From the Collective session with Chef Sharon Schaefer, Assistant Director of Consulting at the Culinary Institute of America
Most new recipes in school nutrition die in the paperwork. The USDA standardized recipe process is long, and by the time you finish it, the recipe is already on your menu. Chef Sharon Schaefer put it this way at our September session:
"By the time I got to the end of the road, I had invested so much time and energy. And it was already on the menu, and then you're locked into that commitment."
Chef Sharon Schaefer, Culinary Institute of America
Her fix is to make one pan before you commit to anything.
Start with what you already know
Sharon started in school kitchens in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2010, at Westside Community Schools and later as director at Gretna Public Schools. She had dry bread, liquid eggs and an idea of how to feed kids something new in record time.
The method depends on ingredients whose credit you already know. A slice of bread is 1 ounce equivalent of grain. A large egg is 2 ounce equivalents (oz. eq.) of meat/meat alternate. So two slices of bread and one egg give you a "2 grain, 2 meat/meat alternate item," before you've written anything down.
The egg credit surprised a few people in the room. Rachel Fowler, a dietitian with the Alabama State Department of Education, wrote in the chat: "you never stop learning in the child nutrition business!"
Build that into a pan, serve it as a tasting or a try-a-bite, and see what students think. Sharon's state agency in Nebraska let her write a test recipe on the back of her production record. Yours may have a different answer, so ask before you start.
Three pans from one idea
The French toast bake, 24 slices in a full hotel pan.French toast bake
Stack 24 slices of bread in a full hotel pan, three by four and two high. Whisk 12 eggs with 4 cups of milk, 1/4 cup of sugar and 1 tablespoon of cinnamon. Pour it over the bread, cover it and let it soak overnight, then bake at 350°F for 35 to 40 minutes. That makes 24 servings of 1 oz. eq. grain and 1 oz. eq. meat/meat alternate. The cinnamon is doing real work. "Cinnamon increases the perception of sweetness," Sharon said, which is how the pan gets by on only a quarter cup of sugar.
Ham and cheese sandwiches, cut in half and stood on their sides.Ham and cheese strata
Use the same bread-to-egg-to-milk ratio, but make it savory. Yesterday's ham and cheese sandwiches get cut in half and stood on their sides in the pan, and the egg and milk get sriracha and thyme instead of cinnamon and sugar. When Sharon asked the room to pick between sriracha and mustard, sriracha won by a wide margin.
Enchilada bake
You can apply the same idea with any ingredients that have a known credit. Let's use tortillas, diced cooked chicken, shredded cheese, enchilada sauce and oregano. Tortillas aren't dry like day-old bread, so there's no overnight soak. You can build the pan in the morning and serve it at lunch.
The egg-to-milk ratio in those pans comes from Sharon's chef training, and she knows not every kitchen has a chef on staff. "If you don't have that culinary background, I would say that's where the CIA is going to be a really great partner, because we have a team of K-12 chefs that know all of these fun tricks," she said. Her team also teaches classes, on the CIA campus or at your school.
Sharon's team at the CIA builds its recipes in Gaia, and the French toast bake is already in there. You can also get the French toast bake recipe here.
Cutting it doesn't change the credit
This was the part people kept coming back to. Sharon held up a stack of 10-inch tortillas and asked what happens to the grain credit when you cut them in half, then in quarters, then into shreds. The answer is the same every time.
Halves, quarters or shreds, the stack is still 20 ounces of grain.
"Nothing went away, nothing evaporated, nothing shrunk, nothing changed other than the shape."
Chef Sharon Schaefer
The same goes for the French toast. Cut the pan on the diagonal and each triangle (2 halves) is still one slice of bread, and students like it better. "They love that triangle sandwich more than they like that square sandwich," she said.
Cut on the diagonal, add a little cinnamon sugar and some fruit.
From the chat
Robert, MCPS: "recipes hold you back, ratios set you free!"
Rebecca Polson: "I made something similar with a ruined case of cinnamon rolls!"
Where the Collective comes in
A recipe counts as standardized once it's been made three times, in three places, with similar results. Sharon used to get there by asking two other school managers in her district to make the same pan. Her ask to this group is the same thing across districts: three of you make one pan of the French toast bake and tell the rest of us how it went.
Tell us if you switched the sweetener, how students reacted, how long it baked and in what kind of oven. Sharon is in the Slack channel to help with substitutions.
"One pan, one new dish. And over time, you could transform your entire program."
Chef Sharon Schaefer
Make a pan and tell us how it went
The recipe, Chef Sharon and everyone else testing it are in the Collective Slack.
The French toast bake, 24 slices in a full hotel pan.
Ham and cheese sandwiches, cut in half and stood on their sides.