Set Meal Service

Appears in
Professional Cooking: 10th Edition
Professional Cooking

By Wayne Gisslen

Published 2025

  • About
  • All customers eat at one time.
  • Often called quantity cooking because large batches are prepared in advance.
  • Examples: school cafeterias, banquets, employee dining rooms.
The traditional method of set meal preparation, still widely used, is to prepare the entire quantity of each item in a single large batch and to keep it hot for the duration of the meal service. This method has two major disadvantages:
  • Deterioration of quality due to long holding.
  • Large quantities of leftovers.

Modern high-speed equipment, such as pressure steamers, convection ovens, infrared ovens, and microwave ovens, make possible a system called small-batch cooking. Required quantities are divided into smaller batches, placed in pans ready for final cooking or heating, and then cooked only as needed. The advantages of this system are