Qantas – Recipe Testing Delights
January 8th, 2010. Posted by luane
An insight into part of the Qantas menu planning process by Aimee Bower, Rockpool Consulting’s Menu Planning Assistant.
An astonishing amount of co-ordination happens behind the scenes of putting a meal on a plane. A major focus of Rockpool is creating food that will be fresh, extraordinary and flavourful whilst holding up to all the necessary steps for food on International First and Business Class flights. It’s a lengthy process of research, inspiration, planning, testing, sourcing, creating, apportioning and flying the many hundreds of superb dishes, which land on plates of salivating passengers, miles high around the globe.
For Rockpool’s Kate Barker, much of this consistently innovative task sits on the weight of her shoulders, with the help of a remarkable collaboration between teams at Rockpool and Qantas.
This summer our test kitchen is heating up, as we are in the exciting and delicious recipe testing phase! Kate, with the help of a number of Rockpool and Qantas chefs and the discerning and thoughtful palate of Neil, are creating and baking to find what will taste best and fly freshest for the next round of in-flight menus that are underway.
Here we are exploring numerous different poultry and seafood dishes. A sweet corn and Barrossa Valley chicken chowder, Pan fried Suzuki Mulloway fillets, served with freshly steamed asparagus and a crushed Kipfler potato salad. Finished with a disc of olive butter that melts over the fillet, infusing a delicious salty olive flavour.
Seared sea bass, lemon thyme butter, roast salsify and steamed spinach and a refreshing Asian inspired salad of rare southern Bluefin tuna with its exquisite taste and rich texture. Tuna slices are layered over tatsoi leaves, micro herbs, cucumber, daikon radish and edamame soy beans and finished with a sashimi style soy and rice vinegar based dressing.
Much to our delight the presentation of this round of tested dishes was a roaring success, with a few tweaks here and there to the recipes and accompaniments. We can’t wait to get these exciting new features onto the menus and off the ground.
