WACO, Texas (KXXV) — From premade to scratch-made: Rapoport Academy's food director is revolutionizing school meals while staying in budget and meeting state guidelines
- The state guidelines requite one vegetable, protein, fruit, dairy and whole grain
- Rapoport Academy Food Services Director Nathaniel Gay is looking to make scratch meals while meeting those state guidelines
- Nathaniel is also planning to serve a full salad bar later in the fall semester
Watch Heather get a look at meals students will be eating:
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Rapoport Academy Food Services Director Nathaniel Gay is working to improve student meals by focusing on fresh, scratch-made options while still meeting state nutritional requirements.
Gay is passionate about providing quality meals to students while adhering to state guidelines that require a fruit, vegetable, whole grain, protein and dairy to make up a complete meal. Students must receive three components for breakfast and five for lunch.
"Instead of having the premade breakfast burritos, we're going to actually make our own tortillas and scramble our own eggs and make real fresh homemade tortillas, breakfast burritos to get them excited, then we'll be roasting our pork loins, we're going to move away from any frozen or dry potato. We're going to start cutting and boiling and mashing our own potatoes," Gay said.
The shift to fresher ingredients doesn't always save money, according to Gay, but the quality improvement is worth the trade-off.
"That necessarily doesn't fall into the category of a whole lot of savings when you factor the cost of fresh potatoes are way less than the premade, but you're adding labor into it now, right? But that's what those are the trade-offs that are important to me as a chef and introducing better foods that let's us utilize our time better and offer better foods and save elsewhere," Gay said.
A full salad bar is also in development and will be available to students in the next few weeks.
When planning nutritious meals for hundreds of students each day, Gay explains that many decisions go into what's being served, especially regarding cost management.
"I'll come up with a daily cost and say 'ok we're going to do two fresh from scratch items and then we're going to have the packaged cookie or the packaged diced peaches, but instead of the corn syrup, I'm going to pick the diced peaches in water, you know, and look at those things, and I just moved the dollars around honestly," Gay said.
Gay carefully balances where to invest in higher quality ingredients and where to economize.
"I will spend the money on the healthier items and then the sides or the frozen items versus the canned items, so, you really just have to spend a lot of time breaking it down, seeing what your quantities are, what it costs per ounce per slice per each, but typically because of the way we manufacture worldwide, frozen items will always cost less than the fresh items, so, kind of just pick and choose what we use where," Gay said.
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