We must protect our hands when working in kitchens, especially while in restaurants. If you use your hands daily, make sure you know how to protect them.
It’s important that culinary chefs and kitchen aids learn to utilize the equipment that they are provided with while in the kitchen. No matter how many people are staffed and how skilled the culinary specialist may be, using your hands daily in repetitive and consecutive motions with added tension can develop conditions such as arthritis as time goes on. This is seen prevalently among bakers, as they kneed bread all day long. However, there are ways to prevent arthritis in the kitchen if you are savvy with your trade.
Let the Equipment Do the Work
In commercial kitchens, there is a lot of movement happening constantly, and you must remain highly organized to keep up with that traffic. Luckily, having commercial kitchen appliances do the work helps prevent long-term ailments and other issues.
For example, there are many types of commercial dough mixers, each of which benefit you by kneading, mixing, and doing all the hard work that you’d rather avoid. And after they have finished, the machine will turn off, a timer will alert the kitchen staff, and you can move on to other things. The kitchen should always move like a living organism to serve people appropriately and in a timely fashion—meaning less work for you and more effective work for machines.
Use Lightweight Utensils
If you can help it, go with more advanced, lightweight, and up-to-date utensils to reduce the need to move and grip heavy-duty appliances that can prove to be hard to deal with. Operating heavy-duty machinery can put a lot of stress on the body, namely the hands and wrists, which can cripple a culinary artist in time. So, the moral here is simple—work smarter and not harder if you can help it.
Rearranging Helps
Not everyone thinks along the same lines when they are staffing a kitchen team, so it’s good to hold frequent meetings to discuss how things are operating within the kitchen. You may not have a high-ranking position when you first start out, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t speak up to the rest of the kitchen and provide suggestions to the leadership.
If they like what you are suggesting, then it might become something that everyone is required to do. Something as simple as rearranging some of the pots and pans, equipment, and heavier machines might make all the difference in the kitchen’s productivity.
By taking a methodical approach to cooking in a commercial kitchen, you will discover various ways to prevent arthritis in the kitchen. If you practice remaining organized and utilizing the machinery available to you, you will find out how rewarding it can be to come to work with a plan and follow through.
