In this area you can see what I saw when I turned around to check out the oven or stove top, which ever was available.
Since I was prepared for either, I was a bit suprised to see nothing but plugins where stoves used to be.
After several options were discussed, including Crock Pot, Hotel kitchen oven, dishwasher ( I almost went this route ) and a microwave, I decided to nuke the unopened bags of pulled pork one at a time and just keep them coming until the crowd thinned out.
I had a couple of things in my favor:
1. The pork was not frozen.
2. The food saver bags were packed with about a 1/2 butt in each at 8" x 14"-16" and hand pressed to about a 1" thickness while vacuming. This made them very flexible when heated.
3. This was not a paid catering gig. Bologna sandwiches were available.
This worked out much better than I expected. The pulled pork turned out good. The foodsaver bags kept in the moisture. The flavor was still there but I am sure the microwave deminished the quality some.
We have all done this with small bags at home. After a couple of minutes in the micro they swell up like a bag of popcorn. A bag 14" long does not swell up like that. I kept looking for it to happen and it never happened. After two minutes I would take the bag out and worry it some. The ends would be the hottest point so I tried to work the ends down the bag some. Two more minutes and then cut open and dump into a pan for serving.
4 minutes total, on high with about 2 lbs of pork. This worked very well. I was able to judge when to heat another bag by how long the line was.
Here are some pics from my first large non profit catering gig.
Doing it this way enabled me to keep 7 of 14 unopened bags cold for the next day. And of those 7, I re-heated three of them using this same method tonight.
Here is a couple of pics of the inside of the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville.
