About Chef Glen L. Davis II Expertise I can answer almost any question about food. Food is my passion, if I don't know an answer I will find out and give you the best answer possible!
Experience I am a classically trained Chef. I have been the manager of several restaurants. I have been cooking LITERALLY since I could stand! I strive to learn new things every day and I enjoy helping people and I often assist my mother with a cooking class at her church.
Education/Credentials Trained with several chefs, and I have attended Culinary School. I have also worked every position in a restaurant setting from washing dishes to Kitchen Manager/ Chef. I also teach cooking classes and teach private lessons.
Question I offered to help a friend cook for her dinner. I have cooked for large amounts of poeple before. They have 150 people attending. They have ordered 100 lbs of ham sliced 3/8 inch thick. I will bake it with brown sugar and pineapple about 1 hour its precooked. I will also make 2 electric roasters of sour cream cheddar potatoes and 1 electric roasters of green beans cooked in garlis and onions. The problems is with all this they now want sweet potatoes with marshmellows. the problem is i have purchased 6 cans (i think almost 3lbs each of yams) to make sweet potatoe casarole do i give smaller quaities to make it stretch? i am terrified i wont have enough. They have ordered the ham which i know is too much. Will i have enough to make the cassarole? Also i always bake the potatoe , sour cream,cheddar cheese in the oven now i will be forced to make them in an electric roaster will they come out ok? Where do i purchase a book on quanity cooking. Down home food not fancy? Thank you for any help you can give me.
Answer Down home cooking is my favorite style! I have never had much taste for the "snooty" fancy cooking that most people expect of me (I guess its because of how I was raised). The casserole in the roaster should do fine, you may need to add a little extra liquid to be on the safe side. I would try the recipe, scaled-down, in a small crock pot to be sure that the end product is close enough to what you wish to serve.
I personally, would get maybe 2 more cans of the sweet potatoes, because they are generally a "wet-pack" can, you tend to loose roughly 20% of the total weight. I would think that should be enough, because you will be adding approximately 35% of the weight of the potatoes in additional ingredients (i.e. cream, spices, sugar, marshmallows). Also keep in mind that many people will only want either one starch or the other, or a small amount of each. I would say do not give a portion of sweet potato casserole more than 3-4oz per serving. That should give you enough based upon my experience.
I find that amazon.com is an excellent source of literature on mass cooking. I also HIGHLY recommend, if you plan on doing a lot of mass cooking, purchasing the software package "MASTER COOK". This is the same software that was required for my culinary school. You can add recipes that you enjoy and write your own cook books with this program. The most useful thing I have found on the program is the ability to scale a recipe based on the portions desired. FOR EXAMPLE:
if a recipe that yields 4 portions called for 1 cup of something;
simply changing the portions desired to say 8 will change the needed item from 1 cup to 2 cups.
It will not convert tbsp, or tsp to cups, or ounces to pounds. That is the ONLY flaw I have found with this program.
I hope this helps, please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with. MERRY CHRISTMAS!
