Читать книгу Start & Run a Catering Business - George Erdosh - Страница 16

There are two basic ways for cooks and chefs, whether professional or amateur, to work: either following a recipe, or free-form cooking (i.e., sampling the dish while cooking it until it tastes just right). In catering, free-form cooking is not advisable, particularly in preparing large quantities of food. Food should be consistently prepared from one event to the next, and therefore be very predictable. If you have an excellent memory, you may be able to do it without using a recipe as a checklist, but it is certainly much safer to use one. This way you never need to taste or adjust ingredient amounts. Most chefs who use recipes produce the food and serve it without even tasting it. They check and double-check recipe ingredients, making sure that nothing was left out and the right quantities were used. When the dish is finished, it is ready to be served. The chef knows exactly what it tastes like without sampling it.

Most food preparation techniques involve chopping, dicing, cutting, cleaning, peeling, and preparing at least half a dozen different types of doughs and batters. Even though machines are now used for most of these jobs, you must learn to do all the basic techniques by hand. In a small catering business, the use of a machine, even if it is available, may not be justified for a small job. Knowing how to do jobs by hand is also valuable when machines are suddenly unavailable.

The same applies to the many yeast and baking-soda breads, muffins, scones, biscuits, crêpes, pies, and puff and choux pastries you will be preparing: You must know the right technique for each, both by hand and machine.

One more hint: Use your hands often. Your hands are perfect tools for the job. They accomplish the tasks quickly and are easy to clean. But don’t abuse them. Use rubber gloves if you don’t want to have your hands in water constantly. Kitchen work is not easy on your skin, so save your hands as much as you can. A restaurant kitchen cook can get by with rough, red hands, deadened nerve endings (also called asbestos fingers), split skin, and cracked fingernails. But in catering you need well-cared-for hands — they are exposed to the full view of the guests, particularly at full-service meals. In fact, they are the only part of you most guests will ever look at.