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A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation in a dwelling or in a commercial establishment. A modern middle-class residential kitchen is typically equipped with a Kitchen stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator, and worktops and kitchen cabinets arranged according to a modular design. Many households have a microwave oven, a dishwasher, and other electric appliances. The main functions of a kitchen are to store, prepare and cook food (and to complete related tasks such as dishwashing). The room or area may also be used for dining (or small meals such as breakfast), entertaining and laundry. The design and construction of kitchens is a huge market all over the world.
Commercial kitchens are found in , , , , educational and workplace facilities, army barracks, and similar establishments. These kitchens are generally larger and equipped with bigger and more heavy-duty equipment than a residential kitchen. For example, a large restaurant may have a huge walk-in refrigerator and a large commercial dishwasher machine. In some instances, commercial kitchen equipment such as commercial sinks is used in household settings as it offers ease of use for food preparation and high durability.
In developed countries, commercial kitchens are generally subject to public health laws. They are inspected periodically by public-health officials, and forced to close if they do not meet hygienic requirements mandated by law.
The kitchen might be separate from the great hall due to the smoke from cooking fires and the chance the fires may get out of control. Few medieval kitchens survive as they were "notoriously ephemeral structures".
Technological developments such as the Rumford roaster and the Kitchen stove enabled more efficient use of space and fuel.
Christine Frederick published from 1913 a series of articles on "New Household Management" in which she analyzed the kitchen following Taylorism principles of efficiency, presented detailed time-motion studies, and derived a kitchen design from them. Her ideas were taken up in the 1920s by architects in Germany and Austria, most notably Bruno Taut, Erna Meyer, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Benita Otte, who designed the first fitted kitchen for the Haus am Horn, which was completed in 1923. Similar design principles were employed by Schütte-Lihotzky for her famous Frankfurt kitchen, designed for Ernst May's Römerstadt, a social housing project in Frankfurt, in 1927.
While this "work kitchen" and variants derived from it were a great success for tenement buildings, homeowners had different demands and did not want to be constrained by a kitchen. Nevertheless, the kitchen design was mostly ad-hoc following the whims of the architect. In the United States, the "Small Homes Council", since 1993 the "Building Research Council", of the School of Architecture of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign was founded in 1944 with the goal to improve the state of the art in home building, originally with an emphasis on standardization for cost reduction. It was there that the notion of the kitchen work triangle was formalized: the three main functions in a kitchen are storage, preparation, and cooking (which Catharine Beecher had already recognized), and the places for these functions should be arranged in the kitchen in such a way that work at one place does not interfere with work at another place, the distance between these places is not unnecessarily large, and no obstacles are in the way. A natural arrangement is a triangle, with the refrigerator, the sink, and the stove at a vertex each.
This observation led to a few common kitchen forms, commonly characterized by the arrangement of the kitchen cabinets and sink, stove, and refrigerator:
In the 1980s, there was a backlash against industrial kitchen planning and cabinets with people installing a mix of work surfaces and free standing furniture, led by kitchen designer Johnny Grey and his concept of the "unfitted kitchen". Modern kitchens often have enough informal space to allow for people to eat in it without having to use the formal dining room. Such areas are called "breakfast areas", "breakfast nooks" or "breakfast bars" if space is integrated into a kitchen counter. Kitchens with enough space to eat in are sometimes called "eat-in kitchens". During the 2000s, flat pack kitchens were popular for people doing DIY renovating on a budget. The flat pack kitchens industry makes it easy to put together and mix and matching doors, bench tops and cabinets. In flat pack systems, many components can be interchanged.
In larger homes, where the owners might have meals prepared by a household staff member, the home may have a chef's kitchen. This typically differs from a normal domestic kitchen by having multiple ovens (possibly of different kinds for different kinds of cooking), multiple sinks, and warming drawers to keep food heated between cooking and service.
Canteen kitchens (and castle kitchens) were often the places where new technology was used first. For instance, Benjamin Thompson's "energy saving stove", an early 19th-century fully closed iron stove using one fire to heat several pots, was designed for large kitchens; another thirty years passed before they were adapted for domestic use.
As of 2017, restaurant kitchens usually have tiled walls and floors and use stainless steel for other surfaces (workbench, but also door and drawer fronts) because these materials are durable and easy to clean. Professional kitchens are often equipped with gas stoves, as these allow cooks to regulate the heat more quickly and more finely than electrical stoves. Some special appliances are typical for professional kitchens, such as large installed , Steaming, or a bain-marie.
The fast food and convenience food trends have changed the manner in which restaurant kitchens operate. Some of these type restaurants may only "finish" convenience food that is delivered to them or just reheat completely prepared meals. At the most they may grilling a hamburger or a steak. But in the early 21st century, c-stores (convenience stores) are attracting greater market share by performing more food preparation on-site and better customer service than some fast food outlets.
The kitchens in railway have presented special challenges: space is limited, and, personnel must be able to serve a great number of meals quickly. Especially in the early history of railways, this required flawless organization of processes; in modern times, the microwave oven and prepared meals have made this task much easier. Kitchens aboard , aircraft and sometimes Railroad car are often referred to as galleys. On , galleys are often cramped, with one or two burners fueled by an LP gas bottle. Kitchens on or large , by contrast, are comparable in every respect with restaurants or canteen kitchens.
On passenger , the kitchen is reduced to a pantry. The crew's role is to heat and serve in-flight meals delivered by a catering company. An extreme form of the kitchen occurs in space, e.g., aboard a Space Shuttle (where it is also called the "galley") or the International Space Station. The ' food is generally completely prepared, Dehydration, and sealed in plastic pouches before the flight. The kitchen is reduced to a rehydration and heating module.
Outdoor areas where food is prepared are generally not considered kitchens, even though an outdoor area set up for regular food preparation, for instance when camping, might be referred to as an "outdoor kitchen". An outdoor kitchen at a campsite might be placed near a well, water pump, or water tap, and it might provide tables for food preparation and cooking (using portable camp stoves). Some campsite kitchen areas have a large tank of propane connected to burners so that campers can cook their meals. Military camps and similar temporary settlements of may have dedicated kitchen tents, which have a vent to enable cooking smoke to escape.
In schools where home economics, food technology (previously known as "domestic science"), or culinary arts are taught, there are typically a series of kitchens with multiple equipment (similar in some respects to laboratory) solely for the purpose of teaching. These consist of multiple workstations, each with its own oven, sink, and kitchen utensils, where the teacher can show students how to prepare food and cook it.
The most common cooking equipment in Chinese family kitchens and restaurant kitchens are woks, steamer baskets and pots. The fuel or heating resource was also an important technique to practice the cooking skills. Traditionally Chinese were using wood or straw as the fuel to cook food. A Chinese chef had to master flaming and heat radiation to reliably prepare traditional recipes. Chinese cooking will use a pot or wok for pan-frying, stir-frying, deep frying or boiling.
While many kitchens belonging to poor families continue to use clay stoves and the older forms of fuel, the urban middle and upper classes usually have gas stoves with cylinders or piped gas attached. Electric cooktops are rarer since they consume a great deal of electricity, but microwave ovens are gaining popularity in urban households and commercial enterprises. Indian kitchens are also supported by biogas and solar energy as fuel. World's largest solar energy kitchen is built in India. In association with government bodies, India is encouraging domestic biogas plants to support the kitchen system.
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