It might be small, but according to head chef Pascal Deroubaix it's perfectly formed. And it has everything he needs to prepare the modern French cuisine offered on the menu at the 55-seat Bean Tree restaurant in Harpenden, Hertfordshire.Originally a coaching inn on the road to London, then converted to a private house, the building was bought last year by Ross McBeath, who had no hesitation in investing in good design and good equipment in the Bean Tree kitchen to make sure that the three-strong brigade had all the work surfaces, heat and cold it needed.
Deroubaix is full of praise for his kitchen. It all works, everything is to hand and in the nine months he's been working in the kitchen he hasn't sworn at a fridge or slammed an oven door. Much of the prime cooking equipment is from the Lincat heavy-duty Opus range, which complements the light-duty and medium-duty equipment for which the company is best known.
Centre stage of the prime cooking area is an Opus six-burner gas range including oven and a similar size Opus gas solid top with oven underneath. Having both an open burner range plus a solid top might seem extravagant, but Deroubaix says it gives a lot of flexibility for his cooking needs, from the faintest of simmer on a corner of the solid top to fierce heat on the main open-range burner.
The menu features a number of roast dishes, including meats and fish, where different oven temperatures are needed, which makes having two ovens very useful. Similarly, with pan-fried dishes popular on the menu such as turbot, asparagus and bean-sprout casserole served with a marjoram jus, more range space is needed than a single six-burner could provide.
There's not much call for deep-fat frying at the Bean Tree other than a few starters and garnishes, but because of the volumes of food the kitchen needs to produce on busy nights, a Lincat Opus twin-tank electric fryer is fitted. Seldom is more than one tank in use, and there's a strict rule of manual filtration every night, not least because the kitchen deep-fries in olive oil. Rather than the standard crisping oil temperature of 180°C, Deroubaix says he can achieve excellent crisping at 160°C in olive oil, which prolongs oil life.
One of the most popular starters is a crottin goats' cheese stuffed with dates, chicory and macerated prunes and deep-fried. It has to be crisp to work well, which can still be achieved with the combination of olive oil and the lower cooking temperature.
The combi-oven is a Swiss-built Franke six-grid, which Deroubaix says is faultless, particularly good at even heat distribution for delicate work such as souffl‚s and pastry. All bread is baked daily, and Deroubaix finds a few blasts of steam during bread-baking gives a far crisper crust.
Main kitchen refrigeration is from Gram, with a refrigerated drawer unit with stainless steel work surface and saladette wells at the back of the work surface for the hot section and a similar unit for the cold section, which Deroubaix says makes preparation work a lot simpler and quicker when making up complex desserts.
Ancillary equipment includes a Panasonic microwave, used mainly for specialist jobs such as chocolate work, melting butter and making some of the garnishes. The food processor is a Robot Coupe, which Deroubaix says he could never fault, but he reserves his greatest praise for his cookware, almost exclusively Bourgeat stainless steel. "I trained on it and I've used it everywhere I've worked. I just think it's the best," he says. "There's a special metal sandwich in the base which diffuses the heat and gives you a really even heat, even at low temperature."
The dishwash area is along one side of the kitchen and based around a Nelson SW700 high-performance cabinet machine with adjacent stainless steel sinks from Sissons, taps from Mechline and an IMC food waste disposal unit. Almost all the stainless steel tabling and fabrication in the kitchen was done by Olympic Catering Equipment, which also supplied most of the kitchen equipment and design.
The Bean Tree's basement area is used for dry goods storage and additional refrigeration. There's an upright Gram freezer and a Williams walk-in cold room. It's also where Deroubaix portions and vac-packs meat and fish.
Deroubaix says portioning and vac-packing immediately after delivery of fish is a way of maintaining absolute freshness with no flavour transfer or drying-out. "The vac-packer sounds like something that should belong in the mass-production kitchen, but it's one of the most useful bits of equipment a serious kitchen can have."
The Bean Tree, tel: 01582 460901
www.thebeantree.com