Hymn to the chocolate pudding

The galley duty is an important team on the Thor Heyerdahl. If you are part of the galley duty for a day, you and three others have the responsibility to cook for the whole crew. The main difficulty is that it has to be enough food for everyone and that it should be delicious at the same time. And then, when everyone is full of a – hopefully great and tasty- meal, you have to wash the dishes – yeah! It goes on and on and on! Cooking, washing the dishes, cooking, washing the dishes, cooking…

The galley duty has to prepare 4 meals per day:

Breakfast, Lunch, Tea time and dinner. For breakfast they prepare bread and different toppings like marmalade, honey, cheese and ham. Furthermore, the crew get each day fresh fruit salad and cereals. For lunch the galley duty cooks every day something different. At tea time we get cookies, cake or something special served from the galley duty. In the evening we eat bread or sometimes salad. The meals depend on which groceries we still have.

Thursday- seamen’s Sunday- and on Sunday we celebrate the day with special food, like Nutella for breakfast, and for example self-made milkshakes at tea time and toast Hawaii for dinner.

So, you can see galley duty is a complex work on the Thor, where you have to remind many things to overcome the crew´s hunger and make them happy at the end of the day.

Even though it is exhausting, I personally like galley duty. It is pretty cool and the galley is the only place on our ship, where we can listen to loud music, all day long. From 6 am till 10 pm – in the galley there is always a good mood.

I would like to tell you one of my latest challenges in the galley.

So, chocolate pudding:

I think everyone can imagine that it isn´t that easy to cook pudding, if you aren´t used to do it. That difficulty level 50 times is cooking pudding for 50 people.

First of all, we have to find out how much pudding powder we need and how large the pod has to be. The next challenge is that we don´t like burned pudding. Especially the milk on the floor of the pod burns easily and from my experience, I can tell you: It does not taste really nice. Although I love chocolate pudding. At this point of the story, I want to thank my grandma and her great cooking advice, to put sugar on the pod´s floor. It helped very well.

That´s why I wanted to try to cook chocolate pudding for all of us. Everyone was sceptical, because of the memory of the last pudding. The expectations were still high, but we did it!!

The milk was under a permanent observation and when the pudding mixture came into the milk, we stirred and stirred and stirred and stirred… till we were sure, that the pudding is creamy and ready to serve. We did it! Without any burned part found 🙂 It was worth it. The crew liked our chocolate pudding and was happy. A real success!

I think the pudding is a great example that we aren´t used to cook for so many people, but it is a learning process and we all grow on challenges like this. Meals are getting better and better!

Cheers to the chocolate pudding!