Cooks in a Long Island City kitchen whip up dishes to be taste-tested for school cafeterias, including jerk chicken thighs.

With meatless Mondays and plant-powered Fridays on the calendar, it’s not your nostalgic French bread pizza and a cookie school lunch.

What You Need To Know

  • The city has a test kitchen where it tries out new recipes for school cafeterias 

  • The dishes, like pineapple medley rice and kidney bean rajma, have to receive approval from student tasters before they're put in schools

  • The menu included dumplings, a kidney bean rajma served with naan, and jollof cauliflower, a play on the Nigerian dish jollof rice

Dishes have gotten more exciting — after making it through the education department’s test kitchen.

“Everything on the menu, the students have had to say, yes we like it, and if they don’t — we have to go back to the drawing board and figure out why,” said Lisa Davis, coordinator of kitchen learning and development for the DOE’s Office of Food and Nutrition Services, or OFNS.

Usually, the room outside the test kitchen is full of kids on field trips to test new recipes. But on Thursday, the education department invited members of the media to give school lunches a try.

“You get to be a kid again — they said we couldn’t do it, but here we are,” Davis joked.

The kitchen sent out eight dishes to try — everything from the jerk chicken to bean tacos with salsa and guacamole to a pineapple medley rice.

Staff also provided reporters with the same scoring sheet students use to provide feedback.

“Having children here — that’s the higher pressure situation. This is the food that they eat every single day. We really want to have their feedback to have a successful menu,” said Christopher Tricarico, senior executive director of OFNS.

Emily Logan is one of the chefs who helps develop the menu. She gets to combine her love of cooking with the good work of feeding children.

“I could sit here and make the best dish in the world, but if I’m the only one who likes it, it’s not worth it. They have to like it. They have to want to eat it,” Logan said.

Students will be exposed to recipes from all over the world. The menu included dumplings, a kidney bean rajma served with naan, and jollof cauliflower, a play on the Nigerian dish jollof rice. That may seem ambitious, but for plenty of kids, it’ll taste like home.

“It’s one of the most diverse, if not the most diverse, city in the world and we want to make sure our menu represents that,” Davis said.