Tuesday and Wednesday I spent the day helping Dustin with fall menu planning for the dining halls. They use a 5-week cycle menu every semester. My main project last week was to plan the soup menu for Wilkerson, the main dining center. They serve 2 soups at lunch, extended lunch, dinner, and extended dinner each day. Dustin wanted to incorporate more homemade soups into the menu, and fewer convenience (i.e. Campbell's) soups, to try to provide a better quality product and attempt to reduce the sodium content. The executive chef here at UND, Greg, has been recipe testing a lot of new homemade soups this summer, so I took the list of new homemade soups and went to work trying to implement them in the new menu. The goal was to have 1 homemade soup and 1 convenience soup at every meal. I also had to make sure that there was one vegetarian soup at every meal. While it sounds fairly easy, the process became more complicated when I realized that there were only two vegetarian homemade soup options because the rest were all made with chicken or beef bases. One of the convenience soups, the chicken tortilla soup, is very popular with the students so Dustin wanted to leave it on the menu once a week. It got to be somewhat difficult to pair the chicken tortilla soup with a homemade vegetarian option, but we made it work.
Once the soup menu was planned in a spreadsheet, I had to go back into the FoodPro system and menu the new soups at every meal they were offered. Wilkerson also sends out food to the Children's Center and Facilities here, so it was a bit like being a detective trying to find every meal where soup was being served and making sure it was correctly input into the menu, and old soups were taken out. I also got to change a few of the weekend entrees for the Wilkerson menu, to try to add some non-breakfast items into their brunch menus. They have a great selection of new wraps and casseroles to choose from, hopefully the students will enjoy the changes come fall!
On Wednesday I also got to do the soup menu for the Terrace dining hall, which is smaller than Wilkerson and not open on the weekends, so it was much easier to incorporate choices into. I still have to get those soups entered into FoodPro next week.
The rest of my week was spent doing rotations at the UND Bakery! It was a bit of a different experience working nights and getting to help out making a wide variety of baked goods. On Wednesday night I was mainly shadowing the workers there to see what they do and how they do it. But I did get to help Tracy, the bakery manager, make donut dough. We used a sheeter, almost exactly like this one:
The donut dough goes in just under the red line, through the rollers and down the belt. Each batch of dough was run through 3 or 4 times to get it to the right thickness. Tracy even let me run a batch of dough through. You have to catch it on the backs of your forearms in order to put it back through the roller properly. As the dough gets thinner, it also gets longer and harder to catch!Once the dough is the right thickness, Tracy used a variety of donut cutters to get the donut shapes we needed. I also got to help roll and twist cinnamon twists, we ran cinnamon rolls through the dough sheeter, and the last of the dough went towards making two loaves of Apple Fritter bread. There was enough dough leftover to make a giant monster apple fritter!
I also got to work with the large deck oven they use in the bakery. It has 6 shelves that rotate around the oven, and each shelf has room for 4 full sheet pans. Both Wednesday and Thursday night we prepared and baked off muffins, cookies, breads, buns, danish, and a variety of other pastries. On Thursday I got to measure out and mix muffin batter for several different kinds of muffins (I'd never used a mixer that big before!) and I got to scoop out and bake off about 4 dozen multigrain blueberry muffins. I think my favorite item in the bakery had to be the pistachio muffins though-- I wish I had taken a picture, they looked so unnaturally green, something like this: (not my picture, but these are pistachio muffins!)
Hulk Muffins!The other neat part of my bakery experience was that on Thursday night I got to fry off all of the donuts we rolled the dough for on Wednesday. Some of them I also got to fill (like Long Johns) or dip in chocolate, caramel or white icing. We also fried the monster apple fritter we made with the leftover dough. It really took me back to when I used to work nights at a Tim Horton's coffee and bake shop -- though the UND bakery donuts are actually made from scratch and fresh, not frozen and reanimated like Tim Horton's! I think you can definitely tell the difference in quality.
Since the bakery at UND makes all of the baked goods for all of their dining services, we got to load up carts for each area of operation according to what they needed for the day. The carts are then lined up in the inside loading dock of the warehouse so they can be delivered to their respective units first thing in the morning.
While it was a great experience at the bakery, it's been difficult to transition back to being awake during the day! As a dietetics student, it was also somewhat disheartening to see how many unhealthy baked goods options there are out there. I talked to Tracy about that, and he showed me some new healthier recipes they have tested in the past, but didn't have much success with. They do have a lowfat chocolate raspberry brownie that we made, but it has so much added sugar in it to replace the fat that was removed, it's really not that much healthier than the original product. (5lbs of sugar for 4 pans of brownies, oy!) Tracy's take on the topic was that people don't eat baked goods to be healthy, they're intended as treats. While I think that's true, it can also be dangerous. I know there is a temptation to label a food as "healthy" and then many people (myself included!) will over-indulge on the healthy food until they've eaten enough calories to equal the regular version. Apparently they have looked at some multigrain donut options, but the fact that they are all fried in oil and glazed or topped with sugar, the multigrain component really isn't going to improve the nutritional value enough to be worth it. It really drives home the importance of the concept of everything in moderation!
I am really looking forward to next week, not only do I get to continue with menu planning, I will be doing some event planning for an upcoming picnic that UND holds for its retirees every summer. And next Wednesday I get to spend the day at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center here in Grand Forks, shadowing their chief dietitian! Only 3 weeks to go, but so much left to do!
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