In this section, we will be talking about standardized recipes and creating cycle menus.
For all of the cooks out there, remember that you are a professional cook. Whether you are cooking for a group of children at the day care center, or school, or at a five star restaurant, you are being paid to provide a good quality meal. Every restaurant or hotel that we’re aware of has standardized recipes. Standardized recipes basically means that you are able to follow the recipe and produce an item with consistent quality. If you follow the recipe you will also produce the same amount of food each time. Gives you a known number of portions and portion size so you know how many you can serve. Without standardized recipes you cannot control or predict your food and labor costs accurately. A standardized recipe allows you to know what ingredients are being used, how much is used and can drastically eliminate shortages and overages. Standardized recipes allow you to build trust between you and your customers. One of my favorite foods to eat when I go to Café Rio is their pulled pork salad. Each time I get the salad it is the same. How would you feel if your favorite meal at a restaurant changed every time you had it? How can it really become a favorite? Standardized recipes are tried and true. There are also a lot of different kinds of recipe and menu planning software that can help you with this.
So what information should be included on a standardized recipe? Yield- How many portions you get from the recipe and what is the portion size? All ingredients- This needs to be very detailed. Especially because you should be using this as a shopping list. It should include the form of the product. Don’t say corn. Say 1 10 oz can of corn, or 1 lb of frozen corn or if you want to leave your options open, 1 cup corn (canned or frozen). Say olive oil, or canola oil, or vegetable oil. Don’t just say oil. Ground beef, what fat %? 80/20 beef cooks differently and has a different yield than a really lean 90/10 beef. It also establishes standards for your cooks/shoppers of what products you want them to buy. Specific measures, such as, weights, and/or pack size. What is wrong with saying add 1 can of tomato sauce? How big is the can? When possible, I suggest using weight. You will get much more consistent products using weight than you will with volume.
Could you give this recipe to someone else and have them easily understand it? How many recipes have you received from your mother or grandmother, or found online and they are missing crucial steps? Most professional cookbooks have a basic recipe, and then at the bottom they will list acceptable substitutions. You can do this too and it will help you when you are shopping sales or wanting to be a little more creative. The nice thing about it is that the substitutions are also standardized so there is still some cost and quality control measures in place. For example you may have a beef chili recipe that has instruction on how much chopped mushrooms to substitute for the beef if you want to do a vegetarian chili. Substitute quinoa for rice, or this amount of penne pasta for spaghetti noodles.
Using standardized recipes can really help with your costs and efficiency. Whether or not you choose to use a standardized recipe, it’s important to know how you can credit a recipe to the food program. It’s very simple to determine how much of each component a child is getting if you’re serving something like a ham and cheese sandwich with carrots and apples on the side along with milk. What if you’re serving spaghetti with ground beef? How do you know that you’re serving the right amount of grains? How big of a serving will you need to give to serve enough meat/meat alternat? There are a lot of recipes available that already have the crediting information done for you. You can visit USDA’s “What’s Cooking” website and search for USDA standardized recipes. Those recipes have the serving size and crediting information broken down for you. What if you have a favorite recipe and you want to be able to use it, but don’t know how it credits on the food program? You can credit the recipe on your own by calculating how much of a component was put into the recipe and how many children you’re serving it to. Our office has created an electronic form that you could use to credit a recipe. There is also a recipe crediting worksheet in the Food Buying Guide.
Cycle Menus are very similar to standardized recipes in that they are planned menus that you repeat. I hear all the time that cycle menus can be very boring. There is nothing inherently boring about cycle menus. Because there is no restriction as to how many cycles you can have. You can have a 52 week cycle menu where everyday is something amazing and different for an entire year, but then what are you going to do again next year. Are you never going to repeat the same menu again? If I asked you to keep track of what you eat for the next two months, how many items would repeat? How many times a month do you eat cereal or pancakes for breakfast, or a turkey sandwich for lunch. For the most part we tend to eat similar foods. If you or your cook want to break the cycle you can, but if it is going to be business as usual wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry about coming up with a menu every week. If you are menu planning correctly there is a lot of time and energy that goes into making a good meal. That meal has to fit into a daily pattern with the other menus offered that day and that day has to fit into the week.
Have you ever accidently planned a menu where you use apple juice for breakfast, and apple for lunch, and apple juice again for a snack? Or planned a menu only to realize that you are serving chicken for lunch and or supper everyday of the week? Having well planned and well evaluated cycle menus can prevent you from over serving or underserving items. They can help you to increase the variety of fresh fruit and vegetables different types of meats. Different flavor combinations or international cuisine. A detailed, replicable cycle menu helps create a shopping list that will promote easier purchasing as well as a stable inventory. Which will save you money overtime.
Seasonal Menus are menus that take into account times of the year when certain foods are inexpensive, readily available, and more naturally eaten. Why serve applesauce when fresh apples are in season. Why serve fresh apples when they taste terrible. That is when you should be switching to apple sauce, or another fruit that may be in season. Shopping seasonally is also a great way to support the local economy and local farmers. Seasonal menus do not just apply to fruits and vegetables. It can also apply to main dishes or entrées. Don’t you crave salads more in the summer and soup in the winter. If you create cycle menus you should account for that.
Creating menus can be a fun and challenging experience. Don’t be afraid to try new things. When you’re trying new recipes, remember that it can take a lot of times introducing a food before a child might decide that they’ll even try it. Don’t get discouraged if you try something new but it doesn’t go over well. Sometimes the children just need more exposure to it. There are a lot of menu development tools and resources available to you. When you’re creating menus, remember to create meals using the food chart as your guide. You need to serve the required components in the specified amounts in order to be able to claim the meals. It’s important to make sure that you’re planning meals that are nutritious. Even though there are specific guidelines on the food program, there is a lot of room to still meet the meal pattern but also be serving meals with a lot of processed foods. Try to go with less processed foods when you can. Another thing to focus on is that you create menus that you would like to eat. If the parents visiting your site aren’t enjoying the meals that are being served, it might be a good idea to switch things up.
Something else that we would encourage you to try is to include locally purchased or grown food whenever you can. Summer is an especially opportune time to offer locally sourced fruits and vegetables when they are at their peak of freshness and quality. There is a program called Farm to Fork that is an exciting way to approach nutrition as well as help the local economy. You are able to purchase foods from local farmers or to grow food at your site and include the produce in meals. Make sure that you’re letting parents know that you’re serving local foods – that can be a big draw for a lot of people. It’s also important to let the children know where their food is coming from. Let’s say you have a very picky child who doesn’t like to try new things. What if you arranged to have a local farmer come and talk about the food that he or she grows, how they tend to it and how it changes from seed to food. Chances are that the picky child might be more willing to try that food, because it’s not just something weird on their plate, but something that Farmer Jill came and talked about. You will want to be aware of food safety. You can visit our website for more information on the regulations regarding purchasing local foods.
Once you know whether or not you can credit a food, you need to know how much you need to purchase to serve the right amount to the children. The Food Buying Guide will help you figure out how many servings you’ll get from a specific quantity of food, how much of a raw product will provide the amount of ready-to-cook food called for in a recipe, and how much food you would need to purchase. You’ll want to be familiar with this guide. One of the checks that our office will do on a review is something we call a food audit. We’ll pick a food, let’s say apples, and determine how many times you served that food and in what serving size from your detailed menu records or production records. After that we’ll look at your receipts for the month and determine how many apples you bought. Then we’ll compare and make sure that you purchased enough apples to meet the serving sizes that you stated you served. If we determine that you didn’t purchase enough to meet the meal pattern, we would need to take money back because you didn’t serve a reimbursable meal. We don’t want to take money back, so it’s important that you’re planning for and purchasing a sufficient amount of food.
Just like the crediting food guide, the food buying guide is split up by components. It has general information at the beginning of each component section and then lists specific foods. The specific foods are organized under six columns. Column 1 is the “Food as purchased, AP” column. This tells you the name of the food item and form in which it is purchased. Where appropriate, column 1 also includes a detailed description of the form in which the items are purchased. For example, baby carrots have a different entry and different yields than carrots that you purchase whole and then you peel and cut them. Column 2 is the “purchase unit” column. It tells you the basic unit of purchase for the food. For most foods, the guide lists “pound” as the purchase unit. For some processed foods, the guide lists an institutional pack (such as a number 10 can) and, in many cases, a smaller pack, along with the net weight of the pack’s contents.
Column 3 is the Servings per purchase unit, EP. EP stands for edible portion. This column shows you the number of servings of a portion size (which is found in column 4) from each purchase unit. This is easiest to understand when we to through an example. Let’s use the baby carrots as an example. We’ll say that we’re serving them raw, so we would use the top row. Column three tells us that there are 12.9, ¼ cup serving sizes in 1 pound of baby carrots. Column 4 is the Serving Size per Meal Contribution column. This column describes a serving by weight, measure, or number of pieces or slices. Sometimes both the measure and weight are given, or the measure and number of pieces or slices. You can see in this example of the fresh carrots, it gives you the volume measure (1/4 cup) as well as the number of pieces – 3 strips, 4” by 1/2”. Column 5 is the purchase unit for 100 servings column. This shows you the number of purchase units you would need for 100 servings. For example, if you were serving 100 children a ¼ cup serving of baby carrots, you would need to purchase 7.8 pounds of baby carrots.
Column 6 is the additional information column. It provides other information to help you calculate the amount of food you need to purchase and/or prepare. For many food items, this column shows the quantity of ready-to-cook or cooked food you will get from a pound of food as purchased. For the fresh carrots, you can see that it tells you that when you finish peeling and chopping 1 pound of fresh carrots, you’ll end up with 0.7 pounds of carrots. This helps you account for the waste that incurs from processing foods.
We’ll go through an example for bananas together. Bananas are a food item that we commonly find purchased in the food program. Let’s say that you’re serving bananas for breakfast and you’re planning on serving 100 meals. How many pounds of bananas would you need to purchase to serve the minimum portion sizes? First, let’s determine which row under the bananas entry matches what we’re serving. We’ll say that you serve the bananas in either whole or half pieces and let the kids peel and eat them that way. The top row is specifically for sliced fruit, the second row is for unpeeled fruit, and the third row is for mashed fruit. The second row matches how you serve it, so we’ll go with that one. First, let’s calculate how many pounds we need to buy to get 100 ½ cup servings. If 1 lb gives you 5.39 ¼ cup serving you can divide 5.39 x 2 and it would give you how many ½ cup serving you get per pound. That equals 2.695 ½ cup servings of bananas per pound. If I need 100 ½ cup servings I would divide 100 by 2.695 and that would tell me how many pounds I need to purchase. This is a little over 37 lb. So you would want to purchase 37 and a half or 38 lb to be sure you had enough.
Now, if those examples had you worrying that you wouldn’t be able to do the food program because of the math involved, you can rest easy now. There are automated options that will do the math for you. The first is the on-line Food Buying Guide calculator. You’ll go to fbg.nfsmi.org. Let’s say that you want to figure out how much milk you need to purchase for the week. We’ll say that you’ve looked over your menu for the week and added up all of the times you’ll be serving milk. You’ve determined that you’ll be serving 100 8 oz servings. You’ll click on the link for the component that you’re determining, so we’ll click on milk for this example. Next you’ll click on the purchase unit, whether gallon, quart, or half pint. We’ll click on gallon. Next, you’ll input the serving size 8 oz or 1 cup. Then enter the total number of servings which was 100, then you click the “add to list” button. It did all of the calculations for you. It tells you that you’ll need 6.25 gallons to serve this amount and then it rounded up to 7 gallons because that’s how much you would need to purchase. This is quantity you would enter on the planned portion of your daily production record. Next we will talk about production records and detailed menu records.
If you have any questions about the topics discussed in this section please contact our office.