how do restaurants cook fresh food so quickly?

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I know you can essentially cook anything in 5 minutes if it’s already been prepared, like boiled, fried beforehand. But restaurants use fresh ingredients, so how are they serving me in 15 minutes a freshly fried pork belly that needs at least 30 minutes to boil, then another like 10 minutes to fry, etc?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Former chef.

Step 1: Mise en Place. Everything’s prepped and ready to grab within an arms reach.

A lot of ingredients we use are bought fresh, but we prepare them in a way so that we can get them in, sauced up, and out in minutes. Preboiled veggies. cooked beef, chicken. Fish marinated and prepared to steam/broil.

Seafood in general is very fast to cook. Boil time is anywhere between 1-10 minutes for most seafood.

Our longest entree would be consisting of frying a whole fish, which takes about 12-15 minutes or until the fish meats falls off the bones.

In most cases this is similar to your pork belly situation. We fry our fish to about 95% doneness, then and then refry until finished. Pork belly, as you’d expect fried from its raw to cooked state will take about 25-30 minutes long. So we would pre-boil and sometimes pre-fry a few of them for service, and keep them almost ready until there’s an order for one, and then we drop it for a few minutes to cook fully before serving.

All about being efficient without a loss of quality and freshness.

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