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| Sunday, 8 September 2002 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Sky meals go gourmet by Jayanthi Liyanage
Ideally, the world's first sky meal in 1919, served on a London-Paris flight, should have given birth to a new culinary culture of "high-altitude glamour-dining." Instead, the airline cabin crew who, by the sheer delectable act of rolling the meal trolley up the aisle, try to conjure a pleasurable diversion to passengers who are virtually frozen for hours on end with little to do, have had to endure many a roasting looks and remarks for serving food which tasted like a "homogeneous" mush. In-flight catering the world over is a jaw-opening 10 billion pounds industry and come up with equally soaring hurdles to airline chefs, who cook as many as 50,000 meals a day - as Cathay Pacific's catering facility in Hongkong does. The absence of such niceties as taste and creativity in air-food may arise from its cooking ritual - cooking the food in bulk on the ground, chilling it to 4C and loading it on air-planes and reheating en route. Take a gripping look at the way a succulent filet mignon would go - "sear to perfection, shove in the refrigerator, chill to 4C, reheat and garnish with wilted frozen peas. Toss an ice berg salad and serve with wine of dubious vintage in tiny plastic cups." But try explaining the travails of airline catering to thousands of palates of different, specific taste buds. Many would just peel back the foil and stare bleakly at sparse squares of unidentifiable meat, fruit and drooping salad on trays. For them, the biggest hazard at a 32,000 ft altitude is facing the horrors of mass catering. As a solution, many airlines have taken on the uphill battle of providing palatable in-flight grub, by going from bland food to "gourmet fare" created by famous chefs, with appropriate ethnic and regional flavours. Linda Yamada, chef of Kauai Beach House gourmet restaurant is quoted as saying, "Gourmet food now means using the freshest regional ingredients and serving it right away when the flavours are still at their best." But whereas gourmet restaurants rush the freshly prepared food directly to customers, gourmet airline meals are poured ahead of time into disposable aluminium pans and frozen, which means the chicken might still be the same old rubber-duckie. Only the Middle East and the Far East airlines seemed to have achieved the knack of "gourmet wizardry" with a range of new menus of regional and ethnic flavours to tantalise the air-borne traveller and even the Economy Class fare is delicious. For the European and other Western airlines, "gourmet" is still bland and tasteless. Professor David Kirk of Queen Margaret University College in Edinburgh says, "Some airlines, like KLM, try to make in-flight meals more fun by serving frozen ice cream blocks and pot-noodles." Put the economy class meals on china plates and serve in the comfort of first or business class and food will be far more appetising, he advises. Egon Ronay, the food critic, feels that airlines should sell picnic packs of fresh, easy-to-eat food in the departure lounges. In 1998, his team tasted the meals on 10 transatlantic airlines and pigeonholed British Airways into the eighth place dismissing its roast chicken meal as "dog's dinner." Airlines now hire celebrity chefs to give their menus a mouth-watering lift. Sky Chefs of Germany prepares a million meals a day to 260 airlines, plus the lion's share of the world's airline "gourmet" meals. Western food scientists say that high altitudes dull the taste buds as the pressurised air in the cabin dries out the olefactory bulb of the nose. The ability to taste salt and sweetness is reduced by at least 30%, yet oversalting will dehydrate you further. "The food you would like to use at high altitudes is the food which requires the least oxygen to digest," advises high-altitude expert, Charles S. Housten. "What you need is small amounts of carbohydrates which give you quick energy and don't use much oxygen." But airline gourmet meals focus on meat entree which is primarily protein. Savvy air-travellers say that sky meals can be tastier when pre-ordered from the ever-expanding "speciality air-meals", such as vegetarian, kosher and halal cuisine - which are prepared last and served first. While Cathay Pacific's speciality menus offer 20 selections, Ansett flights feature an experienced chef who personally introduces the menu selection to business class passengers and prepares each meal to order. But inspite of all this effort in specialising, the Western Airlines continue to grind out the same old "hash" menus without the subtle, customer-oriented, culinary streaks the Eastern Arilines are temptingly dishing up on its air-trolleys. Source: World Wide Web ==================== SriLankan Catering (Pvt) Ltd. : Soars high with their menus
SriLankan Catering (Pvt) Ltd. (SLCL), the sole flight caterer at the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) to our own national carrier and all other airlines touching its tarmac, has tackled the challenge of rising beyond "undifferentiated air-mush" with gusty vigour, at the dextrous behest of its dynamic Chief Executive Officer, Dilip Nijhawan. A measure of the versatility of SLCL's high-quality gourmet meals kaleidoscope, the bulk of which is for long-haul flights, can be assessed by the calibre of its customers replenishing their "sky larders" at BIA, namely, SriLankan Airlines, Emirates, Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, Condor, Cathay Pacific, Royal Jordanian, Qatar Airways, Gulf Air and Aeroflot. Times are long forgotten when quite a few locals on flights to the Middle East hardly touched their breakfasts of scrambled eggs and similar uninspiring, western-type desserts.
After a survey by SLCL to successfully ferret out the preferences of this customer segment, SriLankan Airlines now serve kiribath, seeni sambol, ambul thiyal, rotti and katta sambol, to satisfy the hearty local in-flight appetites with gusto. And wattalappan gives just the right flavour to the local sweet palate. Lunch menus offer heavy portions of rice, vegetables, fish, chicken and mutton curry with dinners apportioned in a more lighter fashion customers can choose western or oriental menus. On-flight questionnaires continue to feed more information for gourmet choices and every three months, SLCL displays in culinary artistry, around 40 menu suggestions of its customer airlines, to select menus for their continually changing meal cycles. SLCL has the capacity to produce 4,500 meals a day - be it European, Eastern, Japanese or other traditions.
The basic meal choices lurk around meat/fish/vegetables and hot/cold. Many seem to prefer "veg" on air and lunch/dinner would often be the most popular meal on board. Another favourite, the "hot meal", is served in bigger quantities. Heavy is how a Sri Lankan would like his meal while many Europeans would opt for a meat-based meal. From the moment the perishable food items enter the SLCL facility to the base where the processed food is loaded on plane, a sophisticated cool chain with carefully controlled temperature is maintained to ensure freshness of food and to reduce contamination risks. "We use only fresh and processed ingredients, not frozen foods", SLCL stresses. The prepared meals are placed in cold storage 18 hours prior to a flight departure, ahead of the industry norm of 24 hours. The Airport Restaurant serves about 2,500 passengers with Sri Lankan, Indian, European, Chinese and Thai menus. With rapidly liberalising local trade and tourism policies, SLCL predicts a speedily multiplying airline traffic across Colombo and is on the verge of constructing a new state-of-the-art facility to take on the challenge of catering more than 10,000 meals a day by 2003/4. |
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