Need Help! Cooking Pastalaya for tailgate

It just all depends on how much ahead of time you are planning on cooking. If you cook it ahead of time, you either need to keep it cold or hot whether it’s cooked in stages or fully cooked. My advice is to do what you have to do to either cook it on site or cook it off site and bring it cooked (as long as it’s not cooked long before you serve).

I made patalaya by cooking everything ahead of time, cooling it down, and reheating it later. Best practice for food safety is to fill a cooler up with ice and water so you can rapidly cool the cooked food* down. If you have a vacuum sealer, you'll want to use it.

Depending on how much you're cooking, you can combined some ingredients. We were responsible for dinner on the third night of our family vacation. So a couple nights before leaving i did all of my cooking.

Started just like I was making it for that night by rendering the sausage. Once nice and brown it was removed. Then I added the chicken, while it was browning I bagged up the sausage and dropped it in the ice slurry.

Once chicken was done it was removed and the aromatics went it. While it cooked I bagged up the chicken and dropped it in the ice bath.

Once the aromatics were cooked, I deglazed the pan and reduced au sec. Then they got the same treatment as the meat.

After letting everything cool in the ice bath for about 1/2 hour. I stored it in my refrigerator. Then it got packed into the cooler we took on vacation. All I had to do for dinner was combined the meat, aromatics, water, and pasta into aluminum pans and pop them into a preheated oven, covered for 45 minutes. Came out great.

*Flattening the vacuum sealed bags of food will help them cool faster.