It is not uncommon to choose where you want to holiday depending on what (and how much) food is available at a particular destination. Countries like Italy and Thailand, for instance, are on top of everyone?s list of most desired places to vacation in, at least partly because of their traditions of fabulous, fresh cuisines. It is for the same reason thousands of people flock every summer to a cruise. After all, how much more indulgent can your gastronomic experience be if you are stuck on a luxury ship with tonnes of free floating, high quality food and drink all day long?
Last week, I was on board Royal Caribbean?s Mariner of the Seas, one of the biggest cruise ships in the world completing its non-stop sailing from America to Japan. I, of course, just did a small Asian part of the journey between Singapore and KL, but instead of revelling in the pampering brought on by three-star escargots, duck, scallops (in pretty shells) and perfectly cooked steaks, I found myself headed down to the galley: To the hidden, unseen world of the kitchen that works non-stop to feed more than 3,000 people every day.
Speak to some of the best-trained chefs in restaurant kitchens and you will discover that many have done stints aboard a cruise-liner. Apart from the fact that it trains one in diverse cuisines and gives young chefs the experience of working in multicultural kitchens (so important in hospitality today), fact is that working in the galley is akin to being in the trenches: guaranteed to toughen one up, make a chef adept at not just catering to bulk but also letting him practice the virtues of planning. After all, you can?t run out of eggs or milk, can you, several hundred kilometres into the sea?
Chefs at large hotel chains or restaurants in India will often regale you with stories of gigantic off-site caterings where they made last-minute saves?working under huge pressure to cook a second batch of dish running short, or where the host had told them to cook for 2,000 people but actually 5,000 turned up and the like. As I spent time in the galley of the Mariner of the Sea, I realised that these are situations that chefs on the ship face daily.
Catering to 5,000 meals a day, using up 10,000 fresh eggs, 6,000 pounds of chicken and so on everyday, that is inevitable. And the kitchen does not really know what to expect when the ship is traversing a new region where people?s tastes drastically change. During the captain?s dinner for instance, escargots ran out in the first sitting itself (there are two sittings for dinner in all cruise restaurants). And because it was chartering an Asian course, the Caribbean liner suddenly found that the consumption of duck was double than that of beef steak?it is usually the opposite in America.
Looking at the working of such a high-pressure kitchen environment from the inside, I figured out a few tips that we all can copy. We may not be having 3,000 people home for that dinner party but even if we are hosting more than five, these should come in handy:
Plan the menu: In the kitchen of the Mariner, I found proper recipes (with reference pictures) of each dish taped on to the working station. Clearly, if you are planning to cook for your party, having recipes handy and all ingredients pre-organised is important.
Cook in batches, freeze: If you are cooking so many dishes, for so many people, it follows that you need to start a day or two early. In a cruise kitchen, dishes are cooked in batches and put in the deep freeze (standard industry practice is ?first in, first out??serve what went in first, first). But one invaluable tip vis-?-vis safety and hygiene is to take food out of the fridge only just before you are actually going to use it. There is no point in letting it sit in your hot kitchen much before you are serving it.
How to plan quantities: This can be tricky whether onboard a luxury ship or at home if you don?t know the tastes of your guests. One advice cruise chefs give is to have more of the show-off dishes (every one will try those scallops, for instance).
Taste everything before you serve: In India, with our concepts of jhoota, this is something we most overlook when cooking at home. But if you are cooking for a party, you have to check everything before you put it on the table. At the Mariner of the Sea, for instance, each dish is tasted by the executive or sous chef in the evening before being put out. And that is why no disasters happen by way of oversalted fish, undersalted curry and worse?
The writer is a food critic