by Buck Reed
In An Organized Kitchen
In culinary school, we were told a story about a chef in France who worked for the king of France in the days of old. It seems that during one of the parties the chef had prepared for the king, they had run out of food, devastating the chef and his reputation. So, when the next party was planned and the food was delivered, the chef noted that there wasn’t going to be enough to feed all the guests again. Not realizing that there was another cart of food on its way, he became distraught and eventually committed suicide, not wanting to face the humiliation of another ruined party. The moral that I took from this story was that you better get organized or you will get “run over” in the highway that is the professional culinary world.
A natural talent of most successful chefs is definitely found in organization. In my time, I have found that Lutece and McDonalds, both successful restaurants have this in common. If you look in their walk-in refrigerators, you will find that everything is neatly organized and put away the same way every single day. There is no guessing if you are out of something or not. There is no searching for a box that is out of place. Hide and seek is not a favorite game of any chef. Now we have computers to help us with our planning. A Point of Sale (POS) is a system that helps organize the wait staff’s orders into tickets that help the cooks prepare the food for service. But that is only one small part of what this program can do. If properly set up, POS can keep track of your entire food inventory, helping you with ordering, food cost, and even tracking theft. It can also give you a history of what happened in the past, and help you predict what might happen in the future. Knowing how much of a certain appetizer or entrée you sold last weekend, or the same time last year, can give you a great jump on deciding how much you should prep this weekend.
Fortunately for home cooks such as yourself, you do not need a $10,000 computer system to get organized. Keeping your kitchen and pantry organized will make shopping easier. And, an organized kitchen is just easier to keep clean. Making lists before you go out to the grocery store is a help, but like most of us, you may be shopping for sales or, even better, something that is in-season. Trying to shop in such a way that you will know what you want to cook for the rest of week is a challenge in itself. But, real cooks seem to make it work out. It is almost as if we do it without even thinking about it.
