Photo By Senior Chief Petty Officer Molly Burgess | Culinary Specialist 2nd Class Christopher Policastro, attached to Naval Support...... read more read more
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NORFOLK, Va (NNS) - Culinary specialists (CS) got back to the basic fundamentals of cooking during an in-depth culinary training course at the Naval Station (NAVSTA) Norfolk base galley, Dec. 3 to 7.
As part of a CNO-driven initiative to implement more “old school” scratch cooking back into Navy meals, the regional galley program brought in a team of chefs from On-Site Culinary Solutions, a training institution that travels to their customers to help refine culinary skills already learned, to help reintroduce “scratch” cooking to every day Navy shore menu.
“We’re providing training on basic culinary principles – the foundation of cooking,” said Jud Flynn, senior executive chef of On-Site Culinary Solutions. “We are here to help bring back the scratch style cooking to the galleys, and bring the Sailors to a level of confidence when going through each particular procedure and reworking the foundation.”
Over time, the Navy has slowly moved away from making many of its meals using the hands-on cooking style they once learned in culinary school, using mostly pre-packaged commercial style foods instead due to reduced culinary specialist (CS) manning and budgetary concerns.
According to Flynn, with more scratch-made-meals back onto the plates of service members, the benefits are plentiful and worth the extra time it takes to complete a dish.
“The cost of making a meal from scratch is much cheaper, so you can save a lot and it’s also a self-pride thing when you produce something because of the skill level it takes,” he said. “But the nutritional value is the purest benefit the Navy can get.”
According to Joe Farrington, a chef from On-Site Culinary Solutions who is also conducting the course, scratch cooking produces a product that is cleaner to the taste buds than its pre-packed or heat-and-serve counterparts.
“A lot of the time, with pre-packaged food, you don’t know what you’re getting … [it’s] loaded with sodium or preservatives, and sometimes that’s not what you want,” said Farrington. “When your scratch cooking, you know exactly what went in the food and it’s just cleaner all around.”
The training was an intense five-day course with a group of only 10 Navy culinary specialists from different installations throughout Navy Region Mid-Atlantic, designed to give over-the-shoulder training and demonstrations, build culinary confidence, and raise food quality and nutrition value, while adding a touch of personal uniqueness to dishes.
“By the end of the course, we want them at a point where they can walk into any situation and feel like they can succeed,” said Flynn. “We need to make sure they can go into any other training module and feel comfortable knowing that they understand the foundation.”
Throughout the training, the students had a chance to re-familiarize themselves with basic culinary skills so that can train junior CS’s and integrate it better into daily Navy meal preparation.
During the course, the chefs covered hands-on techniques, including braising, stewing, grilling roasting, poaching and more. They also learned the basic cooking principles of safety, sanitation, knife skills, sauces, soups and more.
“There are five steps of culinary principles and this is just one step in the ongoing training program,” said Flynn. “With this program, we are seeing, on average, a person’s knowledge base expand about 20 percent each day of class, with 100 percent growth by day five.”
According to Flynn, food does not change, but ingredients and the skill of cooking is constantly changing, causing a need for continued training.
“When you lose that interpersonal skill set, you have to go back,” said Senior Chief Culinary Specialist (SW/AW) Michael Sims, leading chief petty officer for Region Mid-Atlantic Food Service. “Cooking is no different. Cooking is an art. You have to rejuvenate your skills to train your art.”
There are more than 7,000 CS’s in the Navy, and for many of them, feeding the fleet is not just about getting the food to the sailors, it holds a much more personal value.
“As we all know, the first and last person most sailors see in a day is the culinary specialist,” Sims explained. “Morale starts in our serving lines and giving our Sailors the opportunity, once again, to express their pride through food will not only benefit the Sailors and the command, but give back that sense of pride and mission accomplishment to our culinary professionals.”
| Date Taken: | 12.07.2012 |
| Date Posted: | 12.14.2012 13:50 |
| Story ID: | 99323 |
| Location: | NORFOLK, AL, US |
| Web Views: | 125 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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