Centralization, Updates Top HUDS' Menu

Andy Allen, clad in his chef’s whites, stands in the cold steel confines of a walk-in refrigerator, clutching a bag of turkey noodle soup while recounting his pursuit of the perfect piece of pasta.

“I spent three years looking for this noodle,” explains the executive chef of the Culinary Support Group (CSG) as he points out the robust cubes of carrot and celery floating in the broth. “I wanted a noodle that would hold its shape in the liquid.”

After an exhaustive three-year search he found it floating in a Swiss soup mix, and persuaded the manufacturer to sell the noodle separately so that he could incorporate it into his stock of ingredients filed away in the CSG kitchen below the brick walls of Kirkland House.

Over the past five years, the CSG has allowed Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) to centralize much of its “wet” food production. While the centralization has allowed for improved efficiency, Allen and other HUDS administrators want to ensure that not only Harvard’s noodles, but also its collection of localized House dining halls hold their shape and flavor. HUDS director Ted Mayer has said he does not want to see the University move towards a system with central dining halls, like many other colleges.

“The reason for the house system has nothing to do with efficiency,” says Mayer.

By centralizing some of its production, HUDS has been able to improve and monitor quality, consistency and efficiency of its food preparation—without compromising House life.

DIRECTING THE KITCHEN

The history of Harvard’s dining system is worth upholding, Mayer says, but the culinary traditions are not.

“The old house kitchens were modeled on the army. That’s where institutional cooking really has its roots,” he explains. “The food they ate then was much more casserole-like, we’re talking meat and potatoes, not nearly as sophisticated as what we eat today.”

When he took over as director of HUDS in 1997, Mayer says he made it his charge to examine the dated physical facilities and brainstorm more than cosmetic changes.

“We needed to take advantage of new cooking technologies,” he said.

By the summer of 1998, Mayer had begun to implement plans for the CSG kitchen to become a central HUDS facility responsible for slicing, dicing and mixing.

HIGH-TECH PREP

Standing in front of a large metal slicer carving its way through semi-frozen chicken, Allen explains the simple logic behind the CSG. “We only make things that make sense,” he says.

Those items include soups, sauces, salads (everything from beans and potatoes to chicken, tuna and pasta) and dishes like refried beans and taco meat that can easily be stirred with three-foot whisks in 150-gallon kettles.

Allen says that each army-sized batch circulates through a pasteurizing pump, which distributes the product into plastic bags that bear a product label and list of ingredients.

The bags are then stacked and stored at 30 degrees in a large refrigerator that registers a temperature rating with a central computer every 10 minutes for quality control. “They’re very cold, but they don’t quite freeze,” Allen says, demonstrating with a bag of viscous clam chowder.

Mayer points out that Legal Sea Foods uses the same process to centrally make its chowders. “The equipment is really very high tech,” he says. According to Allen, only about a dozen colleges prepare food in this fashion.

CSG takes advantage of this “cook-chill” technology to maintain and monitor freshness for the typical two-day period that the bags remain in the refrigerator. This means that Wednesday’s Alfredo sauce will be brewing on Monday.

“We try to cook as close to the date of service as possible,” Allen explains.

Before the plastic bags are shipped to the 12 houses and Annenberg, the CSG retains two small samples of each batch—one for the head chef to taste-test and sign off on and one that HUDS keeps for two weeks in the rare event that it causes a food epidemic.

SUGAR AND SPICE

In addition to producing all of Harvard’s wet food, the CSG kitchen hosts all of HUDS’ experiments in seasoning and flavor.

“Central production allows us to be consistent with our flavorings,” Allen says.

According to Mayer, Allen is the only certified research chef on any college campus, which means he incorporates an understanding of food chemistry into analyses of taste.

New vendors constantly visit the underground complex to market condensed flavoring pastes, which Allen says are the basis for many food service flavors. “We can’t actually caramelize onions for 150 gallons of French onion soup,” he explains, “but we can pick our favorite flavoring to provide the right taste.” He adds that these types of flavorings are the basis for the onion taste in Burger King’s Rodeo Burger.

The kitchen doesn’t only use synthetic spices. Allen says that HUDS recently switched to using more fresh herbs that have been flash frozen and will continue to cook with whole roasted garlic cloves, whose sweet flavor makes it “the candy of flavorings.”

SWEET SUCCESS

Mayer says that the CSG has improved efficiency by centralizing preparation. “You had nine kitchens doing the same thing, everybody had to chop their onions,” he says. The centralized system has allowed HUDS to save money by rehiring fewer staff at the end of their nine-month contracts.

“With the money that we saved in labor, we could afford to pay for the CSG renovations in two years instead of three,” he says.

This allowed HUDS to get out of the kitchen and examine customer satisfaction.

“Once we had achieved efficiency there we hired an outside firm to interview students and find out what they wanted,” Mayer says. HUDS incorporated the results into its dining offerings, and continues to survey students twice a year to seek recommendations for further improvements.

While outsiders attempted to determine student preferences, Mayer consulted his insiders. “We really needed to work with our staff,” he says. “We went on a retreat about where to take dining services, to determine our mission statement.” Mayer says he talked to House Masters, senior tutors and administrators to get a sense of how they envisioned HUDS.

Most representatives of residential life say they think dining facilities play an integral role in forging a sense of community within the House.

“The dining hall is one place where students can really relax,” Dunster House Master Anne Porter says as she sits down to a leisurely Sunday brunch. “Students talk and they work and there’s food and there’s nothing like food for sparking good conversation.”

--—Staff writer Wendy D. Widman can be reached at widman@fas.harvard.edu.