When you’re installing or upgrading a kitchen for your church or community centre, a semi-commercial kitchen is the option to choose. It will give you the durability and hygiene that you need for the heavy use of a shared culinary space, while maintaining the welcoming and familiar feel of a home kitchen.

Aside from practicality and ease of use, a semi-commercial kitchen offers the opportunity to try some exciting and adventurous cooking. You can choose a range of appliances that allow you to broaden your menu and your horizons, which means even better community engagement, greater use of the kitchen, or even more fundraising opportunities.

While you shouldn’t choose equipment just because it seems exciting or novel, you should be sure you have use for them, there are some exciting ideas to consider for your new kitchen. Here are a few to consider.

Griddle

Hamburgers are perfect for summer fetes and fairs — they’re popular, simple, and quite a handy way to raise money, if you choose to sell them.

As a nation, we’re notoriously determined to get the barbecue going at the first sign of summer, but just in case the weather has other ideas, or you’d prefer not to tempt fate, a griddle is a perfect indoor burger grilling solution. It has plenty of surface area to grill when there’s a high demand for burgers, plus you can cook onion slices on it too, so your burger cooking can stay a one-surface wonder.

The griddle isn’t just about mass catering though. For example, it’s also a common method of cooking flatbread, so you could use it to make an unleavened bread as a fun way to connect children’s groups with the story of Passover.

Potato Oven

On to winter warmers — if you’d like to prepare baked or jacket potatoes for groups, then a specialised potato oven would be an excellent choice. It allows you to bake potatoes at scale, in a relatively compact space, which leaves the oven free for separate groups to use, or for you to cook other dishes at the same time.

You can find ovens in various shapes, sizes, and colours, with display windows so that you can see the progress. It’s a simple but engaging way to share a cooking experience with children, who can watch the potatoes cook while they help prepare fillings.

The potato oven is also more versatile than the name implies. It’s perfectly capable of cooking pies, sausage rolls, and more, so it’s not simply an investment in cooking one vegetable.

Pizza Oven

Another fantastic way to engage children with cooking and the kitchen (with a well-loved result) is pizza-making. It’s a hands-on activity that doesn’t require great skill and isn’t time-sensitive in preparation, which makes it perfect for groups of young people, and it’s a wonderful way to let children enjoy the fruits of their labour.

It’s quite challenging to cook pizza in a normal oven, because you need the dough to bake as the ingredients cook, which means you need control over the surface it is cooking on as well as the air it is baking in. Having a pizza oven means successful pizza baking is easy.

Induction hobs

Now, there’s nothing particularly exciting about an induction hob on its own, but it can afford you to do more with your kitchen.

It can heat faster than a gas or electric cooking top, which obviously means faster results, so you can produce more in less time.

Most importantly, though, it’s safer. There are no naked flames, and the hob won’t heat without a pan on it. An induction hob can allow people with impairments to use it safely and is safer for younger uses. All of that makes an induction hob great for group cooking lessons, or simply making busy kitchen days easier to manage.

Designing your semi-commercial kitchen

If that has sparked your imagination, and you’d like to see what the difference a semi-commercial kitchen would make to your space, you can always contact Steelplan for an expert, free, and no-obligation design consultation. We can even use our 3D consultation service to show you what your new kitchen could look like. Contact [email protected] to find out more.