[Carrie']

Hi, I am in my 2nd term of culinary school. We will be having a live fire test in two weeks. During this next two weeks we have to make a menu, place product order, write recipes, do recipe analysis, make plate diagrams, do food costing, etc. We already had a breakfast live fire a month ago and everyone performed miserably!I have never worked in a restaurant and don't know which is easiest, fastest, holds best, etc.

We have four members on our team, we serve for 45 minutes and must serve 10 portions of each item. We are required to make a burre blanc (I'm planning on adding cream and reducing before adding the butter to stabilize the emulsion and holding it in a thermos), Mornay sauce (holding in a thermos) for a "Kentucky Hot brown sandwich", gallon of soup (held in soup warmer), mashed potatoes (held in crock pot), ground lamb kebabs to be grilled, couscous, green salad, grain salad, chicken curry, poached salmon, a vegetarian dish with sauce and side, and a pan sauce.

We also have some limitations. We don't actually have a line. We will be working in our class kitchen. It is equipped with a line of cook tops, ovens, a grill, a small (think counter top, home sized) deep fryer and two tables to set up for production. We put out food on a third table when the order is up.

So, I guess my questions are; Which items work best on the line? Are those the best ways to hold the sauces to keep them warm and from breaking? Is cold salmon with a burre blanc sauce a good idea? Is par cooking and then finishing in the oven or on the grill a good idea or will it lose quality? What are the best choices for the soup, salads, vegetarian dish, etc.? I want it to be fast, taste good and look good. What is the most efficient way to set up our tables for holding our prep and plating our food?

Thanks for any advise you can offer, I really appreciate it!

[cheflayne]

Your thermos idea for sauces should work out fine. In my opinion, any time that you par cook, you lose quality;not necessarily a lot of quality (depending upon item, methods, time,etc.), but some. At times, the benefit to par cooking, an example being if it insures better customer satisfaction due to increased speed of production, offset the detriment of decreased quality. Making life easier for the kitchen is not a good parameter. As to your other questions, I could easily provide input; but I feel that you will learn much more if you spend time really thinking them through. Good luck and good cooking!

[ChefToddMohr]

Boy, that sounds like a tough test under difficult circumstances. It will take a lot of prior planning to pull it off smoothly.

You have a lot of questions there, but I can answer generally. In my opinion, the biggest mistakes happen when you rush and run out of time.

While par-cooking can cause some loss of quality, frantically cooking under time pressures can give you undercooked items, or inconsistent plate-up.

I'd do as much prep ahead of time as possible. Stage everything in an assembly line so you know the timing of each item, assuring all are hot and fresh as possible.

Kabobs are a good idea because they can be assembled ahead of time, and cook quickly. Making sauces that are stable in advance is a good idea too, but I don't know if beurre blanc will stay together in a thermos.

Also consider the categories you'll be graded on. If there are a great number of points to be lost by not making a time frame versus a few points lost for par-cooking items, I'd make some decisions based on the rules of the game.

Plan ahead and your results will be much better