Croissants: The Game
The time is 6:35am.
There are 30 trays of croissants in the proofers that need to be baked and put away before the store opens at 8am.
Each croissant must be egg-washed before going in the oven. Egg-washing takes 2 minutes per tray.
Croissants take 7 minutes to bake in the oven and each oven can hold 3 trays.
A hot tray just removed from the oven can only be placed on a spot marked with xxx. After 3 minutes it can be moved to any available /// spot.
When Chef is within a 3-foot radius of the ovens, the 2 xxx spots above the oven are not available (“I don’t want to see anything on top of the oven.”)
Once a tray is cool (3 minutes after oven), the croissants can be consolidated onto a new tray, with 14 croissants fitting onto one tray. The consolidation takes 30 seconds for one 14-piece tray and requires 3 adjacent xxx spaces to be available.
Beginning at 7am, front of house staff arrives and begins to remove pastries from Speed Racks A and B, which frees up space at an average rate of 1 slot per 4 minutes. However, the additional number of people increases the time it takes to get to the lamination room by 15 seconds.
Speed Rack A can hold hot trays, Speed Rack B is full of doughnuts whose glaze could melt, so it can only hold cool trays.
You have 2 hands, so you can at most carry 2 cold trays or 1 hot tray at a time.
Speed Rack A currently has 1 empty slot and Speed Rack C has 3 empty slots. You must remove all trays from Speed Rack C before 8am because front of house will never find them there.
By 7:45am, the customer seating area must be empty of trays for cleaning.
Challenge: Describe how you will bake all the croissants in time for the store to open, or suffer the wrath of Chef. (Answer below.)
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Answer: Egg-wash 22 trays, which takes until 7:19am. Put 3 trays into Oven A and set the timer. Egg-wash 1 tray and carry 2 trays to the /// spots on the low-boy. On your way back towards lamination, take two trays from Speed Rack A and put them into Speed Rack C. Bring back the third tray from the proofer. This should take you to 3.5 minutes, at which point you can put the three trays into Oven B. During each subsequent 3.5 minute interval, egg-wash one tray and remove hot trays from the xxx spaces to the customer seating area, where you can consolidate 1.5 trays into 1 tray. This will leave you with a surfeit of 1.5 trays on each cycle, which you can store in Speed Rack A. Store consolidated trays in Speed Rack B.
You should be finished with all the egg-washing by 7:47, at which point you can use the /// spaces in the lamination room for consolidation. You will finish baking at 7:54, and have 6 minutes to clean up and ensure no pastries are left in Speed Rack C.
If Chef walks by, you will have to put hot trays in the lamination room, which will decrease efficiency, and you lose the game.
If anything goes wrong, you lose the game.