[Smashy the Hammer] [An Aspiring Luddite]
I carry no phone
An aspiring Luddite
In a wired world.
[Jeff Berry]
Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on t he PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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First Entry

Yule Ball Post-Mortem

The feast is done! It was reasonably successful. People were fed, the food was pretty good, and it went out pretty briskly. On to the post-mortem, then.

I arrived on Friday and went in to investigate the kitchen in more depth. The first (re)discovery was that while there were a reasonable number of roasting dishes, they were smaller than I remembered. Also that 30 or so kilos of chicken leg quarters take up a lot of space. The combination of those two things made me reconsider some of my oven timings. On the plus side, the small oven turned out to be a convection oven, which opened up some interesting possibilities.

Since I had the evening ahead of me, I decided to get a headstart on the cheese tarts. There was kale and cabbage to be prepped, so I went ahead and blanched them and set them aside to cool. I also went ahead a cooked up a bunch of rice for the rissoles, and roasted off the apples.

I got up bright and early the next day, about 0400, and headed down to the kitchen. (Lest anyone get too worried about the hour, that's not far off when I usually get up.) I had decided that I wanted to get the tarts and the sawgeat sorted as early as possible, to free the ovens up for the chicken and pork later. Therefore I fired up the oven and started running the cheese tarts through, since I had the greens prepped. While they were cooking, I started cleaning the sage. So much sage. I had brought most of a shopping bag full of sage from the garden, since the point of sawgeat is the sage. Once it was cleaned, it was ready to go in once the tarts came out. Which meant I could move on to prepping the rissoles, which was pretty easy since the rice and apples were already prepped. (I forgot to put the dates in, so we used them as garnish, which worked fine.)

The other thing which was worrying me a bit was the cooking time for the rapes in potage. Heating that much liquid takes a long time, so I wanted to get a head start on it. The next task, therefore, was cutting all the root vegetables, which was a lot of turnips and parsnips.

I think I also made the syrup for the peeres in there at some point. All of which meant that when people started to show up to work in the kitchen, we were already well ahead of the game. I had three excellent people in the kitchen with me for the rest of the morning, working towards our 1300 serving time. (Not to mention the organisers and servers outside the kitchen, who were also fabulous.)

The cheese tarts and sawgeat were cool, so we could start plating them well in advance, which also started to free up the baking dishes which we would need. They got plated on the same dish, which was handy. We started the chicken early in both ovens, large and convection, since we were going to have to do it in batches. We had a steam tray set up to keep the chicken warm once it was cooked. We eventually ran a batch or two through the convection oven, and staged that chicken to the steam trays. The other chicken just stayed the main oven until just about service, since under cooked chicken is pretty unappealing.

That meant the pork, about 9 or 10 kilos, could go in the convection oven. It was tight, but it fit.

One of my crew was a good friend, and the sort of person that I could ask, 'Want to do some sauces?' and he would both be agreeable and fantastic at it. So he was on sauce duty.

The bulgur wheat went to soak in the almond milk, and we chopped the leeks and onions for the blaunche porree, and we were basically set.

As the morning rolled on, the rapes were taken off the hob, they would stay warm in their water until service. The pears were simmered a bit, then stuck on the ledge behind the stove. That meant we could get the spinach, frumente, chyches, and blauche porree going, with enough space for the sauces as we moved things around when they were warm enough.

At 1300, we started service. The last plate rolled out of the kitchen at 1410. That's twelve dishes and two sauces, for 96 people arranged (at least conceptually) into 12 tables of 8 in 70 minutes. Not too bad. That gave people enough time to eat and then flip the hall for court at 1500.

Things to note: there was a dishwasher in the kitchen which was crucial during service and very nice for cleanup. The site had quite a few serving dishes, too, which meant that the entire first course could be plated at the same time, and as it was rolling out, we had enough dishes to start plating the second course. The dishwasher meant that as dishes came back, we could wash enough of them quickly enough to plate most of the third course, shortly after the second course had gone out.

Staffing is key. We were serving 96, and I had three brilliant people in the kitchen with me - Hierytha (I hope I spelled that right),Vitus, and Michéal - and for that kitchen, and that number of meals, that was the right number. We had enough people to do what needed doing, but not so many that we got in each other's way.

The pre-planning paid off. In the past, I have sometimes done pre-cooking the week before the event, and frozen or refrigerated things. (I used to that a lot with chicken to make sure it all got cooked thoroughly.) Given that I had access to the kitchen on-site from Friday night, I was able to do that at the event itself. Limiting the number of dishes that have to go out hot is critical to the planning, since ovens are almost always the choke-point in the kitchens I use.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased.

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Luddite'sLog, 26 December 2022
© 2022 Jeff Berry
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