4 hot spins on rotisserie dishes

Try takeout meals

Similar to a grocery store, Joaquin Menendez, director of dining services at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, would like to offer students whole rotisserie chickens to-go.  “A lot of these students, they don’t have full kitchens,” he says. “They could come to The Rotisserie, have a chicken, a pound of mashed potatoes, a pound of gravy and have a meal for a few days.”

Go beyond chicken

Menendez plans to rotisserie beef, bison, leg of lamb, pork shoulder and also fillets of fish with higher fat concentrations such as halibut, salmon or escolar that can be then portioned and served. “The best cuts for a roast are going to be big, so the internal juices create the convection,” says Menendez. In addition to roasting chickens for entrees and sandwiches, Sledge also uses his rotisserie for larger cuts of meat such as leg of lamb and whole turkeys, and once roasted several pigs for a Hawaiian luau-inspired event.

Get creative with veggies

Sam Currie, director of culinary services at The Springs at Greer Gardens—due to open in late 2015 in Eugene, Ore—plans to use his rotisserie to roast vegetables such as peppers, eggplant and garlic. “One thing I want to play around with a little bit is using eggplant [in a] Vietnamese-style sandwich, a form of a banh mi,” he says. “I would [also] like to feature a lot of salads at lunch and carved proteins that can be added to the salad that are warm coming off the rotisserie.” Justin Sledge, culinary services director at Aegis Living's Marymoor community in Redmond, Wash., says he'd like to experiment with roasting sweet potatoes, squash and other winter root vegetables.

Related:Roasting spits make a comeback

Buddy up with a brick oven

In addition to serving roasted meats as plated entrees with vegetable or grain side dishes, Menendez plans to use them as sandwich fillings and pizza toppings to go along with fresh-baked bread and pizza crust booked in a brick oven. “The brick oven is [also] going to allow me to have meals warmed up very fast,” he says. “The production cycle with a rotisserie, I’ve gotta have the proteins cooked beforehand and the hot brick oven allows me to reheat them [by] increasing their flavor, not decreasing their flavor.”