Good morning!
I am SO glad this week is over. Two tests on one day yesterday = not awesome. But, our afternoon following the tests was fun! My Food Service Management class group and I met up with the UNC hospitals Executive Chef yesterday to make our Mexican Black Bean Burgers in their kitchen!
As I mentioned, our Food Service Management professor is the head of food service at UNC hospitals, so our project involves creating a new menu item for their hospital! Each group has to:
- Come up with a recipe, either for patient menus or for one of their retail restaurants/ cafes (we chose retail). Scale to 20 portions. (Done!)
- At the hospital, go in in the early a.m. to learn how to purchase food; give the staff our recipe and ingredient list. Help the team receive and store all the food shipments that came in that morning! (Done! This was HARD work!)
- Using the kitchen and supplies at the hospital, prepare our recipe!
Yesterday was the day to make our recipe on the large scale:
It was cool being in the kitchens at the hospital. It’s crazy how much behind the scenes work has to be done every day! Mad respect for everyone that works in food service.
Our first order of business? Getting suited up in hair nets! So sexy.
Heh. Once we put on the hair nets and some plastic aprons, we got right down to work!
We scaled our recipe to make 20 veggie burgers and wow was it a lot of stuff! We used their MASSIVE food processor to mix it all.
Jillian in action with her rockin’ hair net:
Libby and an entire of pitcher of black beans, no big deal:
(I prefer pitchers of margaritas.)
Prepped toppings:
Eventually, we processed all the ingredients and out it came looking like a large mush of… poop. Let’s be honest. It looks like poop.
Apparently their food processor is way better than mine and blends things much finer!
It looked better once they were actually in burger shapes 🙂
Then, off to the grill we went! We decided they would be more fun grilled than pan seared. Plus, it was easier for mass production!
Yum yum! Check out those beautiful grill marks 🙂
I felt like I was back in my high school cafeteria! (Except they didn’t have black beans burgers or wheat buns.)
Ready to knock the taste tester’s socks off:
BAM.
The burgers were a big hit among the kitchen staff! Our professor even liked them, although he wanted to add in some finely chopped diced peppers, onions, or feta cheese (or maybe even some mashed black beans instead of processing all of them) to mix up the homogenized texture of the patties. The food processors in the kitchen there made them MUCH more finely processed than my one at home did!
They are going to think about implementing the burgers for a new “vegetarian concept” they want to try out in one of their retail cafes. We’ll see!
I’m off to school — we are getting our first Biochem exams back today, eek! Here’s hoping I did okay 🙂
Have a good one!
