New for the Holidays

A few client-pleasing ideas

The holiday season—Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Eve and more—can be a make-or-break time for some caterers, both social and corporate. In a festive mood, clients may be more willing to spend a little money on treating friends, family, clients and coworkers to a good time. But last year’s holiday season was a tight one for businesses, and therefore for caterers, as some companies cut back on even the appearance of spending money for “nonessentials.” The evidence is that business is coming back this year, but with a difference: Even big corporate clients are looking for value more than—or in addition to—glitz.

Successful holiday ideas from caterers around the country combine sensitivity to price, nostalgia, creativity and, of course, good taste.

The more the merrier
Last year, a number of Greg Ziegenfuss’ clients reduced their holiday entertaining. “I’ve got a very good friend who’s president of a company,” says Ziegenfuss, vice president of operations for Butler’s Pantry in St. Louis. “Last year he told me he wasn’t going to do a holiday party; he would just take 20 of his people and go to a restaurant.”

This year, Ziegenfuss is giving clients a chance to entertain customers and/or staff even within a tight budget. Butler’s Pantry will offer existing clients the opportunity to buy tables of 10 for a splashy holiday party at a new venue the catering company is opening in November. “We’ll have a great party band, an elaborate cocktail hour and a buffet,” he says. There will be dancing, décor and the opportunity to meet new people. Although it’s not designed as a networking event, Ziegenfuss sees that as a nice plus: “It’s kind of like a big    mixer, an opportunity to mingle and perhaps network, even though it’s a social event.”

Butler’s Pantry is trying to keep tickets in the $30-$40 per person range, which means a client can buy a table for $400 or less. Ziegenfuss has been doing email blasts to clients, alerting them to the party, and plans to work with the local business journal in a nice trade—a few tables of 10 in exchange for a series of ads.

A way to serve up tradition
Sweet potatoes show up on a lot of holiday dinner menus, so why not “explode” them into a great holiday appetizer. That was Zack Sklar’s idea, anyway. Zack is owner/chef of Cutting Edge Cuisine in New York. His Exploding Wedges make a surprising hors d’oeuvre, with nostalgic flavors done in a new way.

 “Exploding” Wedges with Scallion Crème Fraiche
Ingredients/sweet potato
1 large sweet potato, cut into 8 long wedges
1/2 gallon frying oil
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 Tbsp kosher salt
1 Tbsp granulated sugar
1-1/2 tsp cinnamon
1-1/2 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp ground ginger
2 limes, zested

Ingredients/crème fraiche
1 cup crème fraiche
1/4 cup scallions, thinly sliced, plus 2 Tbsp for garnish
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp granulated sugar

Ingredients/“exploding” butter
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2 tsp kosher salt
1/4 cup honey
1 Tbsp granulated sugar
1 lime, juiced

Method
Heat frying oil to 300º. Blanch sweet potato wedges in oil for 4-6 minutes. Freeze wedges for at least 3 hours or overnight.

Combine all the ingredients for crème fraiche and refrigerate until service.

Combine all ingredients for “exploding” butter in a saucepan and heat just until melted and combined; draw the liquid into a marinade injector.

In a bowl, combine the sugars, chili powder, salt, cinnamon, ginger and lime zest.
Heat frying oil to 360º. Drop frozen sweet potato wedges into the oil for 5-7 minutes or until golden brown and blistered. Immediately after taking out of the oil, coat wedges in the brown-sugar mixture.

Push the needle of the filled marinade injector the long way into each sweet potato wedge as far as it will go. Slowly press the injector while sliding the needle back out. Repeat this step on the other side of the wedge, in case the needle doesn’t reach the length of the wedge.

Once the sweet potato wedges are filled with the butter mixture, they can be held on a rack in a 300º oven for up to 30 minutes.

To serve
Put the crème fraiche mixture in the bottom quarter of a large shot glass, top with the wedge and garnish with the remaining sliced scallions. When guests bite into the sweet potato wedge, they get a surprise “explosion” of great flavored butter.

Entrees gone small
Want to give your guests a taste of familiar food, without the bulge in their budget or tummy? Brad Schreiber of Ashton Gardens in Houston is serving up bite-size versions of popular entrées, called Petit Entrée Hors d’Oeuvre.

Mini versions of popular foods—hot dogs, hamburgers—have been around for a while, but Schreiber wanted to upscale it a bit. They have three goals for a mini-entrée: it has to be a familiar concept; it has to look like the real thing; and it has to taste like the real thing. Among the offerings are Steak and Potato, Surf and Turf, Shish Kabob Platter, Chicken-Fried Steak.

Served on 6-inch plates, the entrée hors d’oeuvre don’t require a table—although they do require a fork. Steak and Potato features a tiny “filet” of beef, which is actually a part of the tenderloin that usually gets trimmed and put aside to be ground or turned into skewers. With half of a small Yukon Gold potato, a dab of spinach and a “salad” of a cherry tomato and a chive, the plate is complete.

Ashton Gardens, a wedding venue, serves the mini-entrées either before the meal, with other hors d’oeuvre, or as a late-night bite, after a dinner.

For the holidays, Schreiber says mini-entrées would be easy: a dab of mashed potatoes, a small slice of turkey, fine-textured stuffing. Or a small slice of ham, with mashed sweet potatoes and sautéed green beans.

Baby, it’s cold outside
Chef Eric LeVine, at Encore Catering in East Hanover, NJ, created a special holiday menu that he says “combines elements of cool with fire, like having a fireplace, keeping things warm on a cold winter day.”

The extensive menu starts with specialty beverages like “Hot Coco” Shooters and ends with an array of desserts. In between are an “Un-Cappuccino” station with salads, proteins, vinaigrettes and foams served in cappuccino glasses to order (you could choose, for example, baby spinach and seared tuna loin raspberry vinaigrette and topped with carrot-ginger foam), a stir-fry and “Hot” Ice Station and a traditional entrée.

One of the dessert choices is a triple panna cotta that shows the colors of the season.

Mini Trio Panna Cotta of Cherry Caramel, White Chocolate and Key Lime

1/3 cup skim milk
1/2 oz envelope unflavored gelatin
2-1/2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup white sugar
1-1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup flavored purees (be sure to strain all fruit purees). Use two or three purees, kept separate.

Method
Pour milk into small bowl. Stir in the gelatin powder. Set aside.

In a saucepan, stir together the heavy cream and sugar and set over medium heat. Bring to full boil, watching carefully, as the cream will quickly rise to the top of the pan. Pour the gelatin and milk mixture into the cream, stirring until completely dissolved. Cook for one minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in the vanilla. Divide into three portions and stir a different flavor profile into each one (white chocolate, key lime, cherry, etc.). Pour the first layer into six individual ramekins.

Place in refrigerator and allow to set for 30 minutes, then add the next flavor profile to the glass. Repeat one more time with the final flavor and chill for at least one hour or overnight.

Chocolate treats
Chef Vincent Pilon knows his chocolate—now executive pastry chef at Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, he’s worked at pastry and chocolate shops in France and then, upon moving to Washington, D.C., was a chef at Le Palais du Chocolate.

You don’t have to be able to work with chocolate the way he does in order to make a delightful dessert or party-ending sweet dish. Using chocolate items from Mona Lisa Products and simple lollipop sticks, Pilon created to-go desserts that are beautiful, taste great and are even economical.

Mona Lisa Products makes a wide range of chocolate products, from glazes to curls to bowls. Its dessert cups come in many shapes, including tulip and flower and geometrics. Pilon “welded” cups to lollipop sticks with melted chocolate, then used a freeze sprayer to harden the seal.

Once made, the chocolate lollipop cups can be filled with fruit, custard, crème fraiche, mousse or any filling that goes well with chocolate.

A Caribbean spin on turkey
“We do the very traditional menus because it seems like that’s what people are looking for,” says Sonia Berglund Farrow of Dominion Catering in Miami. “As we get
closer to the holidays, we start tweaking that menu.”

Dominion is in a diverse area, which offers great opportunities to update traditional menu items. Instead of a traditional baked turkey and sides, for example, Dominion does a mild jerk turkey (“We add lime juice to the jerk sauce; it kind of cuts down the flame and adds a little tartness”) with Jamaican rice (made with coconut milk) and peas in addition to or as a substitute for stuffing. Farrow says they also have added a tropical turkey, made with a key lime honey baste that makes it lighter and a little less traditional. “But,” she warns, “if you go too far off base, people want to get back to the traditional.” 

By Linda Picone

Editor
Catersource magazine

September/October 2009