Vol. XXIII · The Everyday Cook Plate 5 of 12timing a meal, schedule, working backwards, serving time, roast dinner, oven space, burners, resting, holding, mise en place, Gantt chart, 掌握时间T

Timing a Meal.

The chicken needs the oven for an hour and the potatoes for forty-five minutes. If both fit on one shelf, dinner starts at half past five; if not, at five, and the chicken waits.

Professional cooks plan backwards from the moment the food is served. Each dish has a chain of steps with durations: prepare, cook, rest, finish. Each step occupies something — the oven, a burner, the cook's hands, or nothing (a roast resting, a dough rising). And each finished dish has a tolerance: a roast can rest twenty minutes and improve (II.9), roast potatoes go soft after ten, greens turn grey after three (XX.3), a soufflé will not wait at all (XVII.9). The plan sets every step as late as it can go, so dishes arrive fresh.

Then the resources have to fit. If the plan needs two dishes in one oven at once and the oven holds only one, one of them must move earlier and wait; if three pans need the two burners, something moves too. The art is choosing what waits: the things that tolerate it (roasts, braises, sauces kept warm), not the things that do not (fried and stir-fried food, greens, anything crisp). Prep that needs only hands is done first, before the stove gets busy (I.6). The workshop plans a roast dinner.

Below: a roast-chicken dinner planned backwards from serving at two hours (schedule bench): when each step runs, for the oven space and burners you choose, how early the cooking must start, and how long the chicken waits between leaving the oven and its rest.

What you will learn
Workshop
Schedule bench: tasks placed as late as their successors allow, then moved earlier where the oven or burners are over-booked (the course planner). Durations are typical for a 1.6 kg chicken and 1 kg of potatoes; tolerances are how long each finished dish keeps its quality.

Work back from the plate, then make room

With room in the oven for both, this dinner starts about 90 minutes before serving and everything arrives in its window. With space for only one, the chicken must roast first and come out early: cooking starts 120 minutes before serving and the chicken waits about 30 minutes before its rest — which a roast tolerates, loosely covered, far better than potatoes would.

A method for any meal: list the dishes; for each, write its steps, durations, resource and tolerance; draw the timeline backwards from serving, putting the least tolerant dishes last; check the oven and burners at every moment, and move the most tolerant dishes earlier where they clash; then add the prep that needs only your hands at the start. Write the plan as clock times on a card — "5:30 chicken in, 6:15 potatoes in, 6:30 chicken out" — and set timers. On the day, the plan is followed, not remembered (XXXI.2).

At the stove

For your next meal with three or more dishes, write the timeline backwards from serving on a card before you start, and note where reality differed.

The Gantt chart, used here, was devised by Henry Gantt around 1910 to schedule factory work; kitchens had their own version long before — the brigade's board of tickets and the chef's call of "fire" for each table (XXXI.1).

Terms

Working backwards
Planning from the serving time to the start.
Tolerance
How long a finished dish can wait without suffering.
Bottleneck
The resource — oven, burner, hands — that limits the plan.
Timeline
A chart of when each step runs.
Plan backwards from serving; give each dish its steps, resource and tolerance. Where the oven or burners clash, move the most tolerant dish earlier. Do hands-only prep first.

Sources

  1. A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.