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Breakfast Over Easy The Dawn of a new breakfast: Are convenience foods measuring up? By Elizabeth Pollock To use or not to use? This is the question we posed to a number of chefs. The subject of the inquiry was not existence, but convenience breakfast products. More and more of these products appear on the market each year, from liquid eggs to frozen croissant dough to pancake mix. Chefs are varying levels of comfort with using such products. Some depend on them. Others steer clear altogether. Many, of course, fall in-between. Circus Circus Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas does between 3,000 and 5,000 covers every morning at its all-you-can eat breakfast buffet. With this kind of volume, convenience products are a matter of survival. "About 40% of what we serve is a prefab, ready to go, rock-and-roll type of product," says Executive Chef John dill. "When you deal with these kinds of numbers, any less would be suicidal." Safety is another issue. "There’s no way we can safely and consistently shell our own eggs," says Dill. "We use liquid eggs, because from a sanitation standpoint, safety is a big issue. Whereas in a normal restaurant, you might have one person a year that would get ill, you take that same microscopic percentage for our numbers, and you're talking five or six people a year. That would be disastrous for business. So we use all pasteurized egg products and take that risk out." What about disadvantages? "There aren't too many downsides to the products I'm using," says Dill. 11 For smaller operations, they might be cost-prohibitive, but we can buy at a volume where it's even cheaper than if we made them ourselves." As for the quality of available products, Dills says it's going up ... and down. "We're getting a wider band of products to choose from in any price range," he says. "We spend a lot of time and effort to find products that are a good quality at a good price." Dill adds homemade touches to the buffet, which he says go a long way toward raising the perceived quality of the overall breakfast. "We make our corned-beef hash, country gravy and salsa from scratch," he says. "We can't produce the waffles or the cheese omelets, but the little things we can produce carry the most weight and go the distance as far as customer appreciation." At the other end of the convenience spectrum is Angelo's, a small family-run operation in Ann Arbor, Mich., with a big reputation for home-cooked breakfasts. Owner Stephen Vangelatos attends restaurant trade shows and is well aware of convenience options, but prefers to do without them. "We don't go for any of that precooked stuff," he says. "They're always trying to sell it to you, products that will save you time, give you shortcuts. But we don't really pay much attention. You can get precooked sausage, frozen bread, it doesn't end. A salesman came in here yesterday and tried to tell me I should put in a coffee machine and make coffee out of powder. I mean, is this a gas station? It's ridiculous." Angelo's has been in the family for 42 years. Vangelatos learned how to cook from his dad, and still bakes all the bread himself. Loyal, customers are willing to wait in the two-hour lines that form every weekend, waiting for a taste of the french toast made from Vangelatos' cinnamon-raisin bread. Will the restaurant ever start using convenience products to ease the burden of making everything from scratch? "Well, this is a hard business to make money in," says Vangelatos. "Every week in Ann Arbor there's a new restaurant, it's really competitive." But for him, making from scratch is a matter of "In a place like ours, people expect it to be from scratch," he says. At Torreyana Grill in La Jolla, California, Executive Chef Riko Bartolome takes a philosophic approach. " I don’t make everything from scratch any more," he says. "You gotta be smart. If some things can be made for you that’s great. There are some other things that might inhibit the integrity of the food you want to put out, then you make those on your own. For instant, I would never use something like instant hollandaise; we have to make that from scratch." Pastries are one product that Bartolome always buys premade. "That's a labor thing," he says. "Labor costs a lot in the in the industry, so if you spend a little more on your food costs, but can buy the labor from someone else, then you’re saving. We usually have one breakfast cook. If we made everything ourselves, I'd need two." BALANCING COST, QUALTIY AND CONVENIENCE To use or not to use? California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, part of students' is getting ready to face this choice. "We teach them to make wise choices in terms of convenience products," explains director of faculty Greg Tompkins. "For instance, we’ll show students how to make their own marzipan or apricot filling, then we’ll show them a top bran Germany and say, 'Look, is the quality of what you just made better then what I'm going to show here? Certainly your own, but is it going to be worth it to incur the labor costs?' We give them a lot of options like that. It's done not to show them particular brands, but to introduce them day-to-day choices they'll make in the industry." For most, the question boils down to quality. Even Dean Fearing at Dallas's The Mansion on Turtle Creek isn't above using a convenience product if it tastes good enough. "We use a pancake and waffle mix, a little private brand called Carbon's Malted Pancake and Waffle Flour," he says. "We still mix in fresh eggs, milk, butter, all of that, but the time saver is you don't sift the dry ingredients. The pancakes are just as delicious as from scratch. And when you're using real grade-A Vermont maple syrups, that's when things can't go too bad." "Operators cannot sacrifice quality for convenience," sums up Elizabeth Goodgold, a Chicago-based food consultant and president of Good as Gold Marketing. "The consumer demands a great product. Especially in the baked-goods category, with all the increased competition, the bar has really been raised. Also, consumers are willing to indulge, and operators can tie into a key trend by offering a superior product. Just make sure the convenience products you use are very, very good. You can't fool the consumer when it comes to taste. No one's going to spend extra money on something mediocre. But if you do offer an extraordinary product, the rewards are there. You can offer it, charge more for it, and all that boils down to increasing your profitability." The art is in choosing the product that best meet your criteria. As Bartolome says, "Some brands are great and others aren’t. To me, it doesn’t matter if it tastes like it’s from scratch, just as long as it tastes good." The food magazine for professionals Chef February 1998. Reprinted with permission.
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