Blog

Today has been a rare day at Chef and Griddle when we have not been out to cater for an event. As we were not out cooking we have been using this day as sort of an admin day to make sure that we answer all of our enquiries as soon as possible.

We have had a vast number of enquiries the past few weeks, ever since we have gone into the new year the phone has not stopped ringing and the web form enquiries have been absolutely flooding in. To make your own enquiry for example a hog roast simply the contact tab on our website and fill in your name, event date, event location, telephone number, email address and which of our menus you would be interested in. It is very important that all of these fields are filled in as it allows us to calculate a much more accurate quote. Some people choose not to add their email address as they don’t want annoying spam emails, we do not send out spam emails just one friendly email to check you have received our menus. Alternatively some people do not like to put their phone number on our enquiry forms because they believe they may receive annoying sales calls, again we simply call to check you have received the menus. It is also helpful to include your phone number on our enquiry forms in case your email address is wrong and we can ring up to double check what it should be.

Once you have sent your enquiry through we will respond with our menus and include the price for that menu on the bottom. As well as the menus you have a price for we will send you along some additional menus we feel may suit your event, we might include something you hadn’t even originally thought of or thought it was something we could not do. Just remember when making your enquiry that Chef and Griddle can do as little or as much for your event as you wish and you need only ask, with a high probability that we can provide the requested service and with a quality to match dedicated event organisers in that particular area.

As the working week winds down for most people we at Chef and Griddle are loading up our vans ready for the weekends work hog roasting. The supposed blizzard is apparently nearly on us and we have already had one cancellation due to the weather. For our customers who have stuck to their guns and will be going through with their event are in a for a huge treat. Can you imagine anything better than being outside (or inside) with the snow coming down a hot pork roll in one hand and crispy crackling in the other? We have a very lucky hog roast Benfleet customer who is having freshly made and seasoned mulled wine as well as hot apple juice and cinnamon with their hog roast tomorrow

Today we made a booking for a lovely woman who is having roast chicken as well an afternoon style tea. Roast chicken is fantastic when cooked spit roast style, the smell of slow roasting chicken is hard to beat and it also looks amazing with multiple chickens turning on a spit. To supplement chicken we make freshly made stuffing and tasty gravy using the juices from the chickens. When served into a bread roll with stuffing and drizzled with a bit of the homemade gravy the chicken is exceptional, it falls off the bone without being too greasy. The afternoon style menu is something we do quite often and in this case consists of freshly baked scones, cakes as well as having an urn of tea, coffee and mints that the customers can help themselves too.

With Easter coming up in the next few months we will be very busy at Chef and Griddle and with the coming of spring we will have a fresh batch of nice spring lambs. As brutal as it sounds it will be excellent to have these lambs to stick on our spit roast machines as they are perfect when seasoned with rosemary and herbs and slow cooked to perfection.  These fresh new lambs will also be excellent on our barbecue menus as awesomely tasty lamb kebabs.

We have had another busy week this week at Chef and Griddle. The office has been full of enquiries ready for the summer weddings. We have also taken a lot of bookings for the next few months, an example would be a machine hire for the 1st of February. We also had a last minute booking yesterday afternoon for a classic hog roast for today, we quickly checked with our suppliers and they told us it was no problem to have a pig on such short notice. The hog roast Folkestone went as excellently smooth as all of our events, the classic hog roast is a standard hog roast consisting of a whole spit roasted pig with all the lovely crackling that it provides. This is then served into bread rolls and served with apple sauce and stuffing for a fantastic meal.  We arrived onsite six hours before the serve time as the hog roast was for 80 people which requires a 50 – 60 kilo pig and we say that for every 10 kilos an extra hour of cooking time is added.

As the pig was slowly turning and cooking for the whole six hours the smell of the roasting meat was given chance to permeate the venue thankfully we were cooking indoors as it looked like it was threatening to snow all evening and the wind was bitterly cold.

A lot of people enquiring about our services do not realise we can roast indoors but in fact it is not as big a deal as people make it out to be. Our machines are all sealed units which run off gas not coal which produces a cleaner heat without all the smoke, they are all also gas safety certified to show that they do not leak or produce any harmful fumes. In the slightly more confined space the roasting smell was very strong and everyone in attendance was saying how amazing the smell and our catering setup was. The client thanked us heartily as we left because the event was a corporate party hog roast which had to be organised on short notice and that without it their client probably would have ended up eating sandwiches and a bag of crisps.

Welcome back to another update from Chef and Griddle. Now that all the Christmas and new year festivities are finished the office is absolutely heaving with new enquiries. This is because people are making all their enquiries and trying to get booked in for summer. We are also taking a lot of wedding enquiries now that we have turned into the new year as people realise that their Wedding is only Six months away instead of thinking it is a year away.

Over the Christmas period we had a long term hire for a customer the customer had originally decided to just hire the machine for 3 days while he sold hog roast at events, after having the machine for 3 days he decided that he wanted it for longer and he eventually had it for 10 days. As with the hog roast hire machine we can hire out our machines for as long or as short a time period as you want. As we manufacture our own machines we can guarantee their sturdiness and that they are simply the best on the market for reliability and getting that even hog cook hog roast and perfect crackling every time.

One of the weddings we have booked in during the new year madness is a wedding menu 3 for 150 guests. The wedding menu 3 is a very popular menu at the moment and consists of a choice of canapés to start with, a choice of whole roast meat such as pig, lamb, chicken, turkey or beef. Wedding menu 3 also comes with a choice of three salads and a potato option, a freshly made vegetarian alternative and a choice of dessert to finish off. The reason this menu is so popular is because it is halfway between our ever popular wedding menu 2 which just has canapés and no desserts and our wedding menu 4 which has the same as wedding menu 3 but with starters as well. For some customers they do not require starters and instead just want canapés and a reception drink for their guests to mill around, congratulate the bridge and groom and be served canapés so they do not get too drunk before the party has even began.

On Monday we catered for a Christmas party for a post office in Tetbury. As you would expect at this time of year post office’s are extremely busy and their employees will be stressed due to the amount of Christmas post. To help relieve some of this stress the boss had asked us to cook and serve a roast pig for their staff.

The weather was extremely cold and we honestly thought it was going to snow at one point but we just put our thick jackets on and stood a little bit closer to the hog roast machine as they provide quite a lot of warmth. The post office had asked us not to cook on site for the whole cooking period of six hours so we partly cooked the hog off site for four hours and then finished it on site for two hours when we got there.

The staff absolutely loved the hog roast and told us it was just what they needed to pick them up after a busy day, despite the cold everyone was in the best of spirits and asked us to join them in the pub afterwards, but unfortunately we had to get the machine cleaned and be on our way.

Cooking the pig in the manner that this customer requested is no problem for us, sometimes people only have access to their event venue for a certain amount of time and do not want to commit to having the pig cooking for the whole six hours. In instances such as this there a few things we can do; we can partly cook the pig off site and finish it on site (as we did here) or we could cook the whole pig off site and simply carve and serve it on site. Another option that people often ask us about is whether we can simply deliver a whole cooked pig and let them do all the serving, this is something we can absolutely do, we simply cook the pig and then bring it on a roasting tray to give to the customer.