SWEET SUCCESS FOR SCHOOL CHEF

A Wyvern School chef has been highly commended in a nationwide competition to find the School Chef of the Year.

Ann Allan, catering manager at the Weston-super-Mare school, received praise for her dessert at the south west final, which was held in Plymouth last month.

Ann, who works for school meals contractor Edwards and Ward, went head to head with five other chefs from the region and narrowly missed a place in the national final.

Every year the Local Authority Caterers Association (LACA) organises the School Chef of the Year competition to showcase the high standard of skills and professionalism that exist within the school meals service.

The competition is open to all catering staff involved in the daily preparation of school meals.

The competition puts the planning, preparation, cooking, creativity and presentation skills of school chefs to the test and requires each entrant to produce, in just one and a half hours, a healthy balanced two-course meal comprising a main course and dessert that would appeal to eleven year olds in school.

The dishes must conform to nutritional standards and can be made up of poultry, meat, fish and non-meat proteins and cost just £1.25 pence per head to produce.

The overall regional winner was Natasha Watts from Crispin Secondary School in Somerset who goes through to the national final in Birmingham in June.

The judging panel consisted of dietician Jasmine Challis, Kathleen Jones from the Local Authority Caterers Association (LACA), Chef Rod Naylor from HMS Raleigh and Chloe Hosking and Thomas Lang who are two Year 6 pupils from Ford Primary School, Plymouth.

The judges considered flavour and presentation as well as the ability to replicate the dishes en masse in schools.