 We are cooking several joints of meat for a 60th birthday party catering for 50 people. What is the best way to keep the joints hot for several hours? Also we wanted to slice before taking to the venue and then put on platters.
Slicing cooked joints when hot for numbers is a much slower process than you might suppose, and can slow down serving painfully. Unless you have professional hot cupboards with heat lamps and at least one if not two tame chefs to carve, you will find it hard if not impossible to keep cooked joints hot and not dried out using normal domestic equipment.
My suggestion to you would be to take a leaf out of the book of commercial caterers. Cook the joints the day before until they are just cooked to your liking. As you may not be used to cooking larger joints of meat, I would strongly suggest you use a roasting thermometer to check when they are cooked, as a back up to using the normal "so many minutes per lb, plus..." formulae.
When each joint is cooked, remove from the roasting tin and wrap in a double thickness of aluminium foil. It’s now important to cool the joint as quickly as possible, in the interests of food safety, so the easiest way to do this is to place each one on its own on a wire cake cooling rack or Aga grid shelf, placing this so that plenty of cool air can circulate easily around it. If you have a very large joint, cutting it down into pieces no larger than 2.7kg (6 lbs) will speed up the cooling. Aim to cool to within 2 hours, and then chill in the refrigerator.
Once they are quite cold, they will be much easier to carve, if you have or can borrow an electric slicing machine (there are small domestic ones), so much the better. Slice the meat into even slices and store tightly covered. To serve easily and in perfect condition piping hot, arrange the slices in slightly overlapping slices on large metal serving platters. If you need to, smart stainless steel oval platters can be hired from a catering supplies company. Add half a cup of the roasting juices or a little water to each platter and cover well with a heavy thickness aluminium foil, or use a double wrap of normal thickness turkey foil.
To re-heat the platters before serving, place each in a pre-heated oven at its highest setting for 8-10 minutes, until the meat is piping hot and steam leaves the foil when it is punctured. If you need to heat a number and have limited ovens for this, heat two at a time in the top and middle of the oven, then place these on the floor of the oven, interleaving each with a shallow wire rack or trivet to prevent the meat becoming squashed while it keeps hot here. Then add another couple as above, and add these to the stack you are building low down in the oven.
Aga owners can re-heat two platters at a time using the floor and top of the roasting oven, and keep them hot in the warming and simmering ovens. If your model has a baking oven, the floor and top of this can also be used, but heating time will be longer as it’s obviously not as hot as the roasting oven.
To keep everything hot on the buffet table, I would ask around for friends who have heated serving hotplates and use 2-4 of these, or the type that use spirit lamps or nightlights, as used on the tables in Indian restaurants. If you have spare oven capacity, another ploy would be to heat some terracotta tiles in a moderate oven for half an hour, then to place these on trivets on the table and to place the platters of meat on top, the tiles will hold their heat for a good time and keep everything hot, but do take care to protect the table from damage from the hot tiles.
My suggestion would be to keep back 25% of the total amount of meat on "top up" platters, and to re-heat these once you are starting to serve. These can then be brought in to replace the almost empty platters from the initial ones to keep the buffet tidy and well stocked.
|
