Kitchen Call Outs The Importance of Last Bite the with Chef Sharon Schaefer
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out Behind You keeps moving at a normal safe pace and all other coworker(s) stay stationary. This is key; everyone needs to know to stay in place and work fairly still to allow the person on the move to navigate the kitchen without obstacles. Hot Behind You and Sharp Behind You are used in the exact same way but add another detail of the hazard by sharing that the person on the move has hot pans or sharp knives in hand.
As a chef I started learning call outs early on in my career. Even if you’ve never used a kitchen call out, the concept is familiar to most thanks to TV shows like Top Chef, Hell’s Kitchen and others. The culinary team often calls orders and the line hollers back a hearty “Yes, Chef!” Chefs can definitely be prone to the dramatic (I say lovingly as one of them) but in this case call outs are not created for TV drama, they are an important communication system. Looking beyond the familiar “order up” and “Yes, Chef ”, the most important calls to implement in your school kitchens right away are “behind you” and “coming through.” These two call outs are designed with kitchen safety in mind. Kitchens are busy places with lots of hazards. Hot pans, knives, and equipment are obvious safety issues. One risk that is often over-looked is simply our coworkers and the fact that we all move around in a fairly small space. Each person in a school kitchen has an important role and is on the move. This presents the opportunity to collide, bump, step back into, trip over, you name it. . . we’ve all been there right in the way of a coworker’s path and vice versa. Since the eyes in the back of our heads seem to only work for our own children, a different approach is needed in our kitchens. Making your unpredictable movements predictable by communicating well takes that potential hazard and transforms it into part of your school kitchen’s strong safety efforts.
Shout Out to The Lancer Eats Team Thank you, Laurel Presher and your team for all the great work feeding our kiddos during these
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Coming Through • Hot Pans Coming Through
Shout Out to the BPS Chartwells Dream Team
Coming Through is used to announce yourself when you are approaching doorways, coming around corners, or navigating crowds. This important call out helps everyone avoid kitchen blinds spots. Pushing rolling carts of hot food or even carrying one pan can create an unwelcome surprise around a blind corner. Transform that scary moment and potential drop, spill, or crash into a well-heard announcement. Just like the previous call out, Coming Through puts the announcer in the driving seat and on the move. A coworkers response to Coming Through is very different from the previous freeze tactic. If you are not the person that made the call out, you should move out of the way. Hot Pans Coming Through can alert others to simply step out of the way and provide safe passage. Sounds simple enough, right? As in all communication if you’re not speaking the same language, nothing is happening. Implementing these two types of call outs should be practiced with staff and reinforced regularly. To get started role play is one of the best methods to simulate how and when to call out to each other. Recreate common situations in each kitchen that collisions can occur and practice together letting different people call out and respond appropriately. Make sure after Behind You everyone freezes and after Coming Through everyone moves out of the way of blind spots.
challenging times. The families in our
Our Dream Team has served
community are most grateful!
100,000s of meals in snow, sleet, rain and sun. With a little bit of Pattie’s positive pixie dust we all keep big smiles on our faces! The Dream Team loves feeding all the
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kids in our community healthy nutritious meals. Thank you Dream Team Love Pattie Guck Director of Dining Birmingham Public Schools Michigan. Submitted by Pattie Guck
Submitted by Anonymous
Behind you • Hot behind you • Sharp behind you
You Did It! We want to give a huge shout out to all of the operators for making it through 2020! You guys are the heart of child nutrition! Keep up the good work!
Use a hearty call of BehindYou to announce your presence. It might be your natural habit when someone is behind you to try to step out of their way, but in a kitchen, this can lead to a dangerous collision. The person that calls
Shout Out to the Lunch Ladies at Bunker Hill CUSD8! These ladies have ROCKED this CRAZY school year! They are 100% dedicated to our students. They have done an awesome job of being flexible and ready to go at every curve we have taken! They are always ready to jump in and rock out every wild/last minute addition I throw at them. I thank them from the bottom of my heart!
Resident Chef, NxtGen Network; Owner of Evolution of a Lunch Lady, LLC Director of Food & Nutrition Services, Gretna Public Schools Since childhood Sharon was on a quest to make healthy food taste great! That love of all things delicious led her to The Culinary Institute of America. After completing her externship at The Food Network, Sharon discovered a world of how to share great food through media.
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Submitted by Rachelle
Owner of Evolution of the Lunch Lady, LLC, and Director of Food and Nutrition Services for Gretna Public Schools, Chef Sharon Schaefer, SNS frequently takes her culinary chops and K12 experience on the road as a highly sought after Key Note Speaker and school nutrition trainer. Sharon Schaefer, SNS
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