Roberto Bassi and Ilaria Rossi from Academia Barilla (part of Strength2Food partner BARILLA), visited Serbian primary school in November 2017 where they viewed kitchen facilities and met cooks. After that, Barilla developed several recipes in collaboration with a team of nutritionists from the University of Parma to help schools offer more nutritionally balanced and tasty food to children. The Parma team also developed some video shooting of the recipes with the aim of giving useful instruments to school cooks.
The Academia Barilla team will be back in Serbia at the beginning of December 2018, to deliver training in Belgrade and Novi Sad for school canteen cooks and managers, organised by the EUTA Team. A demonstration with Roberto Bassi will allow cooks to interact with him and better understand best practice for basic techniques and preparing recipes.
Academia Barilla and the Parma team developed a set of videos demonstrating cooking techniques and how to prepare healthy but appealing dishes within a canteen environment. For instance, one of the videos shows the technique for double cooking pasta, indicating the proper procedure to cook pasta in a canteen context where part of the food preparation needs to be separated from the service time. The obtained pre-cooked pasta can be stored in a fridge for up to 48 hours and then re-heated 30 seconds before serving. This procedure, which is adopted by restaurants, is a very practical technique to manage and optimise the production and distribution of several dishes in a short time, maintaining the quality and the right consistency of pasta.
