Out of the cafeteria, into the kitchen

With over 9,000 mouths to feed every day, how does the University of Oregon's Food Services team keep up without letting quality go down?

By Thom Brekke

Ask most college graduates to recall the food service at their alma mater and odds are you'll be met with a variety of grimaces, groans and gasps. These graduates will probably remember cafeteria dining, not exactly the height of cuisine, their meals the products of a half dozen reheatings and a long day of sitting under the sneeze guards, each item waiting for its turn to get into someone's stomach and cause a mess of mischief. These dining halls worked to put out sheer volume, and their diners ate food that was predictably sub-par as a result.

Tom Driscoll, head of Food Services at the University of Oregon, does his best to make sure that this generation of students will, at the very least, struggle to come up with such compelling dining hall horror stories. Every day, Driscoll works with the staff of the University of Oregon's Central Kitchen, where much of the cooking and prep for campus-wide food services goes on, to make sure that the 9,000 meals produced every day will be something students look forward to eating, something relatively healthy and, perhaps, something different.

As you can imagine, it's no simple task and, accordingly, the University of Oregon's Central Kitchen is no simple kitchen. As college students have come to expect more from their residence halls, University Housing's Food Services has had to change its operation in the central kitchen to fit Housing's current service system, which meets its diners' demands with several individual food court style eateries. Given the increased complexity of this style of food service, getting meals to the expectant students is only possible as the result of a lot of planning and a precise system of preparation and distribution.

"The central kitchen provides food to the eight other units that we operate on campus. Nobody eats here, this food goes out by truck to the other locations," Driscoll said. "There's about five or six deliveries a day, and we divide them into cold deliveries and hot deliveries."

To make sure those trucks have deliveries to make, scores of staffers work in specialized departments that handle everything from sushi for the University's Dux Bistro to pizza dough for use in Carson Dining Hall. The kitchen is a remarkably easy place to get lost, as every turn seems to lead to another cooler door or storeroom. Even straight passages can lead into a flurry of baking activity, a streamlined sandwich making operation, or, if your timing is perfect, even secret training for an annual cooking competition between university chefs, which I stumbled upon during a visit. The competition helps keep chefs on their toes, their creative juices flowing, to keep new culinary ideas coming out of the kitchens and into dining halls and catered events.

During my visit alone I saw several items I'd never seen as a student, including a garbanzo burger patty and Carson chef Dan Irvin's competition dish incorporating striped bass, mussels, shrimp and calamari over fresh pasta, for dining hall service and catering, respectively. An array of newer baked goods, from small pecan tarts to scones, is also made fresh in the central kitchen, usually twice a day, according to Driscoll.

Once these infant recipes become part of the central kitchen's canon, they move out of the creating chefs' hands and into the system, where cooks in expansive rooms with large mixers and long silver tables produce the recipes in volume. Some items, such as baked goods, have their ingredient amounts calculated, according to batch size, in a computer database before the required amounts are mixed together in cylindrical plastic containers for ease and speed.

Even so, the central kitchen is more concerned with quality than putting out maximum quantity at the fastest pace possible, and it shows. Each area within the kitchen is abuzz throughout the day, but although the staff can race through some preparation, to say it's a frantic pace would be a lie. Every item is made with the same care as the one before it, and this care extends to attention to details like the ingredients' origins and the methods used to farm your burger patty or wheat flour. Driscoll noted that most of the University's beef and chicken is locally grown, and he said that the university is moving toward buying more and more locally grown products and produce in the future.

"[Buying locally grown is] something the students are interested in lately, and we've been looking at ways we could do that," Driscoll said.

Most of all, the students are interested in eating their food. That's a triumph for Food Services, and, in turn, a triumph for the epicenter of Food Services' activity, the Central Kitchen.

Go there: view a slideshow of photos taken in the Central Kitchen