Wherever you are sitting on the plane

Boston lobster thermidor, wagyu sirloin and red Thai curry duck are on a menu created by celebrity chefs including New York's Alfred Portale, Kyoto's Yoshihiro Murata and Sydney's Matt Moran.

But to taste some of these dishes you may have to pay as much as $6000 for a fold-out table for one. That's the price of a sleeper suite on board an A380 superjumbo with Singapore Airlines from Australia to Singapore return, and the menu is part of the luxury offering for premium passengers.

Portale, Murata and Moran are on the airline's nine-strong global culinary panel of celebrity chefs who have a kitchen cabinet full of Michelin stars between them and who are at the forefront of creating the airline's menus, not just for first and business classes, but also more basic dishes in economy.
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Carlo Cracco, a two-star Michelin chef in Milan, is the latest appointee and his classic Italian fare was rolled out on Singapore Airlines' flights in January. Celebrity chefs are a phenomenon at many airlines.

"Airline food used to have a reputation for being bland, but the quality of inflight meals has improved massively as airlines place greater importance on serving good food at altitude," he says.

Wherever you are sitting on the plane, he says, the food is a welcome distraction, especially on long-haul flights. "People get bored and look forward to the food and movies. Any interruption is welcome.

"Although our customers are flying with us to get from A to B, the inflight experience is a significant part of why they choose to fly with us. If you think back to your recent flights, more often than not great food is the most memorable part of the experience.

"Our customers have ample time to reflect on their meals and, as the popularity of cooking shows has demonstrated, expectations have only increased."

Singapore Airlines has an annual food and beverage budget of about $500 million and has a large kitchen facility at Changi Airport, where 50,000 meals are prepared daily. (Emirates has an even bigger kitchen operation in Dubai, where 175,000 meals are made each day.)

Within the Singapore facility, which I was able to tour recently, there are several specialist kitchens for different cuisines, such as Indian, halal, Japanese, vegetarian, and even dim-sum. The airline is at pains to point out that all the meals are made from fresh, seasonal produce, and all the meals are less than 24 hours old when served inflight.

It is also at pains to maintain high hygiene standards. During the inspection of the kitchens I was outfitted with a white coat, hat and face mask. Visitors also need to remove jewellery and scrub down at sinks like surgeons before passing through a wind tunnel designed to blow away any dust remnants.

"The first thing to make the headlines [and create a PR disaster for airlines] is a food-poisoning case," Freidanck says. "The second thing that will make headlines is a foreign object in the food. That's why so much care is taken."

Among all this super cleanliness, there's also an omelet station where 5000 of the egg dishes are made each day and a test kitchen that simulates an aircraft's cabin pressure, which can lead to the deprivation of a person's taste sensation by up to 30 per cent.

Apart from the volume of dishes that airlines need to turn out daily, one of their biggest culinary challenges is to overcome this distortion of the flavours of food and wine, and therefore they are careful to select meals that will reconstitute well and wines that are bold.

Freidanck says the main issue is serving meals that are moist and full of flavour. "This is why we always feature soups and salads for starters, and our ICP [international culinary panel] chefs have certainly developed a good sense of what flavours and textures are robust enough to be served on-board. The same principle applies with our wine experts, and explains why our wine selection aims for a primary fruit character."

In a painstakingly thorough process, the Singapore Airlines chefs put forward their menus to Freidanck and then each dish is analysed for ingredients and whether it will be suitable to the airline's cooking process (initial preparation of the dish at the airport's catering facility, blast chilling, then being reheated on board).

Other factors considered are the weight of the dish, and cabin crew and galley space constraints for plating up.

William Angliss food expert Felicity Fraser says that at altitude our taste buds are not as receptive, therefore it is harder to detect flavours. "The compression effect on our sinuses at altitude deadens the salt and sugar and all those things that bring the flavours out of food," she says.

One solution is to overseason the food once it arrives on your tray table, but Fraser says it also pays to keep an eye on what reconstitutes better in the aircraft kitchen.

"Then it's a matter of bringing it up to temperature quickly in regethermic-type ovens without the food stewing for a long time and drying out. It's like snap freezing, but also snap reheating."

Much fanfare is made of airline food in the annual Skytrax World Airline Awards. At Farnborough, England, last July, Malaysian Airlines won "best airline signature dish" for its first- and business-class appetiser of chargrilled beef, chicken and lamb satay sticks.

The airline serves at least 15,000 of them each day. The sticks are marinated for 18 hours in tumeric, garlic, galangal and lemongrass, and grilled on charcoal at Malaysian Airline's inflight kitchen at Kuala Lumpur before being warmed and smothered in sauce on the plane.

The Skytrax award for best economy catering was won by Singapore Airlines, best business-class catering by Swiss International Air Lines, and best first-class catering by Etihad. Despite the improved standards, indiscretions of the past are never far from the mind.

The food and travel blog Not Quite Nigella recalls a cracked, dried cannelloni on the now-defunct Air Paradise, and Fraser squirms remembering a dead cockroach in her fried rice on a Bali flight.