Healthy school meals without the fuss

Rational’s SelfCooking Center simplifies school meal preparation

The introduction of guidelines by the previous government on Healthy Eating in Schools has meant that school caterers have been struggling to provide healthy, nutritious food that children actually want to eat. Even with the change of government in May 2010 the general trend towards providing healthy food in schools is expected to continue.
Producing healthy food has played an important role in the development of the Rational SelfCooking Center. Its Combifry baskets allow chips to be cooked so that they contain 36% fewer calories and up to 80% less fat than those cooked in a conventional deep-fat fryer.

Vegetables are cooked in their ideal cooking climate, minimizing the loss of vitamins and other nutrients, and meats suffer far less shrinkage when cooked in the SelfCooking Center, thus retaining their food values and texture.

Also totally fat-free grilling is possible in the SelfCooking Center. Special accessories with a non-stick coating mean that fat is no longer needed to prevent sticking during cooking.
Rational SelfCooking Centers are available to public sector buyers with preferential discount from Buying Solutions under framework number A1626669A.
The SelfCooking Center is a fully automatic combi-oven that makes catering easy by taking over the entire cooking process. It detects the size of the food to be cooked and the load size; then calculates the cooking time, temperature and ideal cabinet climate to optimise the cooking process.

This simplifies menu planning for school caterers and allows them the time and flexibility to place emphasis on taste and nutritional value. Because the SelfCooking Center cooks everything perfectly there is less waste, portion sizes are easy to control and ordering raw foodstuffs is more accurate.

Another feature of the SelfCooking Center that is popular with school caterers is its CareControl programme. This cleans and descales the machine fully automatically and only when it needs it. CareControl intelligently monitors what’s being cooked and for how long, telling staff exactly when to run the cleaning programme. Then all they have to do is pop a couple of special cleaning tablets into the machine at the end of the day and CareControl does the rest. The machine will be sparkling clean when catering staff return to work the next morning.