How Working as a Caterer Changed How We Entertain at Home

Cooking for galas with thousands of guests trained us to be better prepared and more organized.

With a combined thirty years experience writing about food and developing recipes for our cookbooks, we thought we knew how to throw a party. But it wasn’t until we took $10-an-hour jobs working as “K.A.s” — kitchen assistants — for a high-end, high-volume New York City caterer that we truly earned our stripes in seamless, stress-less hosting.

We didn’t get into catering to step up our entertaining skills. It started after we met a team of chefs who cook some of the fanciest parties in New York and operate largely under-the-radar — a culinary special-ops force parachuting into a different venue every night to set up their makeshift kitchens and get to work. As soon as we heard some of their stories, we wanted to reveal the mechanics, the stress, and the emotion of these spaces the way Bill Buford’s Heat and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential did for restaurant kitchens.

So, over the course of six years, we worked hundreds of parties, like the Park Avenue Armory Gala and Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s Labor Day “picnic” in East Hampton. We were behind the pipe-and-drape — caterspeak for that black curtain separating kitchen from dining room — at the wedding of Ashlee Simpson and Evan Ross, and also at the Robin Hood Benefit, where 4,400 people (440 tables of ten!) were serenaded by Bruno Mars and dropped $50 million in one night. It’s all in our book, Hotbox: Inside Catering, the Food World’s Riskiest Business, where you’ll learn just how insane it is to cook the weddings of food-obsessed couples and for high-maintenance, highly allergic clients with $1.5 million dollar “cookouts.”

But writing Hotbox had an added benefit for us: it changed the way we cook and entertain in our homes. We’re never more thankful for that lesson than when the holidays come around, guest-counts for our parties soar and menus lengthen. We’ve boiled down those lessons here for you. Here are three we hope will take some of the stress out of your holiday entertaining.

Cook what you know will work

This might seem painfully obvious, but every truly stressful cooking moment we’ve experienced we could have skirted by choosing a simpler menu, or recipes better suited to the occasion, the number of guests, or the weather. There was the fondue birthday for twenty where only two of four pots got hot enough to melt cheese and one of those scorched the cheese before anyone got to eat. Or the roll-your-own spring rolls party when the rice wrappers just wouldn’t unstick themselves from one another. Not every party fail will be the botched raw-bar on a 105-degree Labor Day at an outdoor wedding for 300, but it should go without saying: Holidays are the time to deploy your repertoire, the recipes you know knock it out of the park regardless of temperature, humidity, or the vagaries of a specialty kitchen appliance. A New Year’s Day party for 40 isn’t the time for recipe-testing, so resist the temptation to open that vintage cookbook you got at your office holiday gift exchange and take “Shrimp Supreme” for a spin.

You should cook what you know will work for those reasons, but also because your guests don’t want to see you sweat. Unless it’s a grilling party, active cooking should be complete before the first guest walks through the door. That’s not always possible, but be ever-vigilant, and cook recipes you can prepare in advance that hold well — and get better for holding. Holiday parties are the time to roll out your favorite oxtail and short rib recipes; casseroles and lasagnas; soups and stews you can serve over a rice you especially love; a cured ham station with some home-made pickled peppers and condiments. Vegetables slaws and sturdy bean and pea salads, whose flavors meld more completely the longer they marinate, and can be pulled from the fridge and served at room temperature. Vegetable purées that reheat easily. Choosing food that holds well doesn’t mean every dish has to be stick-to-your ribs comfort food cooked yesterday. Aguachiles made with scallops or local fish are a go-to for us for parties, because they seem so luxurious and decadent. You make the leche de tigre and citrus cures in advance, and the final dishes come together in a snap, a half-hour before guests come in the door.

Organize, organize, organize

This mantra, delivered multiple times an hour by our boss in catering, Juan Soto, might seem like a cliché. But bringing a busy professional chef’s sense of order to the packing and storing of our ingredients and tools in our home kitchens was a revelation at every level and has saved us so much time and anguish. Our spice drawers and knife drawers got orderly makeovers, and we brought into our kitchens the hardware of the catering trade. We use deli containers, those clear cylindrical plastic take-out containers in graduated half-pint, pint, and quart-sizes, plus the larger square clear plastic Cambro containers with measurements printed on the containers. Both are perfect for containing large batches of soup, salads, or pulled pork — and stackable, to help you make the most of your fridge space.

When we worked for that caterer, the teeming production kitchen was where all prep work got done; at any one moment two dozen chefs were working eight different parties. But with only one walk-in refrigerator for prepared food, every container — from that massive, deep pan of a completed lasagna Bolognese ready to head to the party site to the smallest half-pint container of washed, dried, picked herbs absolutely had to be clearly labeled, dated, and stickered with a color-coded dot denoting what party it was headed to. We don’t use sticker dots for our home parties of course, but we absolutely label every container (with a Sharpie on blue masking tape) stating the contents and date — without fail!

But it’s not just tools and ingredients we organize more efficiently, it’s our time, too. Whether we're hosting large or small parties, we always break down every recipe we plan to serve into a task list. We knock out all the things we can do a few days in advance, even if it’s just measuring dry ingredients for a bread or a cake into a container. We’ll wash, pick, and containerize sturdier herbs, and juice the citrus (though if planning to store for more than a day, we’ll freeze the juice then transfer from freezer to fridge to thaw the day before the event).

Get help!

Even if it’s only a week-night cocktail party, a special event takes labor and talent, and sometimes we just can’t do everything ourselves. We don’t need the chef army that was required when we worked on the NBA Legends Brunch at New York City’s Javits Center, but outsourcing simple cooking tasks means the difference between enjoying the company of our guests, and that adrenaline-frazzled feeling of trying to catch up. For a recent buffet dinner for 120 people, we brought in a friend from our catering days to help prep recipes and citrus drink garnishes the day before the party. Those eight straight hours he chopped, sliced, and diced the day before made cooking the scaled-up recipes the morning of the party a breeze. That was literally the reason we were able to get enough sleep that night before the party so we were rested and ready to cook — and host our friends — the next day.

But you don’t always need a professional to make the party soar. For a memorial we hosted a few years ago, the hires that made the difference that day were a friend’s teenage daughter, who handled answering the door and checking coats, and her best friend, who we put on dish duty and sanitation. She gathered up all used compostable plates, glasses, and utensils so by the time the last guest left, the cleanup was nearly complete.

When it comes down to it, parties are ephemeral, which is why even a small gathering can qualify as a special event. You gather friends and family for this one moment — and then, poof! — it’s gone. You owe it to yourself to make that time you spend at your own parties as relaxing and as pleasurable as possible.

For more Food & Wine news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on Food & Wine.