You might have read the other thread I started offering help. I thought starting an additional thread where everyone could offer what they think makes a galley, or a cook, better, might be helpful. I’d also like to hear little things that made the job easier or something you found out about food itself, or storage, or cleaning, or whatever. Sometimes it’s the little things.
I’ve learned a few odd things about the job over the years. I’ll start it off with a little one. The bags you get in the produce section seem to speed up the ripening process. I first noticed it with bananas. Remove your produce from these bags so it doesn’t all turn at once.
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Bananas are kept at 58F while transported green. Then at a point up to eight days before the planned ripe date they are exposed to ethylene gas for a period. The gas is flushed out and the bananas are placed on a specific schedule of daily temperatures depending on how many days is desired before ripening.
Ethylene acts to ripen many fruits and is given off during the ripening process, affecting themselves and other nearby fruits. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene#Ethylene_as_a_plant_hormone
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That’s interesting. My last job we would take bananas up to port Lyons on Kodiak island and they were always irritated with the bananas already being ripe.
Know how to make good chocolate chip cookies and you will have a crew in the palm of your hand. Just sayin’!
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One of the suggestions I was given some years ago was when I was serving a canned vegetable with dinner. Sometimes you have to but the captain suggested dressing them up a little. So chopping up a handful of red bell pepper and adding it to the corn or cutting up bacon and onion into the green beans can really make a difference. One of our cooks adds some cream cheese to his canned corn which tastes great but probably kills any nutritional value haha
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I have the answer to making great chocolate chip cookies! First follow the recipe on the bag of your chocolate chips. More importantly, allow the butter you are using to soften naturally. If you try to nuke it the cookies turn out like crap.
Creaming the butter and sugar together should take care of even hard butter.
Are you doing that with a blender? Im really wondering if theres another way because in all the times I have made chocolate chip cookies, anything other than the recipe requested “softened butter” produced a sub par product.
Ouch. That could be a bit loud. No, mixer on medium speed with standard blade, not the whip. Start at low speed until the chunks go away, then medium until the result is creamy and light-colored.
ETA: it will be nice and soft.
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Nice. Ill let the cooks know to try it if they forget to pull the butter thanks!
Creaming the butter and sugar together is good for most baking. If you look in (at least the '70s version and before of) The Joy of Cooking you’ll see a lot of recipes start out that way.
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Here’s another tip. Many internet experts and even some books recommend pulling your steaks out before cooking and letting them sit for 20 minutes. This is a myth and does almost no good.
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You truly understand! And I have made both mistakes at home before. Keep the crew in chocolate chip cookies and you can rule the world.
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No I’ve never used it. One of our captains when I was cooking was zealously zero tolerance so I never learned. If you have any good ones post one.
Another chocolate chip cookie tip – remember the flour. If you don’t the result when you open the oven will scare you.
And being serious – don’t even think of substituting Crisco for the butter.
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Here’s one. Baking powder and baking soda are 2 different things. They are not interchangeable.
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I can’t imagine how bad those cookies would look!