Those items include soups, sauces, salads (everything from beans and potatoes to chicken, tuna and pasta) and dishes like refried beans and taco meat that can easily be stirred with three-foot whisks in 150-gallon kettles.

Allen says that each army-sized batch circulates through a pasteurizing pump, which distributes the product into plastic bags that bear a product label and list of ingredients.

The bags are then stacked and stored at 30 degrees in a large refrigerator that registers a temperature rating with a central computer every 10 minutes for quality control. “They’re very cold, but they don’t quite freeze,” Allen says, demonstrating with a bag of viscous clam chowder.

Mayer points out that Legal Sea Foods uses the same process to centrally make its chowders. “The equipment is really very high tech,” he says. According to Allen, only about a dozen colleges prepare food in this fashion.

CSG takes advantage of this “cook-chill” technology to maintain and monitor freshness for the typical two-day period that the bags remain in the refrigerator. This means that Wednesday’s Alfredo sauce will be brewing on Monday.

“We try to cook as close to the date of service as possible,” Allen explains.

Before the plastic bags are shipped to the 12 houses and Annenberg, the CSG retains two small samples of each batch—one for the head chef to taste-test and sign off on and one that HUDS keeps for two weeks in the rare event that it causes a food epidemic.

SUGAR AND SPICE

In addition to producing all of Harvard’s wet food, the CSG kitchen hosts all of HUDS’ experiments in seasoning and flavor.

“Central production allows us to be consistent with our flavorings,” Allen says.

According to Mayer, Allen is the only certified research chef on any college campus, which means he incorporates an understanding of food chemistry into analyses of taste.

New vendors constantly visit the underground complex to market condensed flavoring pastes, which Allen says are the basis for many food service flavors. “We can’t actually caramelize onions for 150 gallons of French onion soup,” he explains, “but we can pick our favorite flavoring to provide the right taste.” He adds that these types of flavorings are the basis for the onion taste in Burger King’s Rodeo Burger.

The kitchen doesn’t only use synthetic spices. Allen says that HUDS recently switched to using more fresh herbs that have been flash frozen and will continue to cook with whole roasted garlic cloves, whose sweet flavor makes it “the candy of flavorings.”