180-Cover Plated Dinner with No Blast Chiller
Your hotel has confirmed a plated dinner for 180 guests at 19:00. The menu is roast chicken quarter, rice pilaf, vegetable curry and a fruit platter. The kitchen has two convection ovens, each with ten GN 1/1 shelves; four burners; one 4°C walk-in cooler; one hot-holding cabinet with five 1/1 pans; and no blast chiller. Six staff are on shift from 14:00, but one is a trainee who cannot supervise cooking. Chicken arrives at 14:30 in 20 kg lots and must reach 74°C. Rice is cooked in 12 kg batches and curry in 30 L batches. Service lasts 45 minutes. Hotel policy requires hot food to be held above 63°C, and food not for immediate service to be cooled from 63°C to 5°C within 90 minutes. The banquet manager wants all cooking finished by 18:30. The walk-in has space for 40 kg of raw chicken and 60 L of curry, but no additional shelving.
1. Prepare a production sequence from 14:00 to 19:00 that respects the 74°C chicken requirement and the 90-minute cooling rule. Identify the main bottleneck and one schedule change you would make.
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A safe sequence is:
- 14:00–14:30: Check deliveries, probe chicken, store raw chicken below ready-to-eat food; start curry base (onions, spices, tomatoes) and put rice on to cook in two 12 kg batches, one after the other.
- 14:30–16:00: Roast chicken in two oven loads, ensuring each bird/quarter reaches 74°C; probe the thickest part, not the cavity. Hold cooked chicken above 63°C.
- 16:00–17:30: Finish curry and cool any curry not needed for service using shallow pans in the walk-in; it must reach 5°C within 90 minutes. Do not put a 30 L hot pot straight into the walk-in.
- 17:30–18:30: Reheat curry to 74°C, cook or refresh rice close to service, and load the hot-holding cabinet.
The main bottleneck is hot-holding capacity, not oven capacity: five 1/1 pans cannot hold chicken, rice and curry for 180 covers. The schedule change I would make is to serve in two waves or use the ovens as holding cabinets at 70–80°C after cooking, rather than trying to hold everything in the five-pan cabinet. The trainee should be kept on supervised reheating or plating, not on independent cooking.
2. Calculate an approximate pan and oven load for the chicken and rice, and state whether the five-pan hot-holding cabinet is adequate. Show your assumptions.
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Assumptions: 12 chicken quarters per GN 1/1 pan; 5 kg cooked rice per pan; 8 L curry per pan.
- Chicken: 180 quarters ÷ 12 = 15 pans. Two ovens with ten shelves each give 20 shelf spaces, so the chicken fits in one full oven loading only if no other item needs the oven.
- Rice: 180 portions at about 150 g cooked rice = 27 kg cooked rice. At 5 kg per pan, that is 6 pans. If the 12 kg raw batches are cooked separately, stagger them so the second batch is hot at service.
- Curry: 180 portions at about 120 mL = 21.6 L. At 8 L per pan, that is 3 pans.
Total hot pans at service are roughly 15 + 6 + 3 = 24 pans. The five-pan hot-holding cabinet is therefore not adequate. The realistic options are to hold chicken in a low oven, hold curry in a bain-marie or insulated containers, and plate rice directly from the cooker. The calculation also shows that oven space is tight: the chicken load alone uses most of the available shelving, so rice should be cooked after the chicken comes out or in a separate pot on the hob.
3. The trainee is assigned to reheat curry at 18:05. What checks and fallback would you require?
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The trainee may reheat only under direct supervision, with a written step and a calibrated probe. Required checks:
- Stir the curry before and during reheating to eliminate cold spots.
- Probe at least three points, including the centre of the pot and the bottom; every reading must reach 74°C and hold for at least 15 seconds, or follow the unit's verified equivalent time-temperature combination.
- Record the time, temperature and initials. If the temperature is below 74°C, continue heating and re-probe; do not send it to service on the assumption that it is hot.
- Hold the reheated curry above 63°C and do not reheat the same batch more than once.
Fallback: if the trainee cannot demonstrate the probe technique or the curry cannot reach 74°C by 18:20, the supervisor takes over and the batch is either further heated or discarded. The trainee should not be left alone with a 30 L pot of hot liquid because of both food safety and burn risk.