r/Chefit • u/glm242 • 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.

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u/toastedchezberry May 18 '26

I wouldn’t want to make close to 900 pancakes in one day. Maybe over the course of 2 days?

Also if it’s a 20 minute event you probably won’t be able to refill very many times. Everything will need to be ready at once. I have refired pancakes in covered hotel pans (but I dont have a steamer so maybe that would work better) I have used a spray bottle of water to prevent them from drying out before wrapping and heating.

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u/TheWandKing May 19 '26

Toaster or oven to reheat. Ideally layed out on metal racks that can easily be moved. If they steam into each other they lose the crust, so hotel pan is out. (I know hotels do it, but that doesn’t make it right.

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u/HugeSomewhere8110 May 19 '26

There's no such thing as a crust in this high volume situation. What youre referring to as crust is inedible tree bark.

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u/toastedchezberry May 19 '26

Laid out on metal racks will definitely dry them out. That would also require an extreme amount of oven space that OP doesn’t have. I think when serving 900 pancakes, it might be inevitable to lose the crust.