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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Also sous vide. That’s a water bath heated to 130 degrees. The food is vacuum sealed in plastic bags and heated in the bath. It cooks to a certain point. Great for things like pork chops or steaks which are then finished on a grill.
I used to manage a kitchen.
For us, food was prepped around 2 hours before opening. This included anything with greens, sauces, rice, and filling up the line with containers of various ingredients and at least 2 containers ready to refill in case we ran out during a busy day.
Often times, we will cook the meats to fill up the containers and cook large batches of meat as needed because otherwise it will dry out or lose flavor in a few different ways.
There are restaurants I’ve worked with other chefs ar that start cooking at 3 or 4 am because of the long cooking times. Asian restaurants are famous for this because the broth or certain meats need to be precooked/poached and internally cooked so that they are ready for the last step which is to sear the skin. The meat is held to specific temperatures under heat lamps. This is why you see so many reddish tints on windows in Chinatown/Korea Town, Japan Town and other Asian neighborhoods to showcase the meat is cooked and ready to go immediately. They are keeping the food ready. In sit down restaurants its similar, but they resear it, redouse it in its sauce and send it out.
You probably know about fridges and freezers but there’s another device which does the same thing but in heat. Its designed to keep something at temp but not enough to keep it from cooking completely. The best visual is the spinning meat pile for Middle Eastern schwarmas. That device can be used to cook AND keep the meat at a ready to serve temperature.
Same as smoked meats. Proper smokes take hours so most places have a certain amount prepared for the day ahead of time based on how much they normally sell. If they run out, they run out. A lot of roadside smokehouses don’t have a specific closing time because of this. They just serve until they go through the prepped food and once they do they shut down for the day.
It is not technically fresh as in cooking immediately after the order. A lot of preparation is done early beforehand every day
Like you already said in your post, things are prepared beforehand. Just because they label it as “fresh” doesn’t mean they start the cooking process as soon as you order your food. It’s why some restaurants close midday between the lunch and dinner service, and you can see people working in a restaurant all day despite it maybe only being open for dinner.
They make use of that period without any customers to prepare ingredients. Things like side dishes can be prepared way in advance and just kept warm and dished out when need. If you order a side of fries chances are they would have already cooked them beforehand, or have the potatoes already sliced up and all they have to do is dunk it in a fryer.
If you order a pasta dish, the pasta would have already been pre-cooked, maybe not completely, but it would have just needed a couple of minutes in boiling water to finish it off or heat it back up. And the sauces would most likely already been made in advance. So they would have a separate pot of ragu already done and all the chefs need to do is maybe just toss the sauce and pasta together. Like no one is expecting a customer to wait 2hrs for some bolognese.
And with your pork belly example, they would have done the time-consuming part (the boiling) way in advance. And whenever a customer orders it, they just throw it into some hot oil for 10 minutes to finish the cooking.
I. Addition to pre prepping food Don’t forget that alll the cooking devicices are already at cooking temp (water is already boiling, ovens are ready pre heated, etc). That saves a lot of time
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.
You kind of reverse-engineer. Let’s say you’re doing pork belly tacos. You ask yourself:
1.) What are your time goals? 2-5 minutes really just allows for assembly. 5-15 allows for varying degrees of cooking.
2.) What does a pork belly taco look like, 10 minutes out from being plated?
3.) What parts of the experience will suck if not done at the last possible second?
From there, you come up with a game plan. Maybe the pork belly was parboiled before rush, and then seared as it was ordered.
Sysco Food Distribution, US Foods, PFG, and companies like it make the industry what it is today. In addition to prep cooks who chop dice par boil and pre bake…co’s like Sysco sell that fancy little molten cake or tiramisu, or tart. A chef can buy fancy ganache by the bucket load, croissants…baked or not, and sous vide pork belly fully cooked and ready to heat. Plus thousands of other kinds of meat, seafood, baked goods, French onion soup concentrate, Hollandaise fully prepared, or powdered, vegetables and fruit fresh dried powdered, chopped, minced, whole, mashed, or pureed. It’s all about the money and time. From the hot dog cart to industrial kitchen. Oh, if Sysco doesn’t have it the buyers will find it for you. Costco is similar to Sysco, just much less grand scale. There’s still a little magic in food preparation/ service, however pull back the curtain and the magic has a hard reality to it.
20 years ago I worked in a UK chain restaurant called Bella Italia. We’d have frozen lamb shanks that would simply get bunged in the microwave for 8 minutes until piping hot. People used to rave over them and say how wonderfully tender the meat was. 🤣
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