Blast Chiller Broken

            Today I got in early because I had about four jobs I needed to get done straight away. I immediately got my pavlovas mixed up, and my brulée mix cooking. Then I put them in the oven together to bake. Next I got my dark chocolate mousse on the go and began to prepare for the wedding tasting for four people tonight. I got the chocolate brownies, the petit fours, the bread rolls, and began slicing fruit to decorate the pavlovas, saving some of the fruit for a fruit tray I had to put together today. Next I realized I had to sort out the sorbets for the tastings too. See, we have different sorbet flavors at weddings than we order in, as they are combination flavors. For example, the two sorbets for the tasting today were mango passionfruit and mixed berry. Well, we order in mango sorbet, passionfruit sorbet, blueberry sorbet, raspberry sorbet, strawberry sorbet, and blackcurrent sorbet, but the flavors do not come together. SO we have to mix them ourselves and pipe them into tall thin shot glasses. We try to keep some of each flavor on hand, but obviously they get used. We had only one mango and passionfruit and no mixed berry, so I had to mix up both and pipe them (I hate piping freezing cold sorbet).

            With that finished, I moved on to my daily tasks – petit fours, scooping sorbet, making breads (tomato basil, bacon, and mixed nut). Around this time we got a call about a last minute function in the restaurant tomorrow at lunch for forty people. Great, we already have one for fifty on Saturday, now another. So I had to prepare apple and berry crumbles for that, but luckily since it was such short notice we are not offering crème brulée as a dessert option so I didn’t need to worry about baking those. I did notice that the bar (where we usually get our crumble mix) had virtually none left, so I helped one of the bar workers make a huge batch of that. Then I got roped in to doing an order in the bar when he was upstairs and no one else was around. Oh, how I miss working the line in the bar (well, not really).

One of my breads of the day I saved for a coworker - she loves hers slathered with butter

Next I had a bit of time before service so I decided to make the caramel base for a big batch of banana tarts which I would finish assembling and baking tomorrow. I quickly got that into ramekins, finished preparing for the tasting, and set up for a service of fifty people tonight.

            Service went relatively smoothly, except when one of the servers came in with one of the madeleines saying it wasn’t cooked in the center. They asked me and I showed them the recipe I used and told them how long I cooked them, which was exactly the same as last time and that had worked out fine. I had even tried one myself and it seemed fine. Immediately the head chef went to cook a few more, at a higher temperature but for less time. They looked even lighter than mine and were in the oven less time, but he declared them cooked and sent them out. I have no idea what happened to mine, as I did them the exact same way as every wedding I have done, but it didn’t turn out to be a huge deal.

            At the end of the night I went downstairs and noticed the blast chiller did not seem to be working. It wasn’t cold at all. It seemed to be on and plugged in, and the kitchen porter couldn’t figure it out either. I knew it hadn’t been off long, since it wasn’t warm and items had been placed in recently, meaning it had been working then, but it didn’t seem to be now, and I couldn’t just leave everything in there like that to spoil. Unfortunately, it was completely full as well. Everyone else was gone, so I wrapped, vacpacked, labelled, and put away everything in the proper spots and left a note. The blast chiller has stopped working before, and they had to get someone in to fix it. I had to put away three batches of mashed potatoes, one potato casserole, a whole bin of boxty, 69 burgers, 33 chicken supremes, 20 chicken breasts, nine duck legs, two sauces, and a pan of parsnip chips. So I thought I was getting out early tonight, but that took some time so turns out not.