Monthly Archives: December 2018

CHRISTMAS DELIGHTS BY CRUISE SHIP CHEFS

CHRISTMAS DELIGHTS BY CRUISE SHIP CHEFSThe holidays are a time of joy and quality time with family. Unfortunately, this means that cruise ship chefs’ jobs get more demanding as they prepare to serve and feed thousands of guests with special Christmas treats during the season.

Cruise ships around the world offer a variety of Christmas dishes based on the demography of the guests. However, Western Christmas traditions have become popular across the board, and with a large percentage of cruise-goers coming from these countries, these dishes are a must-have at any Christmas cruise buffet.

ROAST TURKEY

The ideal Christmas turkey is a skin-on bird cooked slowly in the oven over two hours. It is often stuffed with herbs and nuts and is served with a lush gravy thickened with heavy cream and stock. Cruise ship chefs dress dozens of turkeys over the Christmas season to give guests a taste of home on holiday.

MINCE PIES

Contrary to its name, mince pies are, in fact, a sweet treat. Originally from Britain, they are small, individual pastry cases filled with a chunky dried fruit and spices mix. Cruise ship chefs often add alcohol to the mix, and focus on preparing the perfect pastry to go with it.

CHOCOLATE YULE LOG

The tradition of the yule log cake came from a special log of wood saved to be burnt in the hearth over the 12 days of Christmas. Today, to represent this, a chocolate yule log is made or genoise or basic sponge in a Swiss roll tin, and covered in ganache, buttercream and other icings. Cruise ship chefs make these particularly for guests from Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Quebec.

GINGERBREAD HOUSES

Gingerbread has long been associated with Christmas. It possibly came about as a medicinal remedy for over-eating that was common during the festive days. Gingerbread houses were thought to be created around the time the story of Hansel and Gretel became popular in Germany. Today, it is an interactive activity for families, and cruise companies like Disney even have competitions between their ships for the best gingerbread house display.

EGGNOG

Eggnog was a drink favoured by the aristocracy as milk, eggs and good alcohol were expensive. It is traditionally drunk in Britain and north America over the Christmas period, and can even be sold commercially in tetra packs. On board cruise liners, chefs make eggnog from scratch, using high quality milk, cream, sugar, whipped egg whites, egg yolks and spirits such as brandy, rum, whisky or bourbon.

CHRISTMAS PUDDING

Christmas pudding is a must-have over the holiday season in the UK and Ireland, and is quite common on cruise ships popular with these nationalities. The rich, boozy dessert, also known as plum pudding, contains a mixture of dried fruits and suet with treacle or molasses and flavoured often by cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger and other spices. Given that the fruit must soak in alcohol over time, cruise ship chefs must begin preparations months ahead of time.

MULLED WINE

Also called glühwein, mulled wine is popular in Scandinavian countries, but is slowly gaining popularity across Europe. It is a spiced liquor often flavoured with orange peel, cardamom, ginger, cloves and cinnamon.

HONEY-GLAZED HAM

Ham is a beautiful addition to any Christmas spread. It denotes prosperity and success, and along with roast turkey, offers an excellent dish as a table centrepiece. Flavoured simply with honey or maple syrup and sometimes cloves, the whole leg of ham is cooked slowly in an oven for more than an hour. It is sometimes glazed with orange-cranberry sauce.

SUGAR COOKIES

Christmas sugar cookies are a classic treat that cruise ship chefs use to their advantage. They are a popular way of getting interactive with guests, by offering demo baking classes and cookie decorating sessions with children.

Share

How do Cruise Ship Chefs Prepare for the Holiday Season

How do Cruise Ship Chefs Prepare for the Holiday SeasonThe holiday season for centuries has been associated with Christmas and New Year in the northern hemisphere – lots of snow, fires burning, brandy and rum-based drinks, and everyone covered in furs. For many, the temptation to indulge in all of these Christmas memories in fine summery weather is too hard to resist. Their solution – a Christmas cruise.

For the West, the holiday season has been highly commercialized and cruise ship companies have seized the opportunity to cash in on this potential. Swarms of people opt to spend their vacations with family on board a cruise ship in more tropical locations such as the Caribbean, the Bahamas, Mexico, the Canary Islands, and perhaps further in the southern hemisphere in places like Australia and New Zealand.

For cruise ship chefs, this means more work than usual, as people tend to indulge themselves far more over the winter holidays than they might do even on a regular cruise. Cruise ships begin by taking stock of ingredients and ordering sufficient supplies, particularly of holiday specials such as turkeys, fruit and vegetable for pies, geese, and beverages including wines, brandy and rum.

Preparation for dishes that need time to cure such as ham, or to soak such as dried fruit for Christmas cake and pudding starts well ahead of the season. Cruise companies also analyse their guest lists and understand the demographics – such as predominant age groups or cultures – to design menus that will cater to their preferences.

With this in mind, cruise ship chefs jobs entail an understanding of various cultures and their specific Christmas specials. Guests from North America typically enjoy gingerbread, fruit pies, Christmas ham, roast turkey, and fruit cake. Passengers hailing from European countries such as Germany, France and Scandinavia prefer stollen, mulled wine, Christmas cookies, herring salad, sausages, smoked salmon, roast chicken, spice cookies, meatballs, cheeses and rice puddings.

Thanks to the rush over the holidays, cruise ship chefs must cook holiday specials in mammoth proportions. A major part of the decorations are gingerbread displays, which some cruise vessels go to great lengths in terms of size and detail.

Disney Cruise Line organises an annual competition among its ships for the best gingerbread house. In 2017, Disney Wonder created a magnificent display made with around 650 pounds of gingerbread dough, 220 pounds of icing sugar and 5250 gingerbread bricks, in addition to candies, cookies and other decorations.

Through the season, cruise ship chefs stay busy catering to passengers’ mammoth appetites for holiday specialties. P&O cruise ship chefs, for example, roast around 1100 turkeys and serve 600 bottles of Champagne. On Fred Olsen Cruise Lines, nearly 14000 mince pies and 744 Christmas puddings make their way out of the galleys, as well as nearly three-quarters of a tonne of turkey!

On the Silversea, chefs must prepare for guests who typically eat their way through a tonne of turkey and 2200 Christmas pantone, 2500 bottles of Champagne and 12000 bottles of vintage wine.

Fruit and vegetable sculptors and cruise ship chefs pull out all the stops on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year in particular, to create intricate as well as tempting displays of food at gala nights and buffets.

In addition, they must prepare special gift baskets and hampers for the shops, bakeries and on board Christmas markets, as well as special trays of treats to be sent to the suites during the holiday season.

Cruise ships are getting increasingly innovative, even during Christmas, with many looking at interactive sessions for chefs with guests including demonstrations or classes on making Christmas sweets and puddings, and cookie decorating for children.

Being the holiday season, work becomes even more hectic for cruise ship chefs as they put in extra hours to keep up with the high demand and extra trimmings.

Share

The Art Of Cooking

The Art Of CookingFor most of human history, cooking has been viewed as a necessary skill, without which humans are resigned to be foragers and hunters. Over the years, with the opulence of empires and their show of wealth, cooking transcended that realm into something of extravagance and show.

From basic food forms like pies and roasts, food became more dainty and sophisticated to include newer creations such as bruschetta and salads. More recently, cooking and its final products have focused on technique, appearance and quality, causing many to refer to this skill as culinary art.

Art is loosely defined as visual, auditory and performing artifacts that express the author’s imaginative, conceptual idea, or technical skill intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power. Much of this can be applied to the culinary arts.

People in the world of culinary arts, including cruise ship chefs, are expected to have in-depth knowledge of food science, nutrition and diet. Students are taught this art just as one would painting or sculpture – including its history, specific techniques and creative expression.

By nature, an artist uses a blank canvas to stimulate the senses. Cooking a dish and its presentation can cause similar effects. Heston Blumenthal, for example, created a stunning dessert out of something quite classic. He turned the favourite Italian dessert tiramisu into a potted plant.

The dessert is served in a clean pot and appears to be a sapling planted in a soil. To the eye, soil is hardly appetising, initiating a tasteless, bitter, perhaps even unsavoury effect. In this way, it stimulates the eyes and the imagination. Once the diner comes closer, the aroma of the chocolate soil and the mint or basil plant stimulates the olfactory senses.

This changes the diner’s approach to the dish, inviting him or her to try it. Finally, the taste buds are stimulated and the diner feels comfort from tasting something familiar, joy at having overcome the initial reaction and from the pleasant surprise.

Art can be constituted as a reaction or a relationship between the viewer and the object or experience. A similar example in the modern art space is of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose early installations in the 1990s sought to bring people together by cooking meals such as pad thai and Thai green curry for visitors.

This may not be culinary art but shows that art is simply a sensory effect on its audience. They may not perceive it as beautiful or – in the case of culinary art – delicious, but that is their perception of the creator’s vision.

Culinary artists undergo years of rigorous training in skills, food safety, the understanding of chemistry and thermodynamics, and more, to give them a firm foundation of how ingredients react with each other and the elements around them.

The creativity rests on their own imagination to design dishes that evoke positive sensory responses from diners so that people keep coming back for more.

For cruise ship chefs, their jobs on board may not give them the full freedom to practice their creativity, particularly lower down in the hierarchy, but in celebrity kitchens or once they climb the ladder, the world is their oyster.

Share