Reading from news:rec.food.cooking,
"brooklyn1" > posted:

>
> "Damaeus" > wrote in message
> ...
> > Reading from news:rec.food.cooking,
> > "Gregory Morrow" > posted:
> >
> >> And cooking in a restaurant is *very* hard work...exhausting, in fact.
> >
> > Just seeing line cooks at work makes me not want to work in a
> > restaurant. And having worked in a couple of restaurants, myself, I
> > know the confusion that can happen with orders not coming out together,
> > or being delayed, nor not being right. It's no wonder more of them
> > don't come out wrong with all the stuff that goes on in kitchens.
> >
> > And the prep work. My gosh, I remember seeing one prep cook sitting
> > down peeling two or three cases of potatoes. If I had to do that even
> > once a week, I'd go mad from the repetition.
>
> What size cases?

The same size case that bananas come in, shipped to grocery stores.

> Restaurants don't peel many spuds anymore, haven't for many years...

This was 1989. I worked for a place called Tiffany Grille in Springdale,
Arkansas. It was part of the Holiday Inn...pretty nice hotel, for a
Holiday Inn. They were red potatoes, not totally peeled, but he just
peeled a strip around the middle and left the rest, to be decorative, you
see.

> they buy most spuds frozen, already prepped and par cooked. Those that
> regularly peel raw spuds use automatic vegetable peelers, a rotating
> drum with an abrasive lined interior that sands away the peel and has
> water jets to wash the peeling debis out and away... they look somewaht
> like a small portable cement mixer, the typical restuarant size would
> have no problem peeling 50 lbs of spuds in like 5 minutes, the only
> labor being to pour in the spuds and dump them out....

I guess this was before all that became common. This guy sat on an
upturned milk crate on the floor and peeled them by hand, then took them
to be washed.

> just have to remember to set the timer that shuts off the machine or 40
> minutes later there will be no spuds. Restaurants, when they can, buy
> extra large nicely shapen spuds with fewer eyes, called Chef's grade
> (they're like a pound and more each)d they are fairly easy to pare
> manually.

This house loves potatoes, so much so I'm surprised we don't have an
electric peeler of some kind. But how do those power peelers handle those
huge baking potatoes? My friend picked up some about a week ago that were
massive, stretched from my fingertips, up to past my wrist and were very
thick. It took two and a half hours to bake them in the oven at 365
degrees.

Damaeus