Airline Food
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As a frequent flier and traveler, I admit that life is better when you are in business class on an airplane. But even then food can range from dismally awful to surprisingly delicious. And, as you might guess, US airlines are the usual guilty parties when it comes to the former. On a recent United flight from London to Chicago, I was upgraded to first class and had at least a modest hope that the food would be decent. Sadly, this was not the case. Desiccated chicken, a gloppy starch of some sort, and overcooked vegetables were par for the course. The only addition from the business class menu was a soup course – apparently courtesy of Campbell’s in a can.
I chalked this up to an assumption that, after all, it’s next to impossible to prepare gourmet food in a galley kitchen limited to reheating capability. Plus, with the challenges of air cabin pressurization and long storage times for the food, it would be unrealistic to expect Le Bernadin in the air. But it’s also not crazy that food can be better, even amazing. On a Qatar Airways flight, for example, I had a black cod appetizer – billed as created by chef Nobu Matsuhisa, the man behind the phenomenally successful Nobu restaurants in London, New York and Los Angeles. I’ve eaten at Nobu, and was skeptical that this would taste anything like the famous black cod for which Nobu and its chef are known. And yet . . . it was delicious, pretty close to what I had had in the restaurant itself. So the question is, how do they do it – is real cooking involved?
The answer is yes – with gourmet chefs often handling the meal planning for non-US airlines in particular According to a recent article in The New Yorker (“Test Kitchen: Mile High Dinner”), one of the challenges is turbulence, an example being “no blueberries on flat plates.” One of the chefs who is on Singapore Airlines’ International Culinary Panel explained this as well as other hurdles – “The air inside a typical commercial passenger jet at cruising altitude is extremely dry and the atmospheric pressure is approximately that of Park City, Utah, conditions that can make even well-seasoned food seem bland.” The chef went on to explain that Singapore Airlines has a test kitchen that mimics the same equipment that is available for food preparation on the airplane and also the atmospheric pressure so that there is a better way to try out what something may actually taste like in the sky.
All that said, airline food is never going to be as good as a meal at the French Laundry, but if it’s better that the dried out chicken I had on that last United flight, that would be a welcome change!
from Laura Flippin's Dining Experiences http://ift.tt/1sGuYeB