SPAGHETTI Sauce with Ground Beef
While at Cal Poly, I enrolled in a course that focused on the successful operation of a food service environment. I learned a lot of valuable information, including how to standardize a recipe. While this may seem like a simple task, enlarging a recipe from a yield of say 8, to feed over 50, can be much more difficult (as we soon found out!) than first assumed. But why standardize a recipe? Standardizing recipes for institutional use creates consistent food quality, controls food cost, makes purchasing easier, and even reduces record keeping. Standardizing recipes ensures efficiency in any large-scale food production operation.
To begin standardizing a recipe, I teamed up with one of my peers, Natalie, and together we decided to standardize a Spaghetti Sauce with Ground Beef recipe we had found online. Our first task was to test the original recipe and see how we liked the flavor, texture, appearance, etc.
To begin standardizing a recipe, I teamed up with one of my peers, Natalie, and together we decided to standardize a Spaghetti Sauce with Ground Beef recipe we had found online. Our first task was to test the original recipe and see how we liked the flavor, texture, appearance, etc.
We used some of Natalie’s close friends as our taste testers to get some unbiased (because we thought the dish was pretty good!) feedback. Being that we were cooking the small, original recipe, we were able to whip out the dish fairly fast between the both of us. We served the boys, and they scarfed it down!
The boys were excited to taste our home-cooked meal! They were happily satisfied and we had to push them to give us some criticism. One of the boys said he felt like the sauce was a little too overwhelming in size due to the large chunks of ground beef. Therefore, Natalie and I decided to break apart the ground beef into smaller pieces while it was sautéing in the skillet, as well as eliminate the large chunks of bell pepper because they didn’t seem to give the sauce much flavor. We also scratched the onions and decided to kick the recipe up a notch by sprinkling in a little cayenne pepper. ¡Caliente!
Original Recipe
Taking our newly adjusted recipe, we now converted the actual volumetric measurements to larger portions. We chose to use the factor method. First, we divided our desired yield, 100 servings, in half because we decided to cook the spaghetti noodles in batches . We cooked two 50-serving portions. Cutting the total in half, next we divided the desired yield, 50 servings, by the known yield, 8 servings, to get the conversion factor of 6.25. We converted the volume measurements to weights and multiplied by our conversion factor of 6.25. These numbers produced our final standardized recipe! It took a few calculations, but we got there!
Newly STANDARDIZED Recipe
Now that we had calculated the specific amount for each ingredient, we had to go purchase our ingredients! Thank goodness Natalie had a Costco card! We were able to run in (grab a few free samples of course) and run out with everything we needed.
We headed over to Natalie’s again to start the cooking process. Our first biggest challenge was having the proper equipment for our newly enlarged recipe. I brought over some large soup pots from my house and we used those to boil our pasta in small batches.
Again, when making our sauce, it was hard to fit all of the pots and pans on Natalie’s 4-burner range!
Despite this, the cooking process went smoothly, and we tossed the spaghetti and meat sauce together in large tin foil pans, covered them with more tin foil, and popped them in the oven to keep warm for service!
We had previously made the decision to serve our meal to the residents and guests at the Maxine Lewis Homeless Shelter in San Luis Obispo. After making such a large quantity of hearty spaghetti, we wanted to make sure our meal would benefit a worthy cause. When we arrived at the shelter with our three large pans of pasta, the residents were beyond ecstatic. They could not believe that we had prepared the spaghetti with just the two of us! We then washed our hands, grabbed some gloves, and helped in serving the guests. The pasta was still hot and steamy when we removed the tin foil, and was a nice accompaniment to the pizza the shelter had ordered for dinner as well.
We had previously made the decision to serve our meal to the residents and guests at the Maxine Lewis Homeless Shelter in San Luis Obispo. After making such a large quantity of hearty spaghetti, we wanted to make sure our meal would benefit a worthy cause. When we arrived at the shelter with our three large pans of pasta, the residents were beyond ecstatic. They could not believe that we had prepared the spaghetti with just the two of us! We then washed our hands, grabbed some gloves, and helped in serving the guests. The pasta was still hot and steamy when we removed the tin foil, and was a nice accompaniment to the pizza the shelter had ordered for dinner as well.
As the guests grabbed their plates we also handed out 50 basic comment cards that included facial expressions that symbolized their thoughts on the meal, ranging from a smiley face, to a half smile in the middle, and an unhappy face. The spaghetti seemed to to be popular as guests were coming back for seconds! We then collected the comment cards and analyzed the results. The results were overwhelming positive, with a only few half smile faces in the middle, but no unhappy faces. Hooray!
The feeling I had walking away from the Maxine Lewis Memorial Homeless Shelter was indescribable. The guests, who received the food and even the staff that assisted us, were beyond grateful. They thanked us over and over again, and we left the shelter with a plan to come back. The staff informed us that most dinner meals were donated by local restaurants or by people just like us, so they depended on these donations to help fed the residents and guests.
This experience started out as simply learning how to standardize a recipe, but ended up being an incredibly rewarding experience! We were able to comfort some really great people in need with some good food. We will definitely be back….next time with a new standardized recipe!
This experience started out as simply learning how to standardize a recipe, but ended up being an incredibly rewarding experience! We were able to comfort some really great people in need with some good food. We will definitely be back….next time with a new standardized recipe!