A Catering Chef Shares 6 Tips for Feeding a Crowd on Thanksgiving

No matter how often you cook for yourself or your family, feeding a larger crowd for a holiday meal requires a different way of thinking. You're not simply scaling up an easy weeknight dinner recipe when it comes to a holiday feast. A large roast plus sides and desserts require time and space, not to mention a bit of patience and grace when things don't go accordingly and you have to improvise.

Take it from a catering chef. Michael Riddell, executive chef of the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, routinely cooks dinner for thousands of guests at a time. (Suddenly your 20-person affair doesn't seem so daunting.) "When you're cooking for 20 people, it seems like it's not a huge number, but when you're actually doing it, it's a lot of effort," says Riddell. Here, he talks us through a number of tips and tricks to maintain your sanity when it comes to feeding a crowd.

1. Simplify, simplify, simplify

No need to reinvent the wheel. Crowd-pleasing mashed potatoes are inexpensive and easy to make in large batches. 

Start by taking it down a notch. (If you've already bristled at this suggestion, we're speaking to you specifically.) One of the common pitfalls that home cooks can make when it comes to big holiday dinners is to be overly ambitious. While elements of the cooking process may be the same whether you're cooking for two or 20, "when you're doing large scale, you shouldn't do those intricate dishes that have multiple components," says Riddell. "You have to dumb it down a little bit."

Save that ambition for a more intimate dinner party where you can be creative, and stick with what you know for the holidays. "It's the creativity versus the tradition," says Riddell. "I'll come to my wife on holidays with some crazy ideas, taking some dishes from the southwest or the East Coast and trying to put them into California cuisine, and she's like, 'No, don't do that.'"

A useful tip within a tip: if you're trying to be the only cook in the kitchen for a big holiday dinner, maybe run your plan by someone who knows how to talk you down a bit.

"Stick to what you know," says Riddell, and maybe bring your creative spark to one or two dishes rather than the entire spread. This is also your permission to look at the list of what you're planning to make, and go ahead and cross one of those dishes off the list right now. Unless it's a beloved family tradition, nobody will know it was missing.

2. Do some math

There's a big space between not enough food and completely overdoing it.

Admittedly, leftovers are one of the best parts of holiday meals, but if you gave each of your guests a plate to take home, and you yourself are still eating the same meal on repeat for a week, then you probably overdid it. Former food critic Frank Bruni once wrote of his mother's bombastic Thanksgiving celebrations that her approach to portioning each dish was, "If every guest decided to eat nothing but mashed potatoes, would there be enough to go around?"

Don't do this. "Definitely calculate out how many people are coming, and try to do some sort of math, like, they're gonna eat four ounces of this, four ounces of that, so that way your spillover isn't as much," says Riddell. A potato per person may make sense when you're shopping in the produce aisle, but it makes more sense in a steak-and-baked-potato kind of way, where that might be the entirety of the meal, rather than in a context where the meal may also include several other types of starches.

Don't know where to begin trying to figure out what normal holiday portions are? Whole Foods has a handy Holiday Servings Calculator for just such a purpose.

3. Make a plan: Timing is everything

There are dozens of meal planning apps and services to help keep track of what you need to buy and make. 

Naturally, a convention center chef that has to account for 6,000 people sitting down for dinner all at once has to have a military-level plan for getting it all done, but the same thinking can apply to your (hopefully) smaller scale holiday meal.

The plan should consist not only of the particular timings of dishes that are being prepared start-to-finish on the day of, but also of dishes that can entirely be made ahead, or components that can be prepped, starting several days before the big feast.  

"When I'm setting up an event, that planning process is incredibly important," says Riddell. "So I know several days before a huge event, I can preplan and preprep things, whether it's sauces, dressings, aiolis, marinades, etc. That way when it comes to the day of -- it's smooth sailing." 

You can also prep elements of certain dishes ahead of time, even if you want to cook them fresh. "If you're doing Brussels sprouts, for example, you can cut them and peel them a little bit so you don't get those little leaves that burn inside the pan," he says, "so if you have those preprepped, it's a much faster cooking process than if you were to have to cut and prep them the day of."

Consider your list of recipes again. If you have too many elements that require "à la minute" cooking, meaning that they must be cooked right before they're served, then you want to rethink. Gravy, stuffing, casseroles, breads, even mashed potatoes -- nearly three-quarters of typical holiday meals really can, and probably should, be done ahead of time.

Read more: How to Plan Your Thanksgiving Dinner Using AI

4. Space considerations

Some recipes demand far more day-of real estate and labor than others. Plan accordingly. 

Your plan shouldn't only include the timings of each dish you're planning to prepare, but also their required real estate: in the shopping stage, the preparation stage and the serving stage. "Space in your kitchen, space in your oven, space on your counters," says Riddell. "When you're bringing in all this product, where are you storing it and prepping it?"

A cautionary tale from my own experience: A roommate with whom I once hosted Thanksgiving suggested adding sweet potato biscuits to the menu, which we both agreed sounded brilliant, until we realized on the night of the dinner the amount of space required to roll, cut and bake a couple dozen biscuits on several sheet trays, with everything else that was already in progress in our small apartment kitchen -- not to mention a highly inconvenient dusting of flour. The turkey rested on my bedroom floor while all this happened for lack of anywhere else to put it.

For extra oven space, ask a friend to bring a countertop toaster oven or air fryer if you don't have one of your own.

Make a plan not only for when things need to start cooking, but where, and don't forget about every aspect of your kitchen. "If you have a toaster oven, maybe you can put your green bean casserole in there, rather than having to use the oven," says Riddell, saving yourself from a little of the Tetris often required in the major cooking appliances. Your microwave can also be put to use to reheat certain things that were made ahead.

Also consider whether you're serving buffet-style, or passed on the dinner table, and make sure you actually have enough space to serve your expertly composed dishes. If not? Reduce, reduce, reduce.

And don't forget about space on the plate and your table settings: If you're planning to serve a salad without a salad plate or bowl to accommodate it, who among your friends or family is going to prioritize plate space for several forkfuls of leaves? "I'm not a huge salad fan," says Riddell. (And he's from California, so if he's advocating for skipping it, you know it's OK.)

5. Semihomemade is just fine

Not every dish needs to be made from scratch.

Again, don't let ambition be your adversary for a big sit-down meal. Professional chefs understand which elements of dishes are important to make from scratch, and which aren't, and even they will use shortcuts in certain circumstances. If most of your friends and family are die-hard canned cranberry sauce fans, for example, why bother with homemade, just to prove you can?

"There are great products out there that can help you achieve the success of the dinner," says Riddell. "They're not going to know that you didn't make the pie crust, and I'm pretty sure they're not going to ask, especially if it tastes good." 

Cranberry sauce, whipped cream, breads, pie crust, even whole pies can be bought rather than made without sacrificing the integrity of your meal. If a local restaurant you love is offering holiday takeout, feel free to supplement a dish or two from their selection, so you can focus your ambition on making fewer elements.

6. Save yourself some cleanup time

Aluminum tins won't need to be cleaned after and you an use them to pack up extra food for the fridge or send guests home with leftovers.

Big holiday feasts can feel like marathons to the person executing them. "You've already been cooking all day, so you might as well give yourself a little break," says Riddell. "One of the things we looked at last year with my family was using aluminum tins. They make some nice ones," he says, that come in a variety of colors and styles so you needn't sacrifice the aesthetics of your celebration. Not only do they drastically reduce cleanup time, but may make your life easier during prep, and are super convenient for packing up leftovers.