Millions of people boarded a plane between Christmas and New Year’s – braving inclement weather, armrests and an epic Southwest Airlines meltdown.
Frustration is often a part of flying during the holidays, but when an airline gets it right, the food they serve can take the strain out of a long day of travel. If not, a bad meal will only add to the misery.
What does it take to get that tray to you?
Gate Gourmet, a global airline catering company that provides meals for flights from more than 200 airports, showed The New York Times backstage at its operation at Newark Liberty International Airport. At the company’s massive building in New Jersey on any given day, hundreds of employees perform complex choreography to deliver meals to approximately 400 flights.
THE PREPARATION
In the kitchen late last month, a team of chefs were peeling potatoes, chopping zucchini and simmering a huge barrel of mushrooms. They play a vital role, but the cooks can’t do anything without the carts, trays and other items that are cleaned in the dishwashing area and the ingredients that are stored in the pantry.
“Those are the two main focuses of a kitchen,” says Jim Stathakes, general manager of the Newark building, which spans 290,000 square feet, or about five football fields. “When they run smoothly, the kitchen runs smoothly.”
When a flight operated by Gate Gourmet arrives in Newark, the company collects the galley carts that flight attendants push down the aisles, along with the trash and dirty dishes and trays the carts contain.
In the cavernous saucer room, garbage is disposed of, dishes are washed, and unused, clean items – such as beverage cans, tea bags, and creamer – are recovered. The empty galley carts are loaded into a closed system similar to a small car wash, where they are cleaned and rinsed in extremely hot water.
In the nearby warehouse, forklift trucks arrange and rearrange some of the 2,000 pallets full of ingredients for the kitchen. A few hundred pallets of watermelon, strawberries and other fresh produce are kept in a product cooler, while about 500 pallets of meat and other vegetables are kept in a freezer.
Most of the pallets are on stacked floors in the main warehouse and hold a wide variety of items from canned oranges to jars of cornichons to bottles of hot sauce.
To keep food fresh as it is stored, transported, prepared and ultimately delivered, Gate Gourmet uses approximately 7,000 pounds of ice and approximately 10,000 pounds of dry ice each day.
COOKING
One day in late November, Mark DeCruz, the executive chef of the Newark building, supervised work in the hot kitchen, which houses industrial equipment that can steam, fry, dehydrate and smoke food on a large scale. Large kettles can be used to make thousands of servings of mashed potatoes, polenta or mushrooms. Depending on the season, the daily production of staff for flights out of Newark can range from about 15,000 meals to more than 25,000.
The food is prepared slightly differently than meals on the ground. Sensitivity to sweet and salty foods can decrease at altitude, so the Gate Gourmet team could increase the salt and sugar in a recipe by about 10 percent, said Mr. DeCruz. Because umami flavors are sometimes enhanced in the air, many dishes contain mushrooms.
The chefs at Gate Gourmet’s airport locations have the freedom to adapt recipes, but Molly Brandt, an executive chef of innovation for the company, gets to create them from scratch. Working alone from a test kitchen in Miami, Ms. Brandt has to push the boundaries.
In some ways, she’s trying to design recipes with flying in mind, incorporating umami flavors or using juicy fruits and vegetables that might appeal in a dry airplane cabin, like cucumbers, tomatoes, and grapes. But in general, Mrs. Brandt does not try to limit herself.
A few weeks ago she was working on recipes for a beef dish for a flight between Europe and the United States, a vegan dish for a flight between the Middle East and India, and another vegan dish for a flight departing from the West Coast.
For the beef dish, Mrs. Brandt wanted to make something that would be familiar to Americans and Europeans alike, so she created a Catalan-flavored stew with olives, fennel, and orange. For the flight between the Middle East and India, she created a dish inspired by both regions: a roasted cauliflower steak with a turmeric sauce, in which pomegranate, dill, chickpeas and garam masala are processed. For the final dish, she created a mushroom mapo-tofu lasagna — an adventurous take on comfort food.
Ms. Brandt regularly consults with Gate Gourmet customers and meticulously measures each ingredient so that it can be accurately scaled. But it can be difficult to prepare meals that appeal to all passengers, she said.
“Maybe they just want a comforting meal; maybe they need to rest right away and just need something super nutritious,” she said. “We have a lot of things to consider.”
THE PACKAGE
Once hot foods have been refrigerated to prevent spoilage and cold items prepared, Newark building workers can begin preparing meals for flights to Britain, Brazil, Germany, India, Israel and other destinations near and far .
International lunches and dinners are the most difficult to organize as airlines and passengers expect better quality and better service on those longer, usually more expensive flights. While the meals are being prepared, no less than 20 trucks are loaded with non-perishable items and galley carts. The temperature-sensitive food is loaded last, just before the trucks are ready to leave.
To avoid wastage through delays or cancellations, trucks usually only leave the building about two hours before a flight, and Gate Gourmet is in constant contact with its airline customers, including United Airlines, TAP Air Portugal, Lufthansa, SAS, Virgin Atlantic and British Airways . (Gate Gourmet operates kitchens for United at several hub airports, including Newark.)
A two-aisle aircraft usually requires two trucks, while a single-aisle aircraft requires only one. The Newark facility has 132 trucks and most of them are used every day, said Mr. Stathakes, the general manager. Spring and summer are the busiest part of the facility, and the busiest time of day is late afternoon, just before many flights, especially international ones, depart.
At night, trucks and teams go out again to strip incoming planes of their used carts and boards and start the process all over again.
