A Few of The Most Dangerous Machines in a Professional Kitchen

In the heart of the culinary world, sharp knives masterfully slice and dice while hot pans clang in the organized chaos. The intense heat of the fire gets right in your face. Amidst this synchronized dance, there is no doubt that the culinary battlefield can be a perilous place.

Over the years, government organizations like OSHA have implemented regulations to enhance the overall safety of the food service industry, re-shaping the commercial kitchen into a much safer environment than it was in years past.

Among these regulations are, wearing non-slip and oil-resistant shoes. Since most professional kitchens feature tile flooring, investing in non-slip shoes becomes vital for those who wish to stay upright.

Regulations also mandate the presence of guards on mixers, considering it a fineable offense if found non-compliant.

Ensuring that employees are equipped with proper protective gear when dealing with cleaning or dishwashing chemicals is another crucial aspect of avoiding penalties.

Even with many regulations in place today, the professional kitchen remains a fairly dangerous world. So that is precisely why we are going to explore some of the most dangerous pieces of equipment in modern culinary history.

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1. The Buffalo Chopper

This piece of equipment is somewhere between a food processor and a meat grinder, and you can do both tasks with this machine very well, maybe a little too well. This hybrid franken chopper will easily take a finger from you if you’re not looking and sometimes if you are.

It works like this, there is a large rotating mixing bowl mounted to a motorized platform with blender-like chopper blades. The person operating the machine feeds, by hand, whatever is to be chopped into the Buffalo chopper.

This is a very powerful machine that can puree any food item that is fed into it. When your task is finished go ahead and stick your hand in there and grab out the finished product, done. Because of the rotating bowl your hand can easily get sucked into this thing and many a finger has been lost to the buffalo chopper. Fingers beware!

Go Ahead and Stick Your Hand in the Buffalo Chopper

2. Meat Slicers

We've all entertained the fantasy, at least once, while standing at the deli counter, imagining ourselves as the guy skillfully operating the meat slicer. "Gimme half a pound of corned beef and a quarter pound of smoked turkey." "Alright, good sir, coming right up!" Or maybe that was just me?

As a child with a growing interest in the culinary arts, I was in love with knives and anything capable of slicing. Naturally, the meat slicer at the deli counter became a fascination for me. However, it wasn't until later in life when I found myself operating one of these machines that I truly grasped the potentially dangerous nature of the slicer.

Ideally, when operating a slicer you wear a chainmail glove with a latex glove over it, chainmail is rather floppy so the latex keeps it from flopping around. Upon slicing roast beef one fine day, I neglected to wear the latex glove over the chainmail, and that meat slicer sucked in one of the floppy chainmail fingertips and jammed up the machine. When I got the glove out it was mangled but my hand was not, I guess the glove did its job.

Watch Your Fingers!

3. Commercial Deep Fryers

Deep fryers are the reason we have crunchy appetizers and crispy snacks but these things can be more dangerous than first anticipated. If you ever worked in fast food, the odds that you operated a deep fryer of some sort are fairly high.

The standard restaurant deep fryer can be dangerous enough but when you get into commercial production or large-batch cooking those deep fryers can be large enough for a human body to fall into. Most of these large-capacity deep fryers have guard rails in front of them to prevent such accidents but that wasn’t always the case.

A friend of mine recalled an occurrence when he was managing a large commercial kitchen for a cafeteria at a well-known aircraft manufacturer when the person working the deep fryer ran over to it, slipped, and fell head-first into the hot oil.

She was a tiny, small-statured woman with most of her upper half submerged underneath the bubbling oil. Ouch! As the story goes she was quickly pulled out and saved from her hot, greasy doom. She was alive, a little worse for wear, and spent some time in the hospital, but alive nonetheless. 

Industrial Deep Fryer. You could fall into that.