This week we are gearing up for our largest festival of the year, Global Gathering. This is a repeat event for us, as last year we did well and discovered that while dance festival visitors eat at rather odd times, they do actually still eat. This is contrary to the popular belief held that most of them are either on a spiritual plane that doesn’t require material sustenance or not coherent enough to make their food wishes known or, most commonly, both.
Obviously, in accordance with the Law of Festival Returns, we will be looking to increase our takings over last year, especially as the weather is currently scheduled to be better than 2013. This means that we will be aiming to shift well over a thousand toasties this weekend, and even as I type Barny is in the kitchen, brie, bacon and cranberrying the hell out of some bread so that we’re ahead with our festival preparations.
Followed by some QA. Very important.
In our first year of trading, when we were delightfully naive about these things, we used to turn up at events with solid blocks of cheese and meat. Luckily those gigs were mostly terrible, or the sad truth is that, had they been busy, we would have foundered, panicked, and made a colossal mess of things. Even though toasties are a comparatively simple food, they take a surprisingly large amount of advance preparation. Not as much as earlier menus, but more than I think most folks would expect. For example, we have just spent two days slicing cheese.
Now I love cheese, it’s one of my top 5 favourite foods (steak, bacon, Rogan Josh and Barny’s chicken Caesar Salad in case you were wondering), but when you have just sliced 40kgs of finest mature Warwickshire the excitement tends to fade. Then 10kgs of mozzarella, just for good measure.
While I’m busy slicing my way through the dairy wall, Barny is assembling everything else. Most of these other components are tiny jobs that wouldn’t take two minutes in the real world, but multiplied by 100 they become distinctly long-winded. Cooking bacon is a good example. Cooking 3 rashers for a nice bacon butty will take you around 5 minutes under the grill. Cooking 300 rashers will take an entire morning and make everything you own smell good enough to eat, whether you like it or not.
Fact is that we will spend at least two whole days, 32 working hours, preparing all the food for a weekend of festivalling, and usually most of another day then assembling the first few hundred toasties for sale when we get there.
Had you told me this way back in the day I would probably have nodded politely and filed you under “shares crazy facts about street food almost totally out of context”, but now I can see why it’s worth knowing. The assumption everyone makes is that you buy food, probably wave a spoon at it and mutter some street food magic to conjure up delicious meal.There are foods that come with fewer time-based overheads: usually those that are cooked from raw on the day like paella and reasonably plain burgers, but almost every street food, assuming it’s not made from the cash n carry’s finest pre-cooked-pre-sliced-part-digested minced Food, is going to require more advance prep than would seem to make sense.
So, hopeful street food people who dream of setting up a business they can run at the weekends, know that festival preparations involve more than your fair share of chopping. For those of you who enjoy the fruits of their labour, please enjoy, and if you happen to be at Global Gathering this weekend, just wave and grunt, I’m sure we’ll figure something out.
Can Barney work on a sous vide “Food” toastie?