sometimes during brunch i get what i call "fryer fucked". that is, i just get super backed up on fried items and hold up the whole show. there's literally nothing i can do about it but power through, but still, i feel bad letting shit die in the window cause i can't get any fries out. i work the broiler/fryer station at brunch, and do all the eggs (except the poachies for the bennys). we only have two fryers, four baskets worth. we don't have regular hashbrowns, we do a fried potato/sauteed onion combo we lovingly refer to as bubba browns, but in addition to having enough for the plates, i gotta fry potatoes for the next station over to use in scrambles and burritos and whatnot. and we're usually busy enough where one fryer is dominated by those potatoes for six hours straight. but then we also run our regular menu during brunch, so when people start ordering regular food, i can get wicked fryer fucked. an order of wings takes up one basket for at least ten minutes. four sides of fries can fit into one basket. but all of a sudden it's lent so i've been frying fish like a motherfucker, and yesterday was the st. paddys parade for some reason (i guess cause it was saturday) and we got pounded after the parade was over, three hours straight just banging plates out, and people were ordering just as many fish and chips as they were over easy eggs, and i got fryer fucked. we had simultaneous 15 tops (our dining room isn't all that big either) and was a total half and half mix of breakfast and lunch items. anyway, we did 4800 on saturday and we normally do around 3000. that's food and bev combined (we're a bar) but still...4800 brunch kicks ass.
the other time i get fryer fucked is during happy hour when wings are a quarter. it's very common to have two or three hundred wings on the board (my all time high was 450 hanging) and at most we can put a hundred and twenty wings in the fryers at once. that's assuming i have nothing else to cook (fries, tots, rings, chicken sammies, etc) and that the wings are kinda little. sometimes they're big and i can only do about 80. we fire off sheet pans of wings in the pizza oven to par bake them a little but i still gotta fry them until crispy. and i'm getting to where i can toss 100 wings in sauce in a big ass bowl like a champ.
anyway. just thought i'd share. i don't blog enough anymore.
the other time i get fryer fucked is during happy hour when wings are a quarter. it's very common to have two or three hundred wings on the board (my all time high was 450 hanging) and at most we can put a hundred and twenty wings in the fryers at once. that's assuming i have nothing else to cook (fries, tots, rings, chicken sammies, etc) and that the wings are kinda little. sometimes they're big and i can only do about 80. we fire off sheet pans of wings in the pizza oven to par bake them a little but i still gotta fry them until crispy. and i'm getting to where i can toss 100 wings in sauce in a big ass bowl like a champ.
anyway. just thought i'd share. i don't blog enough anymore.
5 comments:
Ten minutes for wings?? Are you cooking them frozen? Start pre-cooking them so they take 2-3 minutes to fry. Do you have extra burner space on the stove? If so you can set up a pot with oil as a fryer.
yah we cook them from frozen...usually they get ten minutes in the oven, then four or five to fry, but it depends on how hard we get hit and when...sometimes we get so backed up they take forty minutes to hit the table. we used to thaw out huge buckets of them but for whatever reason my boss doesn't want us doing that. we never used to precook them, we'd just have them thawed and then we'd fire them off as they were ordered, now we don't thaw them and fire off sheet pan after sheet pan before anybody even orders them. wierd.
when I worked for the grocery store, wings were the bane of my existence. We had two pressure fryers (one ginormous with four trays) and one regular restaurant fryer and they also did double duty for fried chx. Fried chx was 65% of our sales, but wings had their moment and when they did it was fustercluck. In addition, we also had to have 10 and 20 packs for the cold case. Long story short, Superbowl and New Years Eve were stupid with preorders for 50 and 100pc. I think we sold something like 4500 pcs for the former. In any case, we had two combi ovens as well so I started baking them off from frozen then chilling them in the blast freezer. Actual time in the fryer was now mere minutes and the real upside was that most of the fat rendered in the oven and gave our oil a little extra life. After the chaos that was NYE, I commandeered the badass bakery oven (like a walk-in with spinning racks) so I could bake off 1000 at a time. None of us blog enough anymore because we're too busy thinking of new f'ing ways to meet the huge demand for those damn wings.
The wings we have are seasoned no flour just seasonings and then Pre cooked and then we freeze them. Even though there frozen once we fry them they take about 5 minutes.
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