Increasing recognition of the challenges of feeding dysphagia sufferers means not only getting the texture of the meals right, but making food that looks and tastes good too.
Preparing food for people with swallowing difficulties can be a bit scary. Get the texture wrong and they could be in danger of choking, but play it too safe and you risk producing something so liquid and bland it will hardly have them licking their lips in anticipation.
And when you remember that dysphagia is most likely to occur where someone has an existing health condition, then we are talking about a group that is unlikely to have much of a sense of appetite to start with.
Premier Foods has been working to help caterers overcome the challenges of dysphagia sufferers for several years now and, to kick-start its new competition, asked me to prepare three meals using recipe cards, some simple ingredients and a few basic bits of kitchen hardware.
Now, I might have covered the catering industry journalistically for almost 20 years, but that doesn’t mean I’m much use in the kitchen. One-pot cooking across a fairly limited range is about as good as it gets at home, and most of this is done from a mixture of memory (increasingly ropey, as time passes) and rough-and-ready estimates about quantities. The end results are usually edible, so why change a winning formula?
This meant I was pleasantly surprised to find that the recipe cards supplied were easy to follow. In fact, after each dish was ready, I felt I must have missed out several steps because it all happened so quickly and easily. The same could not be said of the washing up – but ’twas ever thus in the kitchen.
As the ingredients used to create the pizza, fish pie, and scones, jam and cream were everyday kitchen items, the smell and taste held no nasty surprises. There was a comforting familiarity about them.
The texture, without doubt, is the biggest potential stumbling block whether you are approaching these things from the point of view of chef or customer.
In the event, I needn’t have worried. It reminded me of finishing off the baby food when I was feeding the kids, except that the flavours were all grown up.
How do the meals measure up to their standard-texture equivalents? There is nothing magic about these recipes. They are not the same as the standard recipes only ‘a bit softer’ – every ingredient has to meet a texture requirement at the end of the process.
What they do have going for them is a smell and flavour that is almost identical, and a presentation on the plate that has been cleverly designed to recreate the original much more closely than I would have imagined.
Most authentic were the scones. Perhaps that’s not surprising when you consider the ingredients – baked scones blended with cream and spooned into a mould, with seedless, smooth jam and clotted cream to complete the effect. Served with a cup of tea they looked and tasted a treat indeed.