Start & Run a Catering Business. George Erdosh

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СКАЧАТЬ may or may not be a good idea for you. Nearly all of them are geared to home cooks, and although they may be fun, professionals will learn little. Try a few classes offered in your area. If the instructor is good, observe his or her techniques — that’s where the lessons may pay off. Videotapes and television cooking programs can help in the same way. Most cooking programs on the Food Network are geared to entertaining home cooks, but you can learn kitchen techniques from the hosts. Don’t pay much attention to the recipes themselves; rather, watch how chefs work.

      There are seminars and cooking camps for experienced chefs, too, on both cooking and presentation. They don’t come cheap: expect to pay several hundred dollars for a two- or three-day cooking seminar, plus accommodation and related expenses. Catersource has regular one- and two-day seminars in various major cities in the US (see www.catersource.com). Their seminars are excellent, geared to caterers, expensive, and usually worth the fees. During the breaks you can network with other caterers and make valuable contacts. You go home enthusiastic and totally jazzed up.

      There are a truly awesome number of food- and cooking-related websites on the Internet, but only a very small fraction of these are useful to a professional.

      No matter how you choose to do it, total immersion in cooking and cooking techniques for an extended period is what you want. Keep on reading books on food and cooking, even simple cookbooks. No matter how poor a cookbook is, it will likely contain some useful information.

      Learn to cook an entire cross section of dishes, but emphasize the ones you want to prepare in your catering business. Sounds like a formidable task, but it really isn’t. Once you get into the rhythm of preparing new and unusual food with unaccustomed kitchen techniques, trying other new items becomes easier and easier.

      Mark each of your recipes with significant information you’ve discovered in preparation — anything you might need to know for future preparation of the dish. Ingredients should be slightly adjusted to your own taste as well as to current trends. Older recipes use fewer spices and herbs than today’s more sophisticated palates demand. Sugar tended to be used more generously, too, producing the over-sweetened desserts that are not much in favor today. Oils and cooking fats were used more liberally than our present awareness about good nutrition tolerates. So adjust the recipe accordingly and make sure to note the adaptation and results.

      You will need a substantial collection of recipe books for yourself as well as reference books on cooking and food. Your choices will be dictated somewhat by the kind of catering you want to do. Of the enormous selection of cookbooks available, most will be useless to you. There are very few books with original recipes, but those are the ones you need, both for their ideas of new things to try and for your own reference.

      You will also need several good reference books on cookery, basic food chemistry and physics, and nutritional information. These books should be read and reread, studied and re-studied. It is very important to understand the basics of food and cooking and to know where to look up the information when you need it. As Samuel Johnson famously said, “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” When it comes to cooking, there is no single source as comprehensive as Joy of Cooking.

      A classic since its original publication in 1931, Joy of Cooking is the best and most comprehensive cookbook ever written in English. In its revised form, it is still America’s most loved cooking companion and it should definitely be on your bookshelf. The amount of information and research that went into Joy of Cooking is simply incredible, and the information is useful and up to date on most subjects.

      1.1b Cooking and catering software

      There are many cooking software programs available, designed for both the professional and the home cook. These programs not only offer new recipes, but also allow you to organize and manage your own recipes. They scale ingredients up and down for smaller or larger yields, create shopping lists, provide dietary information, and more. Personally, I have never found cooking software useful for my professional needs. You can download and test most software to see if it fits your catering style.

      Professional catering and event management software programs are several steps above cooking software. There is a large selection to choose from; the Internet is the best source for research. To briefly summarize, most programs are designed for large banquet and catering companies, hotels, and restaurants, but some are designed with small businesses in mind. Many of these complex programs are designed for people who work full time managing a large staff, inventory, food orders, and many events and reservations. These are not user-friendly programs. Besides, they are expensive, starting at around $1,500 for the basic version. You can request a CD-ROM or download a demonstration version from the manufacturers’ website. Testing the software will give you a feel whether it will help your business or is an unnecessary business expense.

      Software suitable for a small catering business tends to be simpler and more user-friendly; it costs $750 USD and up. There are not many programs available. An example of one I tested that appears to be simple, user-friendly, and suitable for a small-business caterer is CaterPro (www.caterprosoftware.com). More sophisticated programs for larger caterers cost well over $1,000 USD. My suggestion is to start your business manually. Eventually you can request trial software to test and decide for yourself.

      1.1c Achieving consistency

      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.

      1.2 Planning and organization

      Few fields of work require such a high degree of skill in planning and organization as off-premise catering. Industrial catering with a mobile kitchen, bulk-prepared food for retailers, large-event catering, or even barbecues СКАЧАТЬ