Say you were in charge of cooking a US Army Ranger Thanksgiving...

There are some difficult barriers. The food has to be cooked the night before, chilled and delivered to the base. The food is handed off, almost literally at the gate of the base, with the bare minimum of galley facilities at the end. Low-end, two Rangers on microwaves. High-end, 4 rangers on a mini-galley. Total of 300 Rangers.

Cosco often offers rotisserie game hens, about 100, and blast chills them. For pre-cook, we have 6 Wolff burners, 2 Underground Stealth Circulators, deep freezes and a bunch of timers and volunteer time. We have volunteer dollars, support of the base folks, and a lot of gung-ho.

What are our next steps? I was going to get large stock pots, and a couple of good thermometers to start doing all sorts of braises. But I have no idea how to plan a meal on this scale...

I'd love any feedback, no matter how structured or random.

I wonder if Rangers like 72 hour sous vide short rib...

I can/will provide links to the charity in a bit. I am told we are not going to get hassled over HAACP, etc.

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pgcath

http://www.operationthanksgiving.org/our-mission/

That may be a bit heavy on the Church tie in, but... I'm non-religious so... We're getting along to help the troops.

Chris_Young_80640

Hmmm, I would use large coolers.

In general, you can heat the water to a slightly higher temperature over a big gas burner, then pour it into the cooler, add the meat (Hefty garbage bags are polyethylene), close the cooler and weight. The more water relative to meat, the less of an overheat you need. In general, I heat the water about 2C to 3C hotter and this is enough for a pretty full cooler of large cuts of meat. There is also a nice calculator here that lets you figure our ratio of water to meat and over-heating required, click on passive low-temperature cooking calculator:

http://www.hertzmann.com/articles/miscellany/tools.php

pgcath

Thanks, @Chris_Young!