Toasted sandwiches are hot.
In January, the Subway sandwich chain armed itself with new high-tech ovens and began offering customers nationwide the option of toasting their sandwiches.
McDonald’s Corp., the world’s largest restaurant chain, is testing deli-style sandwiches, some toasted, at about 400 of its 13,600-plus U.S. restaurants.
Helped along by toasty offerings, sandwich-shop sales grew by about 9.5 percent last year, to $16.8 billion, according to market research firm Technomic Inc.
“We’ve been eating burgers and fries for 50 years, so you look for alternatives,” says Bob Goldin, executive vice president of Technomic.
But turning out lots of toasted sandwiches fast is much trickier than it might seem.
The process often adds about 20 seconds to overall preparation time, which is a considerable delay in the fast-food industry. Restaurants also fret about the impact of heat on the texture, taste and the smell of the food.
Even slightly mistimed cooking can mean a burned sandwich.
Those were among the many issues that Subway, the world’s largest chain of deli-style sandwich shops, faced in the summer of 2002. The closely held Milford, Conn., chain was looking to move its menu beyond lunch to dinner and breakfast, using hot foods. Early on, executives ruled out conventional microwave ovens for toasting sandwiches because they can turn bread hard as a rock.
Subway decided to try the Tornado oven, made by TurboChef Technologies Inc., a small Atlanta company whose claim to fame was creating an oven that could cook a pizza in 1 minute flat.
Heat is circulated within the Tornado oven at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour, while a vacuum at the oven’s bottom pulls the heat down to wrap the food in a shroud of air. Bursts of microwave energy, meantime, cook the food from the inside out.
Particularly impressive was the oven’s ability to heat a typical sub sandwich through in 17 to 20 seconds. That’s up to 12 times as fast as a conventional oven.
Other chains are toying with a variety of ovens. McDonald’s, for instance, is using a model in which a mechanism heats the bread before it has been loaded with meat, vegetables and other ingredients.
Meanwhile, Starbucks Corp., the world’s largest chain of coffee shops, is using various ovens, including some from TurboChef, in its early rollout of hot breakfast sandwiches.
TurboChef’s Tornado has proven particularly appealing to Starbucks because its design keeps the aroma of cooked food from seeping into the store.
