Why Any Kitchen Should Stay True to Ethnic Recipes

Did you ever walk your serving lines prior to the start of dinner and wonder about a particular dish, "What it that?"

On college campuses, we run several units and cook so many styles and varieties of foods that when you add up all the recipes and SOPs (standard operating procedures) we have, it’s overwhelming. Our storerooms can look like the shelves at the local grocery store.

Because they’re cooking in so many different styles and making so many different recipes - with the pressure to keep food costs down always perched on their shoulders - some cooks end up making adjustments to ingredients that just don’t make sense.

One day recently as I was looking over our serving line, I questioned a dish listed as Vegetable Chow Mein. The concoction was sautéed vegetables topped with crunchy noodles. What was that all about? The team had chosen to take the easy road and just create what they thought Vegetable Chow Mein could be using the ingredients we already had in house. They did not want to have order another noodle, the soft noodles traditionally used for chow mein (chow mein with crunchy noodles is more of an American tradition).

What’s the difference? they asked. Well, our students - your customers - are smarter than that, I told them. They watch The Food Network, they travel, and they understand taste and flavor. Plus, we should never put our name on the food unless we believe in it.

This bastardizing of recipes doesn’t just happen in campus dining but also in many noncommercial kitchens and even in commercial kitchens. As the world grows smaller thanks to better transportation methods, we can receive the ingredients we need to follow the recipes for ethnic dishes accurately. If Vegetable Chow Mein is on the menu, then you’d better have the correct chow mein noodles.

Be true to cultural heritages and recipes, and make an effort to understand the history of a particular food instead of just finding a cool recipe in a book and putting it on your menu. We’ve since taken that "chow mein" off our menu, and it won’t be back until we can do it right.