A day in the life of a Chef - Part 3

As well as the regular breakfast items that are cooked each day I also do a special item. Special is in truth a little generous as a descriptive as the items are the same for their day of the week. Monday is French toast, Tuesday is a sausage roll, Wednesday is eggs Benedict, Thursday is Ham, cheese, tomato Turkish melt and Friday is Scrambled eggs. These items are cooked either alongside the other breakfast items as with the sausage rolls or after the other breakfast has been transferred to the Hot baine as is the case with the scrambled eggs.

From here I swing into lunch cookery and preparation. Breakfast cooking runs from 7 am until 10 am but in reality I only have to cook a few pans of eggs or put another half dozen hash browns into the fryer or on busier days put another tray of bacon into the oven. If I am lucky the the other staff will jump in, provided they have time and cook the eggs or hash browns. The key for me is to not pay too close attention to the way they do it and to accept that not everything will be done exactly the way you would like. 80% is good enough and all help is good help.

For this purpose I have grabbed an old menu from a random Monday and will run through how I would have cooked and prepared the food. On a Monday morning the sandwich bar requires hard boiled eggs, some will be displayed as whole peeled eggs and other mashed up from egg salad sandwiches. I am required to steam 2 trays or 60 eggs for 14 minutes in the combi oven. I do this as soon as the oven is free of breakfast foods. The other thing I am always careful to do when switching between oven cooking and steaming is allowing the oven to cool to below 80 degrees Celsius before steaming an item. This means that the steam with start almost immediately and also stop the oven baking the item that I am attempting to steam. The biggest problem items for this are when I am steaming rice up to heat for service and vegetables. The top of the rice can become crunchy if the oven is too hot and the vegetables with burn which is not what you want from your steamed veggies.

The other thing that usually occurs at this time of day is the arrival of the milk delivery. I am usually required to send our dumb waiter (goods lift) down so the driver can load the milk onto a trolley in the lift. Once done I will call the lift up and with the assistance of the manager load the milk into the coolroom. Milk deliveries come on Monday and Wednesday and on a typical Monday there are 9 crates of milk to unload.

From here I continue on with my work. The eggs are transferred to a sink in the washup room and covered with water and ice to chill them as rapidly as I can so that I can record the cooling being successfully completed within four hours. The catering assistants with peel the eggs during the morning for their use in the sandwich bar.

I then fill an oven tray with around 3 kg of rice, usually jasmine rice from Thailand. The rice is rinsed for about a minute under running water and then covered with approximately 3 litres of water. I find that the steam adds water during the cooking process so I don't add quite as much water as I would if using a rice cooker. The oven is set to steam and 20 minutes on the timer. The rice for this particular day was to accompany Chicken Vindaloo. Vindaloo is a spicy Indian curry that contains no cream or coconut cream to help balance it's natural heat. When the rice comes out of the oven it will be divided in half into a fresh tray and moved to the top shelf of the coolroom to chill. I have found the part of the coolroom where the cooling fan blows and put the foods I wish to cool on the shelf to assist in rapid cooling.

Next item on the agenda on this particular day would most likely have been to take the pizza bases out of the freezer. The pizza bases are slab sized which fit perfectly to the size of my 4 flat baine trays.
The pizza of the day is Carbonara pizza which is from a recipe that I found in my company's quarterly food magazine. It has a Parmesan cheese white sauce base and is topped with  bacon, mushrooms, shallots and Mozzarella. I would now jump into making about 2 litres of white sauce by first measuring and melting 200 grams of butter and whisking in 200 grams of plain flour and gradually whisking in the 2 litres of milk. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to thicken. After removing from heat add in the Parmesan. Spread over the 8 pizza bases which should serve 32 people.

Anyway, it's time for me to get the dinner on the table. Until next time, happy cooking!!