Ratatouille Box
Jul. 10th, 2009 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleThe dinner box project has been going in fits and starts. Today I made fourteen boxes, most with grilled lamb, the veggie ones with an onion tart. The side dishes are ratatouille and roasted red potatoes. Orders came in for only five people but I'm going to see what the walk-in sales are like.
The ratatouille is very interesting. The Cooks Illustrated recipe for ratatouille is very much in line with my way of thinking about food. Generally speaking, heterogeneity in a dish is a good thing, as it is more stimulating to the palate for each bite to be different from the last. This implies separate preparation of the components, with their combination delayed as long as possible so as to maintain their distinctness. Each ingredient has targets for texture, water content, salinity, and caramelization that are different from the other ingredients.
The genius of cooking is to shuttle ingredients through various processes in ways that make the whole project less work than the sum of its parts. For example, if you are making vegetable soup, you don't make five different soups and combine them at the last moment. You compromise; first you make a plain chicken soup with onions, then add the carrots later, then the celery some time after that, and any herbs and greens just a few minutes before serving. (At least that's what I do.) It's no more work than just throwing the ingredients in the pot, it's simply a matter of adjusting when you add them.
The dinner box is challenging because it is designed to be reheated. Moisture control is most important. The CI recipe is great because it offers a route to getting every ingredient right without much fuss, but the number of separate preparations is a bit of a pain. The eggplant is salted, while the zucchini is not. But they are roasted together in the oven. The onions are sauteed, and for my purposes I peeled the tomatoes by blanching and shocking, then macerated them with a little salt and drained them for a good long while before reducing the juice and adding them back to the raw tomatoes. Anyway, everything ends up just right through separate cooking. Instead of an indistinct stew you have something that is more like a salad when cold, then just beginning to melt together once it is heated.
No more potatoes, though, the results have been less than ideal. I'm going to try a pasta based box soon.
I don't think I'm going to want to take orders for more than 30 boxes at a time. I started at around 8 AM and thought I was OK when at 3 in the afternoon "all I had to do was the packaging", but it's amazing how long that can take. This last round has given me a better sense of the capacity of my equipment - for example, I can roast about five pounds of veggies on a full baking tray. That's giving them a lot of space, so as to get good looking results. This is perhaps too persnickety an approach but I'm not sure if there are any scale-friendly methods that give comparable results.
The boxes were out the door at 4, twenty minutes behind schedule, the tart still not chilled to my satisfaction but it probably won't kill anyone. I make about nine bucks on each box. Not a whole lot but it gets my name out to the right people.
If I can fit the work into a low-stress day like this and make it look a bit better still, it would be viable. This is the most profitable product but it is also the most sluggish seller and the biggest pain in the ass. For some reason it's proven harder than just doing a regular event.
The ratatouille is very interesting. The Cooks Illustrated recipe for ratatouille is very much in line with my way of thinking about food. Generally speaking, heterogeneity in a dish is a good thing, as it is more stimulating to the palate for each bite to be different from the last. This implies separate preparation of the components, with their combination delayed as long as possible so as to maintain their distinctness. Each ingredient has targets for texture, water content, salinity, and caramelization that are different from the other ingredients.
The genius of cooking is to shuttle ingredients through various processes in ways that make the whole project less work than the sum of its parts. For example, if you are making vegetable soup, you don't make five different soups and combine them at the last moment. You compromise; first you make a plain chicken soup with onions, then add the carrots later, then the celery some time after that, and any herbs and greens just a few minutes before serving. (At least that's what I do.) It's no more work than just throwing the ingredients in the pot, it's simply a matter of adjusting when you add them.
The dinner box is challenging because it is designed to be reheated. Moisture control is most important. The CI recipe is great because it offers a route to getting every ingredient right without much fuss, but the number of separate preparations is a bit of a pain. The eggplant is salted, while the zucchini is not. But they are roasted together in the oven. The onions are sauteed, and for my purposes I peeled the tomatoes by blanching and shocking, then macerated them with a little salt and drained them for a good long while before reducing the juice and adding them back to the raw tomatoes. Anyway, everything ends up just right through separate cooking. Instead of an indistinct stew you have something that is more like a salad when cold, then just beginning to melt together once it is heated.
No more potatoes, though, the results have been less than ideal. I'm going to try a pasta based box soon.
I don't think I'm going to want to take orders for more than 30 boxes at a time. I started at around 8 AM and thought I was OK when at 3 in the afternoon "all I had to do was the packaging", but it's amazing how long that can take. This last round has given me a better sense of the capacity of my equipment - for example, I can roast about five pounds of veggies on a full baking tray. That's giving them a lot of space, so as to get good looking results. This is perhaps too persnickety an approach but I'm not sure if there are any scale-friendly methods that give comparable results.
The boxes were out the door at 4, twenty minutes behind schedule, the tart still not chilled to my satisfaction but it probably won't kill anyone. I make about nine bucks on each box. Not a whole lot but it gets my name out to the right people.
If I can fit the work into a low-stress day like this and make it look a bit better still, it would be viable. This is the most profitable product but it is also the most sluggish seller and the biggest pain in the ass. For some reason it's proven harder than just doing a regular event.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 02:52 am (UTC)*desperately wishing I had a Church Lady user icon right now...*
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Date: 2009-07-11 03:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 03:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 06:14 am (UTC)I must have missed it: what was the problem with the potatoes? And, since moisture is a big concern, how do you plan to prevent the pasta dishes from becoming sodden messes?
What you've put together sounds delicious. Just sorry I'm not there to enjoy the fruits of your labors myself.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 02:13 pm (UTC)Nothing has to be a sodden mess, pasta can be as dry as I want it - you just have to undercook it and use a mostly solid sauce with fats that melt when its reheated. I haven't tried this with spaghetti, but it works well with grain-like pastas such as orzo. The main problem is getting a good texture on reheating, it's easy for it to get mushy.