In this section, we will be discussing serving sizes and how to determine how much of a food product must be served to meet the minimum serving size.
If you are not purchasing milk in the carton there are quite a few different ways that a sponsor can ensure that they’re serving enough milk to each child. If you purchase disposable cups, you’ll probably want to purchase the same size of cups so that who ever is pouring the milk can get used to how the different serving sizes look in that cup. You could also purchase regular, reusable cups and mark the different serving sizes on the outside with a permanent marker. You could also have the individual serving the milk pour each serving into a measuring cup and then into the child’s cup. These are just suggestions, whatever works best for you is what you should do. Keep in mind that when we come out on a review, one of the checks that we do is to add up all of the times that you served milk and how many children you served it to and compare it to your receipts. If you didn’t purchase a sufficient amount of milk to meet the minimum portion sizes, we would have to take money back. Underserving just a little bit of milk to each child can add up and cause problems when we do a review.
Often times sponsors will assume that the ½ and 1 serving refers to the serving size on the nutrition facts label. While you will be looking at the nutrition facts label, that isn’t what this is referring to. It also doesn’t mean that you serve 1 pancake. The 1 and ½ serving size refers to a set amount of grain that needs to be met in order to meet the meal pattern.
The grains/breads chart is a tool that you will use when determining the serving size of a grain or bread that you’re serving. This chart can be found in the Food Buying Guide. We’ll be referring to the grains/breads chart frequently throughout the training. It might be helpful for you to pause the video and locate the chart either on-line or in the print resources you might have at your facility to refer to throughout the training. Different grain products have different amounts of grain in them. For example, a croissant would have less grain in it than a piece of bread because the butter that makes a croissant flaky replaces some of the grain. The grains/breads chart divides common grain products according to their average grain content.
Let’s go through an example so that you can see how you would use this information. Let’s say that you’re wanting to serve some hard pretzels along with hummus as a snack and you want to know how many pretzels to serve. Hard pretzels are in group A, so you can see that you would need to serve 20 grams or 0.7 oz to meet the 1 serving requirement and 10 grams or 0.4 oz to meet the ½ serving requirement. Most people don’t know how many pretzels equals 20 grams, especially since we usually measure things out by volume (think cups, teaspoons, tablespoons), rather than by weight. One way to determine how many pretzels you would need to serve to meet the proper serving sizes would be to weigh them out on a kitchen scale.
For this method, you would simply weigh out pretzels until you had a serving size that met the requirements. In the summer food service program, the lunch meal pattern requires 1-slice or serving equivalent for grains. So you would measure out 20 grams or 0.7 oz for each child in this age group.
The second method you can use is to determine how much to serve using the information on the nutrition facts label. Determining how much each item—cracker, pretzel, bun, bagel, etc.—weights and then serve the appropriate amount. We'll go through an example together so you can get some pratice.
Another way to determine the serving size is to look at the nutrition facts label on the product that you’re serving. This is an example of a nutrition facts label for hard pretzels. The nutrition facts label will always tell you how much a serving size of the product weighs. In this example, you can see that it tells us that a serving of pretzels is 30 grams (or about 28 sticks). Let’s figure out how much we would need to serve to equal 1 serving. Remember that the 1 slice serving size is equivalent to 20 grams. So if you served the full 28 sticks serving size, you’d definitely be meeting the minimum amount. You’d be serving 30 grams instead of 20 grams, which would be acceptable. Now lets say that you don’t want to serve extra because it’s a lot of pretzels and you don’t want the food to go to waste. How much would you minimally need to serve? We know that there are 30 grams in a serving of about 28 sticks, so we can figure that each pretzel stick weighs a little over one gram. If you were to serve about 20 pretzel sticks, you would be serving a little over 20 grams, which would meet the requirement for the 1 slice serving size. Now let’s calculate the ½ slice serving size. This one is nice because all we would need to do is cut the 1 slice serving size in half. So you would serve about 10 pretzel sticks which would meet the 10 gram serving requirement.
Now, what if you have a product that you make? Homemade grain products are a delicious addition to anyone’s diet. It can be hard to calculate the serving size depending on the product that you’re making. There are two different ways to determine the serving size for homemade products. We’ll go through both of them.
The first way to determine how much to serve would be to grab out your kitchen scale if you have one. Let’s say you’re making pancakes. You would look at the chart to determine the weight needed to meet the serving size. You can see that pancakes are in group C, so you would need to serve 31 grams for the 1 slice serving size and 16 grams for the ½ slice serving size. Next, you would weigh an average sized pancake that you made. Let’s say that an average size pancake weighs 18 grams. That would meet the ½ slice serving size. You would need to serve 2 pancakes to meet the 1 slice serving size.
The second way that you could determine the serving size is to calculate how much grain that you put into a recipe. You will have to do some calculations to figure it out but, step by step instructions can be found in the Food Buying Guide and you’ll want to refer to them if you’re determining serving sizes using this method. The state agency also has an excel worksheet that can assist you with crediting recipes and does most of the calculations for you.
Next on to documentation. We have a saying here at the state office, if you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen. It’s great knowing that you can calculate the right amount to serve, but how do you relay that information to us and to others in your organization? The production record or detailed menu record is where you will record the serving size. You would record the serving size during the planning process. You can see on the right that it is very clear the serving size that you’ll be giving to each child. Being specific in your serving sizes will not only help us when we’re doing your reviews, but it will also help your staff. What if your regular cook is out for the day and another staff member has to fill in last minute. The specific serving size would make it much easier, where as the generic serving size of ½, and 1 portion doesn’t tell you much and could lead to an insufficient grain component being served.
If you have any questions about the topics discussed in this section please contact our office.
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