The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Ltd.’s (IRCTC) central kitchen is one of the largest kitchens of India. IRCTC has its central kitchen in Noida, Uttar Pradesh that works round the clock in order to provide a hygienic, competitively priced and affordable meals to both rail passengers as well as corporate clients. This state-of-the-art food factory has an optimum capacity of about 25000 meals per day at Sector-64 Noida.
Currently, IRCTC is operating major Base Kitchens at New Delhi and Howrah railway stations and Mini Base Kitchens at Patna and Ahmedabad. The one in Noida is fully automated and has all the latest equipment.
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The four-storey facility makes 10,000 meals and 6,000 snack packets for trains and cater to PSUs, MNCs, BPOs and several educational institutions in and around Noida. Around 120 workers work in two shifts between 11 pm to 6 pm for the next day to supply the ever-increasing orders.
The kitchen is well-equipped with high degree mechanisation from around the world, they have someone from Germany to dice and shred vegetables, while the Finn one boils rice and dal and a France sauté sabzi. And they all work under Indian cooks and managers.
For now they have only 67 cooks in the kitchen who work enthusiastically. Shifts start from the evening and work starts at 11 pm and by 4:30 in the morning, breakfast is ready, while gravies are cooked and ready to be sent off by 6:30 am.
For them it is very essential to be on time, and that’s where the Europeans come in. While fresh vegetables are straight away dipped into Italian machines that clean them properly, the German cutting machines take over, which run through 400 kg vegetables in an hour.
The Italian and French brat pans fry and sauté almost 120-litre capacity at one-go. And the steam kettles from Finland boil 150 litres of rice, dal and soup in just around 40 to 45 minutes.
The Roti Maker
Rotis you eat are made using interesting machine that rolls out approximately 1,400 evenly browned chapattis every hour, after cutting the dough into 50 gram balls and then perfectly rolling them flat. It takes help from the Italian dough maker that kneads 25 kg wheat flour at a time.
Simultaneously, workers pack dals and vegetables in insulated containers, and dispatched in temperature-controlled vans to the railway station kitchen for final packaging. Also, rotis are dabbed with butter and rolled in foil to keep them soft for hours.
This IRCTC kitchen makes approximately 6,000 salty snacks and sweets of equal numbers every day, which includes bread sticks, kachoris, laddoos, rasgullas and gulab jamuns.
Though they work at lightning speed, compromise in quality is not allowed. They check samples from each and every batch and if anything is found wrong, immediately the entire batch is recalled.
Largest Kitchens Of India is our series featuring the mega set-ups where a huge number of people are served. We’ll feature one kitchen every week with beautiful images which will tempt you to visit the place at least once, while their back-story will encourage you to do something different in life. This is the second part of the series, check first here.
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