As busy moms, there’s always something that needs cooking, there’s always a meal that needs preparing, and so I’m sure you have found that bulk cooking helps with that – cooking more than one meal at a time, storing half of it, putting it in the freezer, and then the following time you only have to reheat it. I thought it would be fun to look at how cruise ships and restaurants do their bulk and their batch cooking, and just get some ideas and inspiration from them. So, let’s think about bulk cooking from the perspective of a cruise ship and what we can learn from that.
In order to do bulk cooking effectively, a lot of planning, consistency, and efficiency must go into it. I think the more you plan, the more effective it’s going to be, no matter whether you’re thinking about doing some batch cooking on a day to have meals for your freezer, or just bulk cooking if you’re having a large event, large family over, or if you want to double up on a meal you’re doing. There’s a few principles that I think we can apply.
Firstly, we should choose recipes well. Good ones for this are ones that can be scaled up easily, that can freeze well, and that will still taste good after being reheated. Choose your favorite recipes, the ones you enjoy cooking, the ones your family enjoys, and ones that will store well. You plan your recipes, print them out, and decide on quantities and then you should make your shopping list. Once you’ve got all your groceries, then you can plan the day when you’re actually going to cook, or you can plan the times of the week where you’re going to double up when cooking your meals.
Secondly, a very important thing to remember is to think about what containers you’re going to put things in. Sometimes we have all this food cooked and it’s in pots and pans, and then suddenly we realize we don’t have enough containers to store it in. Sometimes using foil containers works, although this is not the healthiest. We have a good stock of large glass containers with lids, and a variety of sizes of smaller ones.
Think about what you’d use for casseroles, what you would use for perhaps roast chicken and vegetables and potatoes all in one container. Think about what you’d use for soups. Would you use plastic litre containers with lids, or get silicone soup cubes of various sizes? Make sure you’ve got enough containers that are clean, and that they will fit in your freezer – make sure you have enough space in your freezer for all the containers you want to put in. Some things good for storage are soups, stews, and roasted meats.
If we look at a cruise ship or a restaurant, especially a big restaurant, the kitchens are very organized for maximum efficiency. There are distinct areas for different tasks like preparing certain ingredients, for cooking on the stove, and plating. Also, they have the right equipment, and everything they need at each station. That makes the process as fast and as efficient as possible. So, you could think about if there are tools that might help you. Do you have a good vegetable peeler? Do you have good whisks? Do you have good frying pans? Is there anything that might help speed up operations?
You could try multi-station cooking. In a restaurant or cruise ship, there’ll be different cooking stations working simultaneously, and each station handles a different element. Perhaps one place is grilling or cooking the meat, another place is making sauce, and another place is getting the vegetables ready or doing a gravy. Getting your kids involved is great because they can each focus on a specific task and get good at it, and you can assign them tasks according to their age. My oldest son’s good at cooking the meat and making sauces. My daughter’s good at using the instant pot and the crockpot, and my middle two are great for peeling and chopping vegetables, steaming them, making soup, or making a salad. Then my youngest would help put things out on plates elegantly, do the plating, and do the table setting. Working as a team always helps things to go faster, and I would supervise and help each of them know what to do, just watch that things are going safely, and give them ideas for what to do next.
Also important when doing your shopping is to find places where you can buy things in bulk at good prices. Often a real butcher will give you good deals, or cut the exact cut of meat that you want, put in the exact amount that you’d like for a stew, and etc. Of course, the meat is extra delicious and tender if it’s fresh from the butcher and cooked on the bone.
On a cruise ship or for an evening session at a restaurant, ingredients would be prepped in advance and stored. Chopping things in advance and putting them in the fridge for later is so helpful. If you have a food processor, you can pre-chop your carrots, your onions, etc. Put them in a bowl with a plate on top, or a container, and then put them in the fridge. Anything that you think will save time later is often a good idea. If we’re making homemade pizza, we’ll make the dough in advance, and then put that in a bowl in the fridge with some plastic wrap over the top. We would also grate the cheese using the food processor, and put that in the fridge. We would cook up the bacon and the mushrooms in advance so they can be added easily. Just think about each meal and what you could prepare in advance, so that it’s not so much all at once.
It’s also helpful to just do one type of food at a time. Perhaps you could do two or three different soups in two or three pots. Then it’s easier to add things like bone broth to each. You can add your seasonings in a similar way. You can chop just one onion and use it over a couple of soups. You can prepare your vegetables and distribute them. Making a few soups for bulk storage is helpful.
You could also do a few different meats at a time. You could do a roast leg of lamb in the crock pot, some corned beef or some stroganoff in the Instant Pot, and some chicken breasts in the oven all at the same time, and then store all that protein.
I also find that you can put things into the freezer in increments. If you cook all your meat, you can put it in different containers and freeze it, leaving space to add vegetables to those later. Then on a different day you cook up a whole lot of vegetables, some in the steamer, some in the instant pot, and some on the stove, and you can add those to your different meal containers in the freezer. I find this is a lot less overwhelming than doing a whole lot of different meals at once, all the parts of a meal at the same time, or having to cook a huge amount of stuff at one time. You can also do different starches. Perhaps I would do rice in my rice cooker. roast potatoes, first in the steamer and then in the oven, and mashed potatoes on the stove, and then add the starches to the different containers in the freezer.
Sometimes it’s good to cook a bulk meal and a couple of side meals, perhaps lunches for if your husband goes off to work and needs a lunch from the freezer. I often send something like stroganoff with rice and butternut, or a bit of lamb stew with some rice and carrots, or perhaps some beef meatballs. Those are put in the freezer separately.
Also, if one of your family has dietary restrictions, like they have to eat gluten free, then you can pack a separate, smaller dish for them, with most of the same things, but not the ingredient that has wheat in it.
Thinking about portion control and consistency is very important in a restaurant or on a cruise ship, especially when cooking in bulk. They’ll use portioning tools like scoops or ladles to make each serving consistent. With thousands of meals being served, each dish has to look and taste the same, so they use standardized recipes and careful measurements.
So, for us, perhaps we can be sure to use portioning tools and the effective recipes, but also make sure that we dish up the right amount of food for the amount of meals we cooked for. We would be dividing it in half if it’s for two meals, or maybe dividing each part of it into three. If you’re doing a lasagna, in bulk, you can divide up the mince between them, divide up the cheese sauce or the ricotta between them, and divide up whatever else you’ve got, like the grated cheddar on top. You’ll know what a good portion is for your family and what size of meal they eat, and then you can adjust that accordingly.
As always, when you’re doing batch cooking, it’s important to make sure that everything tastes good. In a restaurant everything would be seasoned to perfection. Tasting each part of what you’re cooking is important. lf you’re cooking a lasagna, taste each part of it before you put it together in a complete meal, and then the whole is sure to taste good. Make sure you add enough salt and pepper, and cook it with lots of herbs. Sometimes you can add fresh herbs to a meal after cooking it for extra flavor.
Don’t forget that part, especially if there’s any extra seasoning you can add before you put things in the freezer. Things do tend to get a little bit less flavored when they’re in the freezer and then defrosted. Make sure that it tastes good. You can always add a little bit of seasoning when you’re reheating it.
This brings me to the reheating point. Make sure that you reheat things in a way that makes them taste best. Things like potatoes and roasts are best reheated in the oven for crispiness, soups on the stove, and things that were made in the crockpot are often best reheated in the crockpot. A leg of lamb can be reheated slowly in the crockpot to get that nice broth that you can make into gravy. Vegetables are usually good in the oven, because they’ll have a lot of moisture, so we want to make them not too soggy, but just right.
Things like rice, especially if it’s exposed in the dish, is best to reheat somewhere other than the oven. If you have a rice dish with meat on top, like meatballs and sauce, then it’s fine to reheat it in the oven because the rice won’t get crispy, but if the rice is on its own on the side, there are a couple of other things you can do:
Number one is to boil the kettle, put the rice in a sieve over a bowl, and pour the boiling water over the rice a couple of times. Then let it soak in that water until it’s a good temperature, and lift it out of the bowl with the sieve. Alternatively, you can put a little glass container with some meat and some rice or vegetables directly in a saucepan on the stove. When it has a little water in the bottom and the lid on, it effectively steams the food to warm it up.
I definitely don’t have a full day to give to bulk cooking at any point, because there’s so much else going on, so I do prefer the method of doing one particular meal at a time, or as I said earlier, doing the meats on one day, the vegetables on another, and the starches or soups on another.
There’s also the packaging phase, and it takes quite a lot longer than you expect. Cooking the food takes time, and then letting it cool and packaging it correctly and safely at the right temperature takes time, so it’s good to make sure that you have time in the evening of the day to finish the packaging and make sure everything is squared away in the most useful way possible.
Earlier when I mentioned different cooking stations, it’s good to get those ready in advance, especially if your kids are going to cook with you, or even if you’re going to do the cooking. So, instead of just doing everything in one place, you say, okay, this counter is for vegetables, or this particular vegetable. This counter is going to be for meat and meat cooking, so there’s no cross contamination. Each person has their station, and they can put all their equipment and ingredients ready in that area. That is, if your kitchen is big enough, of course. Even when I’m doing something on my own, it’s helpful to have an area for meat, an area for vegetables, and et cetera.
When you’re doing the packaging of your food, it’s good to have all the containers ready and open in the relevant places, with perhaps permanent markers or other pens that you use to mark the lids, and anything that you’d need in order to finish your packaging.
Then having a list of what you have in your freezer, and which freezer it’s in, is always helpful. Perhaps have a name or label on the container itself. Also, don’t be too adventurous, or try out dishes for the first time when you’re doing bulk cooking. It’s best to stick to those tried and true dishes that work for you, and that you know work in the freezer. You can have those ready, and then you can do the creative cooking in between when you feel like it, and you have extra energy.
Remember to keep your goal in mind. On a cruise ship, their goal would be to serve delicious food in a consistent way so that every meal looks identical, tastes good, and is safe and healthy for those who will be eating it. In your home, your goals will be different, but keep those in mind so that you don’t get overwhelmed or try to do too much in the process. Just remember that whatever you do is helping you to have extra stuff available when it’s a busy day, or when you’re stressed, or when you have less energy. On the days you feel like cooking you can do that, and on the other days you can grab something that’s defrosting in the fridge, or plan to use something from your freezer in the days ahead.
So, the main things we can learn are about efficiency, making the process easier, planning well, being consistent, and then being able to spend the same amount of time, but provide more food for our families. I hope you get to go on a cruise ship someday. I’ve never been, but I think it must be amazing.