The Complete Handbook of Food Washers & Dryers

Chapter 1: Understanding Food Washers & Dryers

What This Book Covers and Why It Exists

This book is about a specific class of equipment that does two things: it removes unwanted material from the surface of food, and it removes unwanted water from the surface of that same food after washing. Taken for granted, utterly mundane, and yet absolutely critical to how food tastes, how long it lasts, and whether it makes people sick. A washer that leaves grit on a head of lettuce ruins that lettuce. A dryer that leaves too much moisture on cut spinach can halve its shelf life in a cooler. If you are running a kitchen, a catering operation, or a processing facility, the equipment covered in this handbook is often the difference between a product that survives the trip to the customer and one that doesn't.

It is worth being precise about what this category includes. A food washer is any machine that uses water, often combined with a cleaning agent or mechanical agitation, to remove soil, debris, pesticides, or pathogens from the surface of food products. This can be as simple as a flume tank that moves potatoes through a flowing stream of water, or as complex as a multi-stage, high-pressure spray cabinet with a built-in sanitizer injection system. A food dryer, in this context, is any machine that removes surface moisture from food after washing. This is a separate step from, say, a food dehydrator, which removes internal moisture to preserve the