Day 12 - October 8, 2009

Day 12:

This weekend we had a party for 400 people that we needed to prepare for. My job was the Au Gratin potatoes. Two of the high school students helped me and together we made 110 pounds of potatoes. . . which wasn't enough. We plan on making 50 more.
I started the day off by making 1 gallon of bechamel sauce and learned how to make an onion piquet. For the sauce, you start with a roux (butter and flour) and warm the milk in a separate pan. Once your roux has reached the blonde stage, add a cup or two of the milk to temper the milk and then dump the roux into the milk. The onion piquet is there to flavor the milk while it simmers and while the sauce thickens. All it is is an onion cut in half (leave the root end on to hold it together but cut off the string part) put a bay leaf in the middle of one half of the onion and pin it to the onion with two whole cloves. All it will do is soak in the milk and be tossed when the sauce is complete.

We also needed 15 pounds of diced onions for the potatoes so I learned how to use the buffalo chopper. It saved me from a lot of tears. :)

At the end of the day after we weighed the potatoes and found out we only had 110 pounds and needed to make 50 pounds more the next day, we just put more potatoes in the oven to be baked and I made another gallon of sauce.

That was about it for my day.