Wonton Chips

Culinary fads are always changing. Our current trend is using Wontons.

Wontons are traditionally found in many Chinese cuisines and are very versatile- usually fried or boiled in many different ways. Now, we've taken this useful item and use it in many different ways. We've...

• fried strips for a crunchy addition to salad
• replaced tortilla chips and use fried wonton triangles to dip in our handmade hummus or other flavor dips
• molded wontons into a cone and filled with salad for an easy grab-and-go appetizer
• piled duck, sweet potato and mango salsa on a wonton cone for an elegant small bite.
• stuffed it, fried it and served it with a sweet hot chile dipping sauce

On one of our cooking class nights we folded our stuffed wontons into Bishop's hats and triangles

Our meal from our Asian cooking class night. We dipped the wontons in a dish of Mae Ploy, a sweet chile sauce

Advice from the Chef

Before frying your wontons, make sure to dry them out a little. Peel apart your stack (cut into desired shape) and lay out to dry. This keeps the wontons from forming big bubbles are you fry them. The wontons will stick better and will look better, too.


We like to think outside of the box and serve inventive, creative and lip-smacking food. Follow your taste buds and dream big for the food at your next event!

DIY: Asian Pasta Salad

This pasta salad is very easy to make with regular ingredients from your grocery store. After one bite this will become your new party go-to-recipe.


Asian Pasta Salad
Lou Crandall, Savory Catering
Makes 8-10 servings

Ingredients
 Salad:
2 cans (30 oz total) mandarin oranges, drained
2 cups chicken breasts
1 bag (16 oz) bowtie pasta
1 bag (6 oz) Craisins
1/2 cup fresh chopped Italian flat-leaf parsley
1 bunch green onions, chopped on the diagonal
1/4 cup raw (untoasted) sesame seeds
6 oz honey roasted peanuts
1 1/2 bags (15 oz) fresh baby spinach OR cooked edamame

  Dressing:
3/4 cup teriyaki sauce
2/3 cup apple cider vinegar
6 TBLS sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
3/4 cup sesame oil (not sesame-flavored oil)

Directions
Drain Mandarin oranges, set aside.
Put raw chicken breasts onto a sheet pan, uncovered, and roast in oven at 450 degrees until an internal temperature of 145 degrees in the thickest part of the meat. Remove from oven, cover tightly with foil and allow to rest for 15 mins.
Put ice and water in a large bowl and set aside. Cook pasta according to package until al dente. Immediately immerse pasta in the ice-water bath after cooking to stop the cooking process. Set aside.
In a blender or food processor, mix together the teriyaki sauce, vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper. With the blender running, slowly drizzle in the sesame oil to combine and emulsify with the other ingredients. Set aside.
When the chicken has finished resting, uncover and slice into large cubes. Cool to at least 40 degrees in the fridge.
Combine all ingredients except spinach (edamame can be combine at this time), peanuts, and dressing. Store in fridge until service, adding the other ingredients.

Tip
It is very important to immerse the bowtie pasta in cold water after cooking. This stops the cooking process. Bowtie pasta is quite fragile after being cooked.
If salad is not being served the same day, then refrigerate all ingredients until ready to use. This can be prepped up to 2 days if nothing is combined.
Add spinach last so it doesn't become limp and soggy.

Maifun, or Rice Sticks

Maifun, or rice sticks is a Chinese culinary item. It can be boiled for a noodle-like texture or fried.

Recently Chef Lou made up a wonderful lettuce wrap recipe. It had ground pork with just a touch of spice. This makes for a great dinner or as a fun hors d'oeuvre. To adorn the lettuce wrap we fried some rice sticks...

 

Even though the video doesn't have sound you can still enjoy it

The rice sticks fry in only a few seconds!

This one package made this entire pile of fried rice sticks!

You can buy rice sticks in the ethnic or Asian food section of your grocery store or at specialty Asian food stores. Branch out a little bit and serve some rice sticks at dinner time!

Does your Caterer make the extra effort?

  Benefits of hand-made Stock

These days it's all about SPEED. It's who can get you what you want in the shortest time possible. We all have a million things to do and so rapidity is requisite.  However, quality gets slashed into bits when speed is the prerequisite. Are cheap plastic toys made in China coming to your mind?

For you party, especially for your wedding, you don't want second-rate food; Savory hand makes 95% of all our food, ensuring that you get the freshest food for the best taste. One way we ensure the quality of our food is through home-made chicken stock.

Hand making your chicken stock is one of the untold culinary secrets- untold for those who've never been to cooking school. Our Chef is happy to tell you all the in's and out's of making a good chicken stock. 

"All meat stock, whether it be chicken or beef, is the basis to all good cooking. It helps coax the maximum flavor out of your food and give it that 'WOW' factor. You just can't get the same richness of flavor out of a can.

Our simmering chicken stock. Wish you could smell it now!

"There are essentially two types of ingredients for a chicken stock: the aromatics and the meat. The aromatics are the flavorful vegetables: celery, carrots, and onions. The meat is usually chicken or beef. Don't get confused when I say 'meat' because I really mean the bones instead of the flesh; all the flavor comes from the bones. You can buy the bones from a local butcher, but if your grocery store doesn't have a butcher you can use the wings and back (for chicken) or ribs (for beef) in a pinch.

Celery is an important aromatic in both beef and chicken stock. Here, we are weighing our ingredients.

"After measuring and chopping the vegetables, put all your ingredients in a big stock pot- the bigger the better- and let simmer on low heat for 6-12 hrs. This coaxes the most flavor out of the ingredients and ensures a really flavorful stock. In my chicken stock I like to add celery, carrots, onions, leeks, Italian parsley, peppercorn, thyme, basil, bay leaves and mushrooms. Then for beef stock I usually add tomatoes in the mix.

At Savory we have a 100qt stock pot for our chicken and beef stock. We let ours simmer for 12 hrs

"Once the stock is all cooked, strain and pour into containers and freeze. You can scrape off the excess fat easier after it's frozen. Use like normal in your recipes and you will notice a HUGE difference in the flavor of your dishes. Home made chicken stock is too good to pass up!" -Executive Chef Lou Crandall

You'll notice a difference in taste in our food in comparison to other companies. Even restaurants cut corners! We promise to deliver the freshest ingredients and the best tasting food because we believe life is too short for ordinary food.

Try making your own chicken stock!

Basic Chicken Stock
Lou Crandall, Savory Catering
This recipe fits a 15qt stock pot. Adjust recipe as needed for your purposes.

Ingredients
10 lbs chicken bones
3 lbs yellow onions
2 lbs leeks, cut in 1" pieces
2 lbs carrots
3 pounds celery, leaves included
8 dried bay leaves
80 black peppercorns
8 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bunch Italian flat-leaf parsley
8 oz mushrooms
enough water to cover ingredients by 2"

Directions
Rinse bones under cold, running water. Remove any large parts of fat or skin.
Fill pot with very cold water, about 2" higher than the bones.
Turn stove and heat through until almost boiling. Turn heat down to a gentle simmer. Do not stir
Skim off the scum that forms on the top. Repeat until no more scum appears.
Add rest of ingredients and simmer mixture gently for 6-12 hours.
Strain mixture and cool immediately. Freeze extra for later use.

DIY: Mango Salsa

We love Mango Salsa.

It's good with chips, over fish, on appetizers...we could eat it with anything! As with most of our food, we hand-make our mango salsa. That way, our chef's make sure that you are getting the best quality for your food. It looks better and tastes better than other salsas from a can.


Mango Salsa
Lou Crandall, Savory Catering
makes approx 2 3/4 cup or 24 oz.

Ingredients
2 regular mangoes or 4 Ataulfo (champagne) mangoes, peeled, seeded and medium diced
1 red bell pepper, seeded and diced small
1/4 cup thinly sliced green onion
2 TBLS lime juice
1 TBLS cider vinegar
2 TBLS fresh cilantro, chopped fine
salt and pepper, to taste
1 1/2 tsp sugar (or to taste)
*optional 2 tsp. Fruit fresh or Everfresh to preserve color

Directions
Combine together all ingredients and let chill in refrigerator for at least 1 hour to blend flavors.

Tips
Salsa looks best when made the same day, resist keeping overnight.

Savory Catering Event Staff

We make a great team!

Blanching

Chef Lou's cooking tip is all about Blanching

Blanching is a cooking process where you take a food, usually vegetables, fruit, or pasta, submerge it in boiling water, then after a time, submerge it in an ice bath to stop the cooking progress. There are many ways where blanching is needed but I will only talk about two uses.

For green beans, asparagus, etc:
Green beans are a little too crispy to eat raw, but sometimes an inexperienced cook will cook the beans too much and they turn out mushy. Blanching the beans takes out some of the crunch and cleans the vegetable of lingering bacteria.

To blanch the green beans, add the beans to a pot of boiling water. Cook for about a minute or so (asparagus takes about 30 seconds) until it changes color. Immediately remove the beans from the hot water and submerge in an ice bath (water and ice). The ice bath is very important because it stops the cooking process, keeping your beans at the right firmness.

 Cook the beans in the hot water until they change into a bright green color

Bonus tip: Sometimes we buy green beans at the store and they go bad within a couple of days and we didn't even have a change to cook them. Try blanching your green beans when you get home and they will last much longer in the fridge

For pasta:
Add pasta to a pot of boiling water and cook as directed on the box/package. When the noodles reach "al dente", immediately remove it from the hot water and submerge into an ice bath. Again this stops the cooking process and keeps your noodles from falling apart later as you start mixing it up.

Add this technique to your culinary repertoire and you will see improvement in your food!

Parsley is not just a Denny's decoration

When I say the word "Parsley", what comes to mind? Do you picture the curly dark green leaf that is featured on sub-par restaurant's fruit buffets? When you were younger, do you remember your mother telling you not to eat the curly leaf and that it was only "decoration for the food"?

If you do indeed recall these childhood memories about a dark green, curly, "non-edible" leaf then you do know what parsley is. Or rather, you know ONE TYPE of parsley.

The curly, bitter tasting offender

There is, however, another type of parsley- Italian Parsley. The Italian variety is a much better herb and we use a lot of it at Savory. It might just be one of our favorites. We use it with other herbs for an herb mixture, we chop it up and use it for garnishes, and we will flavor our food with it.

The superior form of parsley

Now, when picking up parsley at your local grocery store, it's easy to get it confused with Cilantro. Both have a similar leaf shape but cilantro has undertones of lime. Plus, it'll be labeled at the store. To mince, cut about halfway up the bundle and continue chopping until very small bits. You don't need to tear off each of the individual leaves, but don't include all of the stems, either. 

Use fresh Italian parsley in your cooking! It goes well with chicken, herbed bread, noodle soup, and many other dishes. Using fresh herbs will give off more flavor than dried herbs, and it will make your run-of-the-mill chicken dinner morph into a superb meal.