HOT, tasty and convenient – food on the go is one of the few things bucking
the economic downturn.
Last week High Street bakers Greggs revealed their sales have gone up by 5.1
per cent and they plan to open 90 more shops in the UK. At McDonald’s – the
king of the fast food chains – visits were up 90million in 2011.
Yesterday we reported that, for the first time, more than half of meals eaten
out in the UK are fast food, which accounts for 5.54BILLION meals a
year in the UK.
Blur rocker and Sun food columnist ALEX JAMES visited McDonald’s and Greggs
sites to follow the factory-to-food process of an iconic Big Mac and a
sausage roll. He also spent a day cooking up fried chicken at KFC.
Here, he reveals the secrets behind the speedy specials we can’t seem to
get enough of.
Greggs
CHIEF executive Ken McMeikan invited me to see Greggs’ brand new £16.4million
super bakery in Gosforth, just outside Newcastle.
There are ten Greggs super bakeries like this around the UK, supplying bread
and sweet goods to all the stores surrounding them.
But there is only one Greggs sausage roll factory for the whole country, next
door to the Gosforth bakery, which I also had a look in.
I liked Ken — he’s passionate about Greggs and clearly loves his work. His
first job was in the Royal Navy for five years. He said: “The services
taught me the importance of teamwork, preparation and planning.”
And getting the chance to get the bonnet up and see how the Greggs machine
ticks was brilliant.
From a development kitchen with top chefs — including the man who invented the
best-selling Jaffa Cake doughnut — to vast distribution networks to staff
training, Greggs is a many-headed monster.
But in the end it boils down to lots of people getting up early and working
really hard.
There is a lot of love in the UK for Greggs. With 1,571 shops they have more
branches than McDonald’s but they’re British and based in Newcastle, so it
doesn’t feel threatening or as if Americans are telling us what to eat.
In the age of the internet, hot food businesses are thriving, because unlike
music or media you can’t get a hot pasty for free online. Yes, big business
can be a bad thing, but only if it’s bad. The little bakery in my local
village offers goods too sweet and sugary and is massively over-priced.
I can think of much worse things than a Greggs opening up there.
Greggs also make 90 per cent of what they sell, which gives them flexibility
to change and supplement their ranges.
For example, in Newcastle’s Northumberland Street shop they sell flat Stottie
cakes and Stottie sandwiches with ham, pease pudding and tomato relish.
Delicious — the tomato chutney really lifts it.
If you want to compete on the High Street in 2012 you have to be brilliant,
and at 66p, the Greggs sausage roll is a British battleship.
The factory visit was real Willy Wonka stuff — the best food factory I’ve ever
been to, and I’ve been to a lot. There were huge conveyor ovens, and seeing
the dough go in at one side and come out as a loaf was like a reverse domino
effect.
Doughnut waterfalls tipped dough into sizzling oil to crisp them to perfection
and a sausage roll machine — as big as a football pitch and more than 1km
long — folded the pastry 92 times before squirting sausagemeat in.
I iced triple chocolate cupcakes with an enormous icing bag full of chocolate
cake topping and I squirted jam into doughnuts using a machine controlled by
a foot pedal.
Greggs are trying to provide healthy options too, with porridge at breakfast
time, low-fat sandwiches and fruit.
But after having tasted one of their outstanding bacon rolls I won’t be
ordering porridge. A bacon roll and a coffee costs you £2.15 — compare that
to a small takeaway cappuccino in Caffe Nero at £1.85 and you can see why
Greggs are winning.
I was treated to a huge spread of all the products Greggs have to offer — from
ham, leek and cheese bakes to gingerbread men. It was a party right in front
of me. I’ve been to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant and had a tasting menu for
upwards of £50 and it wasn’t that much fun.
And after seeing how they do things, it makes it more likely that I will eat
there, not less.
I just wish they made pork pies too.
McDonald’s
MY day with McDonald’s was absolutely brilliant.
I wanted to look at the whole supply chain, from cow to Big Mac, so we started
at a massive building with lorries sticking out of it in Scunthorpe, North
Lincs.
This is the factory, run by a company called OSI Food Solutions, where THREE
MILLION burgers a day are made for McDonald’s.
It’s the size of five football pitches inside and processes 380,000 cattle a
year. All the beef is British or Irish and comes from 17,000 farmers.
It’s full of different cuts — including neck and flank.
The overwhelming thing is the stench. When you go to the docks it smells of
fish. This was the same but with an overpowering smell of beef — a beefy
docks.
All three million burgers produced here every day have to be the same and
McDonald’s have made it into an art form.
There’s a huge mince masher which you really don’t want to fall into, chewing
up big rocks of fresh and frozen beef.
They have to get the fat content perfectly balanced, at around 20 per cent, as
the burgers aren’t cooked in the restaurants using oil, and using fresh and
frozen beef binds them together. There’s nothing else in a burger except
beef.
It’s like magic seeing how the process binds together a perfect quarter
pounder, which pops out of a conveyor belt at the other end.
It’s then blasted with liquid nitrogen (Heston Blumenthal got the idea from
them, not the other way round) and deep frozen before being eaten somewhere
around the UK within 14 to 20 days.
If you think about how long burgers knock around in your freezer, that’s
pretty good going.
Every half hour a burger is picked off the production line and tested in the
kitchen at the back. The testers have a checklist which includes sear
evenness, juiciness and chewiness. They tasted good to me even though it was
8am.
The equipment is dazzling, with a huge George Foreman-type grill which cooks
the burger from the top and the bottom — no one actually flips burgers any
more.
It’s a pretty simple thing they’re doing but McDonald’s have totally mastered
it.
Next we went on to Manor Farm in Spilsby, Lincs, run by farmer Rob Neave and
his family. The farm has been in his family for more than 120 years and
around 60 of his cows are sold to McDonald’s every year.
Next stop was a backstage visit to a McDonald’s in Leicester’s Fosse Shopping
Park, one of 1,196 branches in the UK.
Backstage was brilliant. There’s some fantastic gear there and in some ways
it’s very similar to a Michelin-starred restaurant.
When it’s busy in a Michelin kitchen, all the chefs are doing is putting
pre-prepared parts of a meal together, which is essentially the same as
McDonald’s.
There’s a mayo gun which gives you the right serving with just one squeeze of
the trigger. The bun is toasted in a mega toaster which leaves it crunchy
but fluffy.
They gave me a bag of the seasoning which goes on a Big Mac and I’ve been
using it to flavour my home-made bread.
It’s awesome and, according to McDonald’s, contains just salt and pepper.
You have just the right amount of chopped onion and just two pieces of
gherkin… writing this makes me want to eat one straight away.
McDonald’s served 90million more people in 2011 than they did in 2010 and
after seeing how dazzling the business is I don’t think there’s anything
sinister about that.
I asked the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) what their main concerns are
about eating McDonald’s and fast food in general and they said that it
doesn’t satisfy your appetite so you eat more.
McDonald’s is also lacking in fibre and the BNF said it should only be eaten
“occasionally”.
They couldn’t tell me what “occasionally” meant, but we all know it means less
than once a week.
My day with McDonald’s didn’t put me off eating there at all.
I was dazzled by the whole process from farm to factory to burger.
Yes, a Big Mac has 490 calories, 24g fat and it will give you heart disease
and make you fat — but only if you have them all the time.
A McDonald’s cheeseburger costs 99p. What else can you get for 99p? Actually,
a tin of sardines is 49p and eating that with a chunk of rye bread in bed in
the dark is pretty spectacular.
But I know what my kids would prefer.
KFC
I’M backstage at a KFC in Reading.
It’s hot, noisy and everything happens fast. I’m wearing rubber boots, latex
gloves and an apron and I’m up to my elbows in a big tub of the Colonel’s
“secret recipe”.
Which is a bit of nonsense, of course. It would be easy to create something
fairly similar to the “secret” flour mixture. I’d be tempted to add a bit of
rosemary if I was doing it at home.
What would be harder to recreate is the cooking gear. The high-temperature
pressure fryers that produce crispy, juicy meat are the Colonel’s real
secret.
The tray of chicken descends into hot rapeseed oil and after 15 minutes they
are lifted to drip dry.
My wife Claire doesn’t like the kids eating KFC because she thinks it’s
unhealthy. You’d certainly be mad to eat there all the time but there’s
nothing wrong with it as a treat. KFC are obviously responding to a demand
for healthier food. They were excited about their new braiser oven, for
non-fried chicken breast.
I was impressed with how smoothly the operation ran.
A clever recipe, cutting-edge technology and good training. Plus, they put it
in a nice box.
Now I’ve seen how it works I’m going to try Kentucky Fried grouse at home this
weekend.
The Sun