Commercial Cookery and Food Preparation
The kitchen as a system
Commercial cookery is assessed as a workflow, not just a set of recipes. You need to know the mise en place principle (everything prepared and in place before service), the brigade de cuisine roles (head chef, sous chef, chef de partie, commis, kitchen hand), and how the food production cycle runs from ordering and receiving, through storage, preparation, cooking and holding, to service and waste. Standard recipe cards, portion control and yield testing are the tools that keep costs and consistency predictable.
Cooking methods and their logic
Be ready to classify methods as moist heat (poaching, steaming, braising, stewing), dry heat (roasting, grilling, baking, shallow and deep frying) and combination methods (braising, stewing, pot-roasting). Questions often ask you to match a cut of meat or a vegetable to a suitable method and justify it: tough connective tissue suits long, moist, slow cooking; tender cuts suit fast, dry heat.
Traps to watch
- Confusing blanching (partial, brief cooking) with par-cooking.
- Mixing up conduction, convection and radiation in heat transfer.
- Forgetting that cross-contamination risk applies to boards, knives and hands, not only to raw meat storage.
- Assuming a recipe scales linearly: cooking times, pan size and evaporation do not scale with quantity.
Worked example
A recipe card yields 10 portions at 250 g and costs $18.00 in ingredients. Cost per portion = $18.00 ÷ 10 = $1.80. If the kitchen applies a 30% food cost target, selling price = $1.80 ÷ 0.30 = $6.00. If trim loss is 20%, you need 250 g ÷ 0.80 = 312.5 g of purchased product per portion. Always state the assumption you used.