Think Rational - act local
11 February 2009
Self Cooking Centre© helps Cornwall hospital food get closer to local food producers.
Cornwall's hospital catering got a major boost when its new Central Food Production Unit, (CFPU), opened this year to service the countys’ primary hospitals. Not only has quality risen and the cost of production gone down, but the Royal Cornwall Hospitals’ Trust has pulled off the additional feat of getting closer to the county's food producers - supporting local farmers and hugely increasing the proportion of genuine Cornish products in its meals.
The £4.6million facility near Camborne is already serving up to 7,000 portions daily to patients, staff and visitors, with capacity to spare. The kitchens are phenomenally efficient, using only 30 staff working a basic 8am - 4pm day, Monday to Friday, producing individual cook-freeze meals from fresh locally sourced ingredients.
In addition, a major factor in the success of the new CFPU, believes Martin Pellow, operations manager for the Trust, is a new bank of Rational Self Cooking Centre units. "We wanted a state of the art facility that would help Cornwall Food Production Unit produce meals for all the health care establishments in Cornwall and possibly beyond," he says.
"From the start we decided that Cornish farmers and other local suppliers would supply as much of our product as possible. We want to minimise food miles and support the local community. However, this meant more time in finding and choosing the best ingredients, and more time in preparing it ourselves. Our new facility allows us to keep control over our ingredients and the final quality, while making it easier to serve Cornwalls’ health service better."
Martin says that when equipping the unit, the Rational Self Cooking Centre just stood out. "We were very impressed with what we saw in the Rationals. They could do so many things and take over a lot of the work of cooking.
"For example, not only can they cook all our meats, and everything you'd normally expect in ovens, such as pies and cakes, but we found we could even blanch vegetables before cooking. They can also de-skill the cooking process."
Critics about reducing the role of a chef sometimes use the word ‘de-skilling’ scathingly. In fact, automating so much like this is actually increasing the importance of the chef and catering manager, by giving them 'more time for the essentials', allowing them to get on with the really important and creative jobs. They can do more food selection and purchasing, have more scope for devising menus and creating recipes and more room for preparation and presentation.
In addition, in the case of Cornwall it gives Martin Pellows' chefs more time to work with the Trust's dieticians, with whom they discuss every recipe.
The CFPU now has four of Rationals' 40-grid Self Cooking Centre units, with one being used exclusively for vegetables and vegetarian food, producing the bulk of the Trust's oven-prepared food, along with two further 20-grid units. A smaller 10-grid Self Cooking Centre is for specialist use, including preparing test meals.
One of the most valuable features, says Martin, is the slow cooking mode for meats. "It produces fantastic quality, with much less shrinkage of meat," he testifies.
A big benefit in slow mode is the hygienic way it cooks. "Because we can rely on it to cook the meat correctly, I know that once the probe is in the meat and the door is shut, we won't have to open it again until it's definitely ready. If you keep opening and shutting the door to inspect the food, it not only holds up the cooking but exposes it unnecessarily to the air and possible contamination”, Martin added.
The CFPU is also using CombiLink. This remote networking feature allows them to reprogram the Rationals from the office, (or over the internet), for different foods and to monitor the performance of each oven. They know what temperature the food has reached, and can log all the cooking.
At the end of the working day, two big further benefits have reduced management “headaches” for Martin. One is the automatic cleaning feature, "CleanJet", while the other, "CalcDiagnosis", removes the worry about descaling maintenance.
"No getting around it, CleanJet is a fantastic feature, we're over the moon about it," he says. "I was sceptical about how it would work at first, but I love the way you just put in a couple of tablets and press a couple of buttons, and when you return, it's absolutely spotless. Cleaning the oven was always one of the most unpopular jobs in the old kitchens, and that has now gone, completely."
Meanwhile, 'CalcDiagnosis' automatically indicates the optimum descaling time, and an automatic program means the unit can be descaled automatically by the user, easily and safely.
