Italian Charity Event Workday 1

My team had our first workday for the 2020 Italian takeout event. I manage a team of volunteer chefs for a variety of events throughout the calendar year. This team was started by Certified Master Chef Paul Elbling about 8 years ago. My duties range from setting the menu, planning the preparation schedule to managing the quality control. This event is slightly different in nature due to COVID-19 in that it is a takeout event only. Typically, we have upwards of 275 guests attend an event with various activities such as dancing, silent auctions and raffles with proceeds always going to a charity.

When I plan an event preparation schedule, I must consider food itself, venue size and service type. Taking all of those things into consideration for this event, I decided to make the food items over several weekends and freeze them. Typically, it makes preparation easier for these charity events to do the labor intensive work at the start of an event preparation schedule because the team has energy.

For this first workday, I decided that we would make the stuffed mushrooms and garlic bread. Here are the recipes for this event. Keep in mind we are expecting 200+ orders.

Stuffed Mushrooms (preparation time: 90 mins)

1 case of button or baby portabella mushrooms (we used button mushrooms)

10 lbs. of mild Italian sausage

1/4 cup of finely chopped, crushed and smeared garlic

2 cups of parmesan cheese

10 eggs

1/2 cup of Italian seasoning

1/4 cup salt

1/4 cup black pepper

Garlic Bread (preparation time: 90 mins)

15 loaves of French bread sliced into 1 inch pieces

7 lbs. of unsalted butter softened

1 1/4 cups of finely chopped garlic

1/8 cup of red pepper flakes

1/4 cup of salt

1/4 cup of pepper

1/2 cup of Italian seasoning

2 cups of parmesan cheese

Mushroom Preparation

Start the mushroom preparation by removing the stem followed by removing the curved lip of the underside of the cap.

Using a knife or a melon baller, just where the lip flattens on the bottom side of the cap, insert the spoon and rotate the cap until lip is completely removed

If your sausage has a casing, remove the casing from all of the links.

Using a knife, make a slit length wise on the sausage link and peel the casing off the sausage

Place all of the sausage into a large mixing bowl

Sausage placed into a large mixing bowl

Begin prepping the garlic by peeling, chopping and smashing it. To save time for this event, we bought peeled garlic cloves. I don’t care for processed minced garlic because it seems to be very bitter.

Cutting board with garlic and chef’s knife

Take several of the cloves, remove the root end and begin finely chop the cloves

Using a knife laid on its side, place over the top of the finely chopped garlic, and put your opposite hand on top of the blade and drag in a direction away from the blade’s edge. As you move the blade, press with your opposite hand so that you will have smashed smooth garlic.

Add about half of the cheese, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, eggs and Italian seasoning.

Mix the ingredients by squeezing the mixture in your hands and flipping the mixture upon itself

Add the rest of the ingredients and mix until thoroughly mixed

Mixture is thoroughly mixed when the ingredients appear to be evenly distributed throughout the mixture.

With a small spoon, hold the mushroom upside down and grab a small amount of the mixture. In a downward motion, using the edge of the mushroom and spoon, begin shaping the mixture onto the mushroom to shape a round top.

Mushroom stuffed with sausage using a spoon to shape the top

Cook the stuffed mushrooms in 350 degrees oven for 25 minutes or until golden brown.

Cooked mushrooms in hotel pan prepped for frozen storage

Now onto the garlic bread. Let’s start by cutting the loaves of French bread. Place a loaf of French bread on the cutting board, make a bias cut on the bread. Place the butter, garlic, parmesan cheese, Italian seasoning, salt, pepper and red pepper flakes into a bowl and mix thoroughly to create a compound butter.

Garlic butter thoroughly mixed

With a spoon, take some of the compound garlic butter and place a pretty thick covering on the bread slice.

Smearing the compound butter on the bread

Place the full hotel pan with one layer of garlic bread in the fridge to allow the butter to firm up. After you have filled a hotel pan with three layers of bread, place in the freezer.

Hotel pan prepared for freezing.

We made about 175 stuffed mushrooms and 300 pieces of garlic bread.

You can order these here

Bon Appetit!