Cooking Hacks: Rapid Cooler Defrost

One of the most fun aspects of being a chef: it's a Decathalon.

Cook. Manage. Create. Repair. Solve. Improve. Train (retrain!) Pay. Receive. Organize.

In order to succeed, you need to at least be able to cross the finish line in every one of these categories (whether or not you are the Best at them all.)

This post deals with the category of experience: Solving Problems You Are Not Trained To Solve at times when solving them is essential. Picture this: Restaurant chef stripping off white uniform coat with blue piping on the cuffs to shimmy into a dark, dusty corner and wrench a piece of broken equipment back to life until service is over. That's what we call "Living the Dream." (Culinary students take heed!)

A Big Slab of Trouble

It's Saturday evening, and I'm checking over the many coolers and freezers before checking out for a day of rest.



I notice one cooler door is ajar and the air temp is rising.  I pop open the service panel and look into the coils: a glacier covers the aluminum fins completely. Oh shit. Humid room-temp air has been flowing into the cooler and freezing on the coils until they are so choked off no air can flow.

Is this problem worth $250/hour (actual rate for emergency service call). . . nope. Is this the kind of thing I could fix myself? Yep. Is anyone else going to be able to help on this. . . maybe one of the staff cooks, but when is the rush going to end and will the job be done right . . . not sure. The Commissar must solve this problem ASAP and keep the food safe.

I could, as I have seen others do, babysit the coils with a blowtorch in my hand manually melting down the ice. . . But that is slow, inefficient and a waste of active time. Besides, I'd have to steal the torch from the Ice Cream Station and then how would they caramelize those bananas? Then I spy the stack of First Aid Supplies on a nearby shelf, with its quart bottles of Peroxide and Rubbing Alcohol. . .

I recall a few hours stuck on wintery runways in Minneapolis waiting for "wings to be de-iced" back in my 20s. Airlines use an alcohol solution to melt ice, much like the windshield wiper fluid in a car. AHA!

Disclaimer: Alcohol is flammable and not appropriate for every de-icing situation! Contact with overheated cooler parts could cause a fire and a severe shortening of your budding career, Chef!

A cheap common de-icer.

I turn up the thermostat until the compressor kicks off (so it will quit MAKING the ice while this process occurs) and then I apply a drizzle of high-test 70% Isopropyl Love Juice to the glacier standing between me and freedom. The droplets start softening the ice immediately, but the smooth surface allows the alcohol to run off too readily. After some gentle taps from a screwdriver to rough up the ice, the alcohol seeps in deeply, scouring out little arroyos. Soon the drip pan beneath the coil is singing with icy, antiseptic rain, and I move on to other tasks.  40 minutes later I can see bare metal on the coils and the glacier has shrunk to a sad little crust pocked with holes and canyons.  A little nudge and the ice falls away, the cooler comes back on line. . . and I might get home in time to tuck in the kids. . .

A drizzle to get going.

Scoring the smooth face of the glacier to get better alcohol penetration.

After a second drizzle and 15 minutes.

All clear.

I detect a leak!

. . . Unless the cooler has another problem!  In this case, the ice reveals to me that the system is leaking refrigerant. That green-yellow color from around the fitting comes from a dye reefer technicians put in these systems to help find tiny leaks. The dye stays in for years and some residue happened to still be present. At this point, I know the cooler is not likely to recover even after the de-icing and so I empty it of foodstuffs and call for service on Monday (at sensible rates.) This whole process on the cooler pictured took about 2 hours start to finish, during which the 3 doses of alcohol I gave it (16 oz total) melted off roughly 4 gallons of water ice.  I accomplished myriad other tasks in that time in addition to re-organizing the inventory of this lame duck (and mopping up all that water.)

One hard thing for new culinary school grads to grasp is the scope of what it takes to keep a successful restaurant running. Recently my crew and I were cleaning up a hellacious mess in the alley left by a disgruntled or inept trash truck driver, and a new line cook from another of Bailey's Restaurants jumped in. It was his first day on the job, he was looking for ways to be helpful. He said "I shouldn't really even be doing this."

"Why?" I asked as we lifted an 80 pound can of garbage over the lip of the dumpster. "You have a bad back or something?"

"No, man. I'm a cook."

"Well I'm the f--king Executive Chef, bro, and this right here is Living the Dream!"

Prospective Chefs: If that doesn't send chills through you, you just might have a shot in this business.