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What does it take to get Airline food off the ground

Every day at 10am, Calvin Soo sits down to a very large meal. He eats, or rather, takes small bites of, all the 25 different dishes on budget airline AirAsia’s Santan menu, tasting each element carefully.

“You get very used to the taste profile this way, so if there is even a slight variance in seasoning, we can detect it instantly. Every day, we have to make sure that the quality is at its best,” he says.

Soo is the resident chef at AirAsia and is responsible for the conceptualisation of all the dishes on the airline’s menu – from snacks like curry puffs and sandwiches to main meals like the famous Pak Nasser’s Nasi Lemak, Uncle Chin’s Chicken Rice, Nasi Dagang, Shepherd’s Pie and even desserts like the newly-introduced Chocolate Mousse.

Only 28, Soo has already chalked up quite a bit of experience, including being a chef-lecturer at HELP College as well as working at celebrity chef Emmanuel Stroobant’s restaurant Saint Pierre in Singapore.

He says that although his job is really exciting, there are a lot of challenges and limitations to what he can and cannot put on a menu. There are things he has to take into consideration that restaurateurs on-ground never, ever have to worry about.

Like the fact that a combination of dryness and low pressure in the cabin reduces the sensitivity of taste buds to sweet and salty foods by around 30%, which means every single dish has to more intense than it would be at ground level.

Or the fact that leafy vegetables are generally a no-no as these greens cannot withstand the chilling and re-heating process necessary in airline food procedures.

Anna Olsen is inspired by Asian Food

It is 11.30am on a sunny Tuesday morning and I am hovering over a hot stove, staring intently at the bubbling contents inside – a medley of rice, coconut milk and shrimp. I have never cooked a risotto before and have been paired with three other girls who – as luck would have it – have also never cooked the dish before. We are using a combination of common sense and our wits to forge ahead, but anxiety is still omnipresent in the kitchen. Then, like a ray of sunshine, Canadian celebrity chef Anna Olson walks by, a wide, disarming smile adorning her face. “Ooh, that looks lovely. You guys are doing a fantastic job,” she says. Instantly, spirits lift and we all do an internal high five. It isn’t every day you get a chef, much less a celebrity chef, all to yourself for a masterclass and if she says you’re doing a good job, well, don’t change anything you’re doing! “This isn’t so difficult after all,” I think to myself as I ladle out hot, heaping spoonfuls of the finished risotto and marvel at the fact that this velvety soft, delicious dish has been made from scratch by culinary neophytes.