How Military Chefs Find New Recipes, Techniques to Expand Culinary Knowledge

Military cooks and chefs often have the daunting task of cooking for hundreds, if not thousands, of their hungry counterparts. Making tasty, innovative and enjoyable meals on a massive scale isn't easy.

Luckily, military culinary specialists, as they're known, have the Armed Forces Recipe Service to use as a guide. The service's food technologists, chefs and dietitians develop recipes for dining facilities on land, at sea and on the go, and they've already mapped out how to scale-up recipes to feed large contingents.

Based at the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center's Combat Feeding Division in Natick, Massachusetts, the recipe service uses input from the Joint Service Recipe Committee to develop recipes and guidelines that are added to a digital recipe book for military cooks and chefs to expand their culinary knowledge.

The recipe service currently has an index of more than 3,300 recipe cards, which include variations of recipes and the diverse ways to cook them. Separate guideline cards give detailed advice on food preparation, including conversion charts and how to use assorted pieces of equipment, as well as explanations of how various ingredients, such as anti-browning agents, work.

"Sometimes the guideline cards can be about knife skills," said Matthew Kominsky, a Combat Feeding Division food technologist. "We also have some culinary trainings. Some of them include cooking with whole grains or … how to use other herbs, spices and flavorings to boost flavor without your fat, salt and sugar."

'Going for Green' With More Flexibility

While comfort foods like macaroni and cheese, fries and a burger will always be available, the Armed Forces Recipe Service is trying to provide more alternative, healthy options for a newer generation.

Over the past decade, the service has worked to transform its recipe collection through the Go for Green Program - a color-coded system that categorizes options much like a traffic light: green means healthy, yellow means intermediate and red leans toward the not-so-healthy options.

"We were finding that a lot of the recipes in the collection were weighted more towards that red and yellow, with a small sliver of green," Kominsky said. "So, over a five-year project, we were able to revise, update and expand the recipe collection. Now, it's … about 50% green, another 35% yellow and then 15% red."

Some of the newer additions include lean proteins such as a lemon-chive salmon, an onion-and-lemon-baked cod dish and a lean-meat Philly cheesesteak power bowl. When it comes to breakfast, service experts have also been thinking outside the box.

"Breakfast is traditionally a very heavy meal, especially in America," Kominsky said. "So, I did a quinoa and almond berry salad that's dressed with lemon and honey. It's a whole grain option, something different than, say, oatmeal."

By looking at what's trending and popular in restaurants, the service has also introduced more plant-based recipes and pushed to expand global flavors. For instance, congee, a popular Southeast Asian breakfast that's akin to rice porridge, has been added. The service also tweaked some grits recipes to mix in quinoa, adding some "stealth health," Kominsky said.

"A recipe I'm working on right now is birria-style tacos," Kominsky said. "[We're] giving soldiers a little taste of what they might find out at restaurants that they go to and bringing that into the dining facilities."

Expanding and Revising

The recipe service is also applying that outside-the-box thinking to food locations, expanding in recent years to offer service members more flexible options such as food trucks and grab-and-go kiosks.

"The Navy has a big food truck operation," Kominsky said, explaining that they're trying to make life easier for busy service members. "Where they're stationed on their Navy bases, it [can be] too labor-intensive to get to a dining facility and use some of their meal entitlements, so it's sort of like bringing the food to where the warfighter is."

Kominsky said recipes get revisited on a rolling basis every five to 10 years, especially if there's feedback.

"From 2017 to 2021, [there] was a lot of that 50s, 60s style of dining - of Jell-O treat salads and outdated combinations," Kominsky said. "We're phasing a lot of those out."

When creating a new recipe, the team will do a few small-scale tests to hone in the flavor before scaling-up to ensure it is transferable to large-scale dining facilities.

"[There are] considerations for equipment, for ingredients, for preparation techniques to make it less labor intensive," Kominsky said.

The recipes, which are available online, include options for eight-10 people, as well as the scaled-up versions.

Once Combat Feeding Division food technologists are satisfied with each recipe, trained sensory panelists - both military personnel and civilians - will test the items and provide feedback.