In many Filipino households, Noche Buena is considered the most important meal. Family members gather at the table to partake of the most sumptuous dishes.
Christmas Eve dinner is a major production number in many homes, so much so that many begin planning for it days or weeks in advance—like the Laudicos.
Every year, Chef Roland Laudico hosts Christmas Eve dinner for his family at his home, and that means a minimum of four courses for at least a dozen people, which translates into a ton of cooking. Pulling it off is no mean feat, even for this seasoned restaurateur and caterer.
Aside from relying on his ever-dependable La Germania range, he draws from his years of experience cooking for large groups of people to be able to create masterpiece meals year after year.
His secret? It’s all in the preparation.
The power of prep
“I spend the entire day cooking for Christmas dinner,” shares Chef Lau. “But you don’t have to do everything on the day itself.” In fact, he says, a lot of preparation success rests on doing the exact opposite.
Planning ahead and preparing your tools and ingredients beforehand often spells the difference between a disastrous dinner and a well-executed Noche Buena.
Chef Lau always includes his diners’ likes and dislikes when he prepares meals. For the holidays, he even includes them in the planning, which can be done even a couple of weeks in advance.
“Before I make the menu, I ask my family and guests if there’s anything, in particular, they would like. They always have special requests, and every year it’s something different. From those requests, you can begin to shape the menu.”
Then comes the fun part—shopping.
“The secret to any good dish is to start with the very best ingredients that you can find. If you start with good ingredients, there’s a good chance that the dish will come out good. If you start with bad ingredients, there’s nothing you can do to them. No amount of cooking will make them good,” the chef explains.
He adds, “So you have to know where to get your ingredients, and you can shop for them well ahead of time. For fresh greens and seafood, it’s always best to buy them on the day you’re cooking them, but the other things, like meat, you can probably get it a couple of days before, well-frozen.”
Frozen meat requires a prep step of its own—defrosting. Chef Lau stresses that this is an essential step in holiday meal-making. “It’s important that you defrost your meat properly. Cold, partially frozen meat will take longer to cook and may be undercooked on the inside, or it could be dry and tasteless.”
Plan for the time it will take for the meat to slowly thaw out in the refrigerator. For big roasts, that might take as much as 48 hours. For smaller items like whole chickens, 24 hours should be more than enough.
Choosing your tools
A reliable cooking range or oven that will withstand the rigors of everyday cooking, as well as the occasional increased demand of preparing large amounts of food for celebrations, is of utmost importance.
Chef Lau recommends choosing the kind of energy you want to cook with—gas or electricity—and pick a range based on that.
He opts for an electric oven for home use. “It’s so responsive,” he says, “the temperature is so easy to control and maintain throughout the cooking process.”
Some cooking processes are reliant on being able to maintain a low, even temperature, or a searing hot one. Chef Lau’s range of choice offers a magnificent temperature range, reaching temperatures high enough for broiling his favorite holiday roasts and low enough to serve as a dehydrator to make dried fruit leathers.