Equipment in Action: Rotisseries
By locking in flavors and juices, rotisseries produce best-selling entrées.
By Lisa Bertagnoli, Contributing Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 6/1/2007
Two things make pollo rostizado a best seller at MoQuila Mexican Restaurant & Tequila Bar, a 175-seat, casual-upscale restaurant in Boca Raton, Fla.
One is the cooking method: Executive Chef Rich Garcia brines whole organic chickens and then marinates them in garlic-mojo sauce for 24 to 48 hours. Before they’re cooked, the chickens are rubbed with a house-made blend of 13 herbs and spices.
The other secret is in the kitchen’s gas-fired rotisserie. The brined, marinated chickens are roasted on the rotisserie for about three hours at a low temperature to keep the skin crisp and the meat moist. The chickens are served with cilantro rice, black beans and fresh corn tortillas at a menu price of $14.95 for a half chicken and $22.95 for a whole.
Nearly across the board, operators who have rotisseries love them. Although rotisseries are big—MoQuila’s is 5 feet wide and 8 feet tall—they are workhorses, capable of cooking a lot of food at once in a way that retains maximum flavor.
Rotisseries also are relatively easy to master. They do, however, require regular maintenance, including a daily washing and degreasing of the spits.
The rotisserie at Kingfish Hall, a 250-seat, casual-upscale seafood restaurant in Boston, is equally versatile. Executive Chef Katherine See uses it to cook whole fish, swordfish steaks, lobsters (for stock and for entrées) and lamb shanks.
The custom-made vertical rotisserie, situated in the middle of the dining room, cooks whole fish and other foods over a wood-fired grill. The rotisserie is nicknamed the "dancing fish" because fish rotate on spits and revolve around the fire as they cook.
Whole fish such as snapper and black bass take 20 minutes to roast over the 200F fire, See says. The rotisserie "keeps all the juice in and gives the fish a nice, smoky, delicate flavor," she adds. But cooks have to keep a close watch on the fish. If it stays on the rotisserie too long, it falls from the spit into the flames.
The rotisserie also has proven to be a marketing tool. "People enjoy sitting around it," See says. "It’s always a topic of conversation in the restaurant."
Circular Logic
Rotisserie cooking—the roasting of food as it turns over an open flame—is as old as cooking itself. Still, chefs find inspiration in the method.
Marc Meyer designed the menu for the 120-seat Cookshop, one of three restaurants he owns in Manhattan, around a custom-made rotisserie.
"I had to really figure out how to use it and how to take advantage of the investment and at the same time not be contrived," Meyer says.
Those self-imposed mandates inspired such entrées as rotisserie-cooked baby chicken with potato-celery root gratin ($23) and rabbit with creamy polenta and spring-onion salsa ($28).
Katherine See, executive chef at Kingfish Hall in Boston, has successfully cooked whole fish in parchment on the restaurant’s vertical rotisserie. "It’s a little tricky," See says, noting that it easily can catch on fire.
Rich Garcia of MoQuila in Boca Raton, Fla., sometimes roasts corn, potatoes and mushrooms in the rotisserie—not on the spits but on a tray below the spits. Juices and fat from the cooking meats fall onto the vegetables, subtly sharing those flavors, Garcia says.
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