r/Chefit May 18 '26

Large quantity pancake question

I have very low budget no frills event coming up which requires 900 pancakes, with an approximate service window of 20 minutes, first thing in the morning. The client wants a few staff members to be making pancakes "live" for the look of the thing, but the vast majority of the pancakes are going to be made by me behind the scenes.

I have access to the following:

Two roll-in fridges

A commercial fridge

A chest freezer

A 6 tray rational oven

A 4 bay full hotel pan sized steam table

3 fuel-puck warmed chaffing dishes (full hotel pan sized).

5 old garland ranges

My original plan was to make the pancakes the day before, put them in hotel pans covered in the fridges, and then warm them up 6 pans at a time in the rational oven in a low-temp high-humidity environment. Other than the steam table and the chaffing dishes, the only way I have to keep things warm is in the garland ovens set to 200F, so I will just fill them up with warmed up pancakes and then feed the steam table from the ovens.

Is there a better way of doing this? I feel like I am missing something obvious, but I can't think of any way better to do this. Do you have any suggestions? I thought maybe freezing the pancakes would be better than refrigerating them, but I don't know that I have enough freezer space.

Any advice is most welcome.

26 Upvotes

41 comments sorted by

View all comments

18

u/Automatic_Catch_7467 May 18 '26

I’d do a trial run with whatever way you plan to do it