How airplane meals go from fields to your fold-down tray

02 April 2017 - 02:00 By Sue de Groot
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A meal lies served in a compartment in first class on board an Emirates A380 passenger plane at the ILA 2016 Berlin Air Show.
A meal lies served in a compartment in first class on board an Emirates A380 passenger plane at the ILA 2016 Berlin Air Show.
Image: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Sue de Groot heads to Australia to find out

Airline food is not, generally speaking, the first thing on one's mind when booking a flight. But, especially on a long-haul trip, being served a delicious dinner (or lunch, or breakfast) makes an enormous difference to one's sense of wellbeing.

No one thinks much about how this food gets to the fold-down trays. The airline staff have to do the final touches in a tiny galley, which comes with its own set of challenges, but most of the work is done before the delicately balanced dinners (and lunches, and breakfasts) are loaded onto the plane.

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In the vast kitchens of Caulfield racecourse in Melbourne, Australia, Emirates regional catering manager Antony McNeil and chefs from Alpha Flight Services gave us, a group of journalists, a taste of the intricate labour that goes into every dinner (and lunch and breakfast) served on Emirates flights.

Each dish comes with a card on which there is a photograph as well as minute details of the ingredients, from the substantial bits to the garnish. Nutritional values, weights and arrangement are all finely specified.

It took us about 20 minutes, working in a group, for us to get even one tray item properly arranged to the chefs' satisfaction. With hungry passengers waiting, cabin crew have to be a lot faster.

We all felt a profound new sense of respect, not only for those who manage these tasks in the air but also for the chefs on the ground who are constantly experimenting with new ingredient combinations so that frequent fliers never get bored. They take months refining the details of each menu.

There has also been a major move towards seasonal pickings and regional food (each Australian city has its own onboard signature dish), which has resulted in partnerships with farmers and food producers who can supply the quantity and exacting quality of produce demanded by Emirates. In many cases this has enabled the suppliers to expand their operations.

Here I have looked at the three pillars of fine cuisine - bread, cheese and wine - but this symbiotic relationship extends to all sorts of producers, from beef to seafood.

Joost Heymeijer, Emirates senior vice president for catering and service delivery, says: "We are always on the lookout for new, reliable, extraordinary suppliers from more regions."

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CHEESE

Kangaroos like grapes, apparently. They hop among the vines at sunset and indulge in a cocktail of whatever cultivars happen to be hanging at a convenient height. Shiraz, pinot noir, chardonnay ... kangaroos are not fussy.

We were told this by an Australian winemaker, but we did not see any kangaroos. Perhaps because we were too busy indulging in the fruit of the vine ourselves. The closest thing to a kangaroo was Gilbert the grape hound, a Collie who lives in idyllic surrounds at Mount Mary Vineyard. Harvest season is Gilbert's favourite time of year because he loves ripe grapes, hence his name.

Having tasted Mount Mary's wines, I know just how Gilbert feels. Australia is famous for its wines and we managed to ingest a fair few of the finest in our rapid hop around the food-producing regions of Victoria and South Australia.

Mount Mary, where the same family has made boutique wines for three generations (and where Gilbert lives) is in the Yarra Valley near Melbourne. Not far away is Yarra Valley Dairy, where we stopped to meet some friendly goats and watch cheese being made.

Australia once had a huge dairy industry that supplied milk to the United Kingdom for mountains of forgettable processed cheese. Then, in 1974, the organisation later to become the European Union put trade bans in place and the market closed. As did many Australian dairy farms, except for those that began making their own cheese from their own cows.

Yarra Valley Dairy is one of several farmhouse producers in this famous food-producing area. They make all sorts of interesting ash-covered and washed-rind cheeses, but their Persian feta, packed in extra-virgin olive oil with herbs, garlic, shreds of lemon and a touch of chilli, has been a game-changer.

For the past 10 years this small artisanal producer has been supplying more than 15,000kg of Persian feta to Emirates Airlines every year, for use in on-board salads and many other dishes. This has enabled them to put in more sophisticated machinery and expand their operation somewhat, but when you visit it feels just like the modest, welcoming farmhouse it always has been. Stop for lunch. Eat cheese.

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BREAD

Bread is the best thing to have with cheese, preferably good bread, and behind an unassuming storefront in Melbourne we discovered some of the best bread in the world. Perhaps the gloved, booted and hair-netted experts who work there get used to the enveloping fragrance of warm yeast, crusty loaves and buttery croissants. The glorious smells put us visitors into a somnolent state of comfort.

This is one branch of Brasserie Bread, headed by artisan baker Michael Klausen, who works with Australian farmers who supply sustainably produced, non-GM grain that is grown, harvested and milled specifically to make single-origin sourdough bread.

"To yield the best results is to take your time, to extract all you can out of complicated and high quality ingredients," says Klausen. "It starts at the root, the health of the wheat plants, the crumble of the soil . good wheat makes good bread. Different flavours come from different strains. We know exactly where the grain in each loaf comes from."

Despite the need to bake more than 3,000 units a day, everything is still done by hand. "To remove the human element would be to lose the soul of the bread," says Klausen.

Like Yarra Valley Dairy, Brasserie Bread is an Emirates supplier, providing 10,000 slices of freshly baked sourdough bread to the airline every week. This partnership began five years ago, but the recipe, using organic flour, organic grapes (for the fermented starter) and spring water, was developed more than 21 years ago.

WINE

Which brings us back to grapes, and their charismatic juice. Choosing the best wines from Australia's myriad vineyards is a bit like, well, choosing the best wines from France, or South Africa for that matter. One of the most interesting wine-growing regions, however, is the Barossa Valley outside Adelaide in South Australia.

This area is unique in that it contains almost the only vines not affected by the phylloxera blight that caused France and almost all other world growers to uproot most of their vines in the 1890s. The ones that remain, some more than 130 years old, are lovingly tended and fiercely protected - make sure your shoes are phylloxera-free.

According to the Barossa Old Vine Charter, established in 2009, vineyards in this area must be registered by age, "so that no one considers pulling this priceless treasury of viticultural heritage from the ground again".

Ancestor vines are 125 years old or more. The charter says they "tend to be dry-grown, low-yielding vines of great flavour and intensity, and are believed to be among the oldest producing vines in the world".

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At the legendary Penfolds estate, where the juice of the grape has been fermented since the early 1800s, we were treated to a vertical tasting of the estate's flagship Grange blend. Chief winemaker Peter Gago, a legend in his own right, talked us through a series of vintages, starting in 1976. Penfolds has "proudly the world's worst wine label", he says. And they are never going to change it. Gago's advice about wine-drinking is refreshingly unpretentious. "Your favourite wine [his is the 1953 Grange] should not be one you want to share," he says. "It should be the one you drink all by yourself."

The Penfolds Bin 389 cabernet shiraz is today the best-selling wine in Australia, but there are many other barrels in their cellars.

Afterwards we had a go at making our own blend in a "laboratory" at Magill Estate Cellar Door, where groups taking part in this activity are kitted out in lab coats so they can happily splash and sip away while pouring different cultivars into test tubes and beakers. We tried to recreate Penfolds Bin 138, a blend of the region's famous varietals - shiraz, grenache and mataro (aka mourvèdre). Blending wine is much harder than it sounds, but a huge amount of fun.

The Aussie wine industry began with port - or fortified wine, as any port-style beverage from outside Portugal must now legally be called. Initially this was for medicinal uses, but fine fortifieds still form part of the industry's backbone.

At Seppeltsfield, a wine estate that recently won best tourist facility in Australia, there is a cathedral-like, oak-scented loft containing an unbroken collection of barrels of the estate's famous Para Tawny, starting in 1878 and added to each year.

These are just a few of the heady tastes to be experienced in Australia (restaurants we will save for another day). I can't claim to be an expert but it was satisfying to know a bit more about the onboard wines on the flight back home. I'd say it even made up for not seeing any kangaroos.

Sue de Groot was a guest of Emirates.

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