Tuesday, December 2, 2008

The Importance of Labeling


Running a restaurant kitchen by yourself with no cooks and no dishwasher really eats up alot of your time. I've been working 7 days a week for a couple months now and have been trying to keep up on the charcuterie as best i can. Because i've been in the juice every single day in the kitchen i've neglected some important aspects of charcuterie. The labeling and weighing of things has all but vanished from my list of things to be doing. I've been recording recipes but every other aspect of recording has been forgotten. i knew i had to stock up so i had so many things on the go and all i kept thinking about was stocking up the fridges and trying to get them curing as soon as possible. 
One day i found myself with a few spare hours and decided to take a minute to check on the charcuterie fridge. What i found was a whole lot of salamis covered in mold with no labels. I had no idea of what was what and when it was made. So i spent two hours attempting to figure out what was what. Each salami was like a scratch and sniff sticker but without the picture of the pineapple. I'd scrape a bit of mold off and sniff and hope to guess the right one. Id label them and then guess the week it was made. I bought another fridge and its already full. I've never gone through so much cured meats its crazy. Some days during a busy saturday night i cant stop thinking about these salami's that have taken 3 months that i burn through in a ten hour service.... crazy!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

how does that fridge work for you? i have one and i've been thinking of putting a humidifier in there...any pointers?

Unknown said...

it works fine... doesn't reach optimum temps though.
with all those salami's in there they make the humidity levels.