The mission was this. Make nine great dinners for a big group, but create menues simple enough so that I could get a morning's worth of work in (ie justify 10 days in Key West) and not freak out at 4 pm. One of the first issues is what to cook food in, the vessels. So a valuable tool was the above Lexan tub which I borrowed from my friendly neighborhood restaurant, Fire (thanks Doug!); the immersion circulator was a huge help (I need to do a post on what lessons from this device that apply to home kitchens without one). I also had two huge pots for boiling green vegetables. After making sure I'd have the right tools, I planned the main proteins, a few of which I either made in advance or ordered. Pork belly confit, duck confit, North Carolina BBQ, a slab of guanciale, lobsters, mussels. When I arrived I bought double what I needed of steak and chicken; the leftovers would provide lunches for the sailing team in addition to dinner. I bought all the chicken the first day, breaking them down and using backs and wing tips to make stock and rendering the fat to use for cooking throughout the week.
One of the main problems people at home have cooking for a lot of people is not knowing all that you can do in advance. When you're planning a big dinner party, choose a main course that can be done well in advance (see above confits, BBQ, or any braised dish). Make it a week ahead and make enough so that you can serve it to family for dinner. Green vegetables can be cooked and shocked as much as a day in advance. Starches can be cooked a few hours ahead and kept warm. Anything that won't be cooked, such as all the components for the fish tacos below, can be prepared hours in advance. Big proteins can be cooked/flavored on the grill then brought slowly to the right temperature in a low oven while you finish other components of the meal. When you're well-prepared, cooking for a lot of people is fun and even relaxing. Why people choose dinner party meals that require everything to be cooked at the same time right before eating mystifies me.
Being organized is the most important tool when cooking for a lot of people. I usually made a prep list for the day's work, a shopping list, and a cooking prep list including a timeline for time-specific preparations, when to start the fire, when to drop the eggs into the water bath, etc. That way, with a few helping hands, you can cook a great meal, and enjoy yourself. You can't sit back in a lounger and swill rum, but you don't want to do that anyway, you want to cook, because that's what you do and because that's what's so satisfying.
A note about portions. For protein, figure it out by weight. Because there were plenty of sides, I usually bought a quarter pound of each meat/fish per person, erring on the generous side. A pound of pasta will serve 6 to 8. I used a quarter cup of rice per person. Same measure for beans. I always made too much salad so I'm no help there. The bigger the group, the less people seem to eat, per person, for some reason.
The following is the menu with notes on what worked well.
Thursday January 12th
Yellow tail snapper ceviche served with grilled baguette, basmati rice cooked with onion sautéed in schmaltz and chicken stock, with chicken skin cracklings and red peppers. Grilled asparagus with garlic and olive oil. Grilled mahi mahi tacos with avocado, lettuce, tomatoes and sriracha sauce.
NOTES: Extra flavor came from chicken fat, chicken cracklins, and chicken stock, made from the trim of what would be tomorrow's main course.
Friday January 13th
Grilled chicken with a lime-tarragon-mustard butter baste. Clean out the fridge scrapple (grits, pulled pork and black eyed peas), fried. Twice baked potatoes. Green beans blanched and finished on the grill.
NOTES: Made the scrapple ahead of time out of leftovers; cooked the beans in the afternoon, twice baked potatoes could be cooked and prepared an hour or two before dinner, then reheated. Can't cook 14 chicken halves at once, so chicken all started on the Weber then finished in the oven (space was an issue that night with trays of chicken and trays of potatoes that needed to be in oven; I should have done a stovetop starch, but I really love chicken and baked potatoes).
Saturday January 14th
Strip steaks, salted, then marinated in olive oil and course ground pepper, seared on the grill and finished in a warm oven. Sauteed onions and mushrooms in butter and wine. Pasta tossed with guanciale, butter, parmesan. Caesar salad (anchovy, egg yolk, and garlic dressing), warm croutons.
NOTES: I ordered twelve 1.5-inch strips; what I got was twelve 3-inch strips. Really nice, and all the extra turned out to be good, but the trick was to cook them perfectly. They were too thick to cook all the way through over high heat—the exterior ½ inch would be well done by time interior was warm. So we seared them well on all sides, then put them in a 200 degree oven till they hit 125 interior temp. Worked great. Same concept as sous vide, just a little less precise.
Sunday January 15th
Eastern Carolina Barbecue night. Hoppin' John (black eyed peas with guanciale and chillis). Yellow rice. Roasted broccoli with garlic. Baguettes painted with garlic butter and broiled. Jason’s wife Christie made an awesome banana pudding for dessert.
NOTES: Made pork ahead of time and brought with me (straight out of Twenty), brought lots of guanciale.
Monday January 16th
Duck night. Duck bacon included with apps. Duck confit with grilled magret duck breast, all purchased from the excellent Hudson Valley Foie Gras. Sous vide egg, arugula salad with a shallot-red-wine vinaigrette. Multi grain bread swiped with olive oil and grilled.
NOTES: Again, the duck was cooked ahead (I cheated and bought from Hudson Valley Foie Gras when I couldn't find legs in Cleveland (and at $5/leg, a great deal). Of course more people than expected showed up that night so I also cooked the duck bacon and instead of getting whole legs a quarter of the folks got shredded confit. I grilled two magret duck breasts, to supplement all plates. I reheated the duck and cooked the eggs in the Lexan, broiled the duck to crisp the skin.
Tuesday January 17th
Pork belly confit, with crispy skin and a mango chutney salsa. Black beans with hot, smoked paprika. Multi-grained rice and stuff (found package at Faustos and needed a grain). Sauteed snow peas.
NOTES: Again, main course prepared well in advance; peas prepped and black beans started in afternoon, finished in evening.
Wednesday January 18th
Surf and Turf: Maine Lobster tails and claws, grilled strip steaks, mashed potatoes, salad.
NOTES: After consulting with Alex Talbott of Ideas in Food (read their fabulous lobster post), decided on 140 degrees for one hour for the lobster tail, boiled the claws. After dinner a couple of us cracked all shells and got all the knuckles for plenty of meat for Donna's great bisque two days later. I'd seasoned and sealed the short ribs for Friday night in Ziploc vacuum seal bags in the afternoon. We dropped those after dinner into the 140 degree water.
Thursday January 19th
Grilled wahoo with mango lime chili salsa. Lobster pilaf. Maine bouchot mussels. Grilled asparagus with garlic and lemon zest.
NOTES: I'd never cooked this powerful swimmer before and it was a big fat filet, more like a tenderloin. The concern would be overcooking. I sealed it in a bag and put it in the water bath with the short ribs for 45 minutes and Jim finished in on the grill. Perfect. Just cooked through and still juicy.
Friday January 20th
Lobster bisque with massive chunks of lobster. Beef short ribs cooked sous vide, slathered with BBQ sauce and finished on the grill. Hand-cut cole slaw (cabbage, red onion, carrot) with lemon-lime poppy seed dressing. Brown-butter-sage pasta.
NOTES: I planned something really easy for the last night since I wanted to spend the day with Donna. At dinner, we simply took the ribs out of their bags after 48 hours in 140 degree water, slathered them with Bone Sucking Sauce and grilled them, a fabulous easy main course. I made lobster stock the day before with Donna so it was nothing for donna to season, thicken it into an amazing bisque, with those huge chunks of lobster.
Now we're in Cleveland in the depths of cold dreary weather. Time to start braising and roasting...
If you liked this post on Large Group Cookery, check out these other links:
- My post on making chicken and dumplings.
- Love seafood, read Trevor Corson's book The Secret Life of Lobsters.
- The NYT covers what to do in Key West in 36 hours.
- A panettone french toast recipe from the blog Gastronomical Sovereignty
© 2012 Michael Ruhlman. Photo © 2012 Donna Turner-Ruhlman. All rights reserved
Julie
This menu sounds amazing. After reading through, my mouth is watering and stomach grumbling at 10:44 am. No lunch in sight. How can we score invites to the next weeklong extravaganza?
Deb
Why were you eating Maine lobster in the Keys? Since my parents moved to the Keys 20+ years ago, I've learned to like the local lobster better than Maine.
Chris
I love the spicy bone sucking sauce. Usually do short ribs in the dutch oven til falling apart. For someone who doesnt have a sous vide, how would you cook short ribs to then transfer to a grill without flavoring it too much. Would you use the bbq sauce in the dutch oven too? sounds really good and would love to try it.
Kevin
I think the main reason that people do everything at once is that they don't realize how much stuff they can cook ahead. That, and if you cook regularly, you start to see opportunities to do so. If you're in the kitchen anyway, and you are consistently cooking at home, it makes it easier to throw a pot of something that you can use on consecutive days (like beans, or stock).
Jim Rosse
Thank you for this portion:
"A note about portions. For protein, figure it out by weight. Because there were plenty of sides, I usually bought a quarter pound of each meat/fish per person, erring on the generous side. A pound of pasta will serve 6 to 8. I used a quarter cup of rice per person. Same measure for beans. I always made too much salad so I’m no help there. The bigger the group, the less people seem to eat, per person, for some reason."
Attrill
A lot of great advice in this post! All of the advice in the Think chapter of "Twenty" applies ten-fold when cooking for a group.
One additional thing that I've found helpful is taking notes after every large cook that I do, mainly focusing on what could have gone more smoothly. I'm cooking for 150 in about a month (on a grill mounted to a shopping cart to boot) and just finished reviewing my notes from the same event last year. There were three problems I had forgotten about that I was about repeat.
John Balley
A most interesting and helpful post. I do hope you write some more about circulators and water baths in the kitchen. Any hints and tips are always appreciated.
Jessica
very interesting!
I've cooked for 9 people at the most and that was for two dinners plus 3 lunches. I'll save this for later use.
Natalie Luffer Sztern
okay I know you're teasing me..those lobsters: it's third post and third picture of these lobsters and I still say Lobster is the most seductive food on this earth far more than chocolate could ever be. At least for me...Valentine's day gentlemen...just bring the lobster!
Ms. Glaze
In a word: WOW! Or as they say in France: WOAW! We never used a thermo circulator at Le Bernardin for lobster but we did use a ton of beurre monté to butter poach claws and tails. Just curious to know what the texture is like after throwin 'em in the ole thermo-circulator?
I must admit that having a thermo-circulator is awesome for large parties (or large restaurants – but you better have a permit!) because it does allow one to hold meat/fish to the perfect temperature. It's great for reheating too. Williams-Sonoma has them and so does Costco....
Amazing menu! Wish I was there to partake!
Kristy Lynn @ Gastronomical Sovereignty
thanks for featuring my panettone french toast! you've got an interesting site here with some fantastic links! keep it up!
Tasha
I'm pining for a thermo-circulator now (and looking forward to the post for kitchens without one). We've got a family of 6 (soon to be 7), and every week we serve dinner for between 4-8 family and friends as well - so I appreciate the value of pre-cooking, organization... and not worrying about exact serving times. Stressing out is your enemy when cooking for large groups at home!
Maureen
It's all about planning and pre-prep and sometimes I need a big nudge or I end up frazzled doing something I love.
Daniel W
One of the reasons that big groups eat less food per person than smaller groups is they eat slower because they socialize more. There is a lot more pacing of eating, so their bodies have more time to give "full" signals to the brain.
Jason Sandeman
I guess I have never had to worry about cooking for large groups - I do it naturally when it comes to my profession. Cooking for 800, now that gets a little more fun. LOL
In fact, my problem is I cook too much. One joke my family uses is that I can cook meatloaf for 200 people, but not for 4 at home. There you go. LOL
Erik
So are you just dropping proteins into the tub as is, and not vacuum sealing them or putting them in plastic bags or what have you?
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