Striving for the Perfect Meal

 

In aged care catering plays a very important role. For the catering services across the world, the dream is to strive to achieve the perfect meal to serve to the people who will be fully satisfied and have enjoyed the dining experience.

 

Looking after each resident and getting it right every time is actually working much in the planning and in the organizing stages. The perfect meal situation does not exactly depend only on the food being well-cooked and presented.

 

It depends on a number of things that must be done right. It depends on how the food is produced, and how the food is delivered to the residents through the meal delivery system.

 

Finally, at the dining table, all the hard work comes together. Each stage along the catering pathway is crucial to ensure its success and that residents will enjoy their meal.

 

Menu

 

The menu has to have all your envisioned nutritional aspects. Menu planning in aged care is more than just what will be cooked each day. It should actually define how catering systems are set up.

 

In addition, it should also present on how the menu can be limited by the catering equipment. Kitchen design needs to be carefully planned to maximize the food production opportunities.

 

Food preferences

 

This is the way that ensures the menu will have a freshness has a freshness that allows residents the flexibility of choice and variety. One big part of the development of menus is gathering food preferences from residents.

 

One must also understand the types of foods residents like to eat. Food preferences gathered from indicated that desserts, soups and the traditional foods associated with an older generation.  

 

Fresh cook

 

Production is where the food is transformed into a meal. Production can be essentially divided between two main systems, ‘fresh cook’ and ‘cook chill’. Data collected from the National Menu Survey for Residential Aged Care, conducted by the University of Queensland, suggests that aged care facilities across Australia are predominately ‘fresh cook’.

 

Cooking fresh is getting the food cooked on the day it is served, which means that facilities have kitchens operating seven days a week.

 

There is some variation on the ‘fresh cook’ theme where facilities do use some ‘cook chill’ technology, so that they can re-thermalize food over weekend periods and reduce their labor costs.

 

These facilities can also produce batches of products like porridge, soups and gravies only a few times a week and hence free up enough time to concentrate on other areas of catering.

 

Cook chill

 

This is the process where the food is produced and rapidly chilled thus enabling an increased shelf-life of anywhere between five to 28 days. One of the advantages of ‘cook chill’ is that it reduces the operational times of a kitchen.

 

The difference between food services in a ‘cook fresh’ and ‘cook chill’ kitchen depends on the type of service you are marketing for your organization. There is little to suggest a significant nutritional difference between the systems.

 

No matter how food is produced – whether in a centralized off-site kitchen or on premises – one of the key areas of food services is moving the food to residents.