Remember the pork cooking I volunteered to do for the big church dinner coming up?

Mom and I just did the calculating and it looks like we’re talking about 44-46 pork tenderloins that need cooking. We figure I can maybe cook 4-6 at a time in my one oven. She can triple that amount since she has three ovens, one of which is convection. So Mom is going to help me do the roasting.

I just did the calculations for the marinade recipe. The original recipe makes 1 cup of marinade. Factor 1 cup needed per tenderloin and we’re talking about nearly 2 gallons of marinade needed. So using the conversion formula for increasing recipes (it’s not a simple thing, actually, especially for the math challenged like I am), it looks like we’re going to need 2 gallons of orange juice alone. The recipe is an Asian-ish citrus marinade.

I have not done this level of mass cooking since I was in culinary school and even then I never cooked this amount of food by myself. At least I don’t have to do the side dishes, too. I’m nervous about screwing this up, but I’m also kind of excited for the challenge. And I’m grateful for my Mom’s help.

[Added Later]: I’m also doing a sauce for the meat, which is basically the marinade but I’ll add some marmalade and cornstarch to thicken it. So I need to triple the marinade ingredients (figuring 1/2 cup servings of sauce).

Yikes.

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1. Yeah, the concern is whether the powers that be realize how much meat they are going to need for 250 people.

   Posted by  on  06/19/08  at  12:15 PM

2. Could you instead do just pork loin roasts (as opposed to tenderloins)?  They’re a little bigger and cheaper, but not quite as tender and yummy.  And for the marinade, it always seems that marinade recipes result in a lot of excess.  I’m sure you could halve it and still have plenty for the marinade, if not the sauce when cooking in bulk.  Definitely not triple!

   Posted by Gwynne  on  06/19/08  at  12:32 PM

3. Marmie, I emailed KJ and she emailed back - she knows how much meat to buy.

   Gwynne, yeah. I plan to make the double recipe of marinade and whatever is leftover will be used for the sauce and I’ll add to it as I think I need. But I’m planning on triple for ingredient buying. Fortunately, it’s all stuff I can use myself if I end up not using it all.

   Posted by jen  on  06/19/08  at  01:08 PM

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