PREPPING

I know a lot of you blogniks out there are excellent cooks but cooking for your family is not the same as cooking professionally. It's not a matter of quantity - at eugenius we often only make a limited amount of something whereas at home you may be cooking for a truckload of family or friends. It's not a matter of presentation - though at our family dinners food rarely makes it to the dining-room table as it is attacked en route. It's not a matter of kitchen appliances - at eugenius we make do with a sandwich press, a convection microwave, a Bamix, a couple of frypans and a camp stove. It's not a matter of cost - though the rule of thumb is the selling price of a meal needs to be at least 5 times the cost of the raw ingredients, at eugenius we use top-shelf materials and as our prices are cheapish we often fall below this rule.
So what is it a matter of?  Consistency for a start. If a customer loved his Breakfast burrito last week when he orders another one this week he expects to get the same thing. So the key is:- have a recipe, source the same raw materials and present the dish the same way each time. Most chefs know this in principle but if you are thinking about opening a restaurant you need to thoroughly bed down your proposed menu items before you commit them to the printed menu. And it is not just the one item you need to get right, you need to consider how each item works with the others. What narrative are you trying to achieve? Is it a type of cuisine, a way of cooking, a style, an emphasis? You need to consider your storage options, your purchasing agenda, your profit margins...
So once youve done all that and you believe the menu item will work, then you open your restaurant and you have to make the thing. And here comes the most important thing...PREPPING.
We'll get onto that next blog