The food factories

Why are so many restaurant desserts bought in? Thanks to an industry that also sells prepared starters, chopped veg and even pre-cracked eggs, writes Fiona McCann

Inside an inconspicuous grey building in Inchicore, a warren of white-coated workers are cranking out chocolate cakes and apple crumbles at dizzying speed. Icing is spread, cream slathered and chocolate piped over about 160 individual portions of puddings and sweets every hour. This is Couverture, a company that makes 13,000 desserts a day, most of which are to be frozen and ferried out to restaurants and hotels all over Ireland.

It used to be that choice on an Irish restaurant menu was between a starter of melon balls, or prawn cocktail on a bed of limp lettuce, an overdone steak for dad in congealed pepper sauce, chicken and chips for the kids, and if mam was feeling indulgent, a slice of sugary apple tart for dessert with a shot of instant coffee.

Who could fail to recall the delights of restaurant dining in Ireland in the days when tigers were Asian and jobs were abroad? There were exceptions, true, but only to prove the rule, and the Irish palate, held hostage for so long by such grim gastronomy, developed a kind of Stockholm Syndrome-type loyalty to it.

However, the nation got richer, travelled much, tasted more, and the variety of the cuisine available in Ireland increased exponentially. Or so we're told.

Those of a sweet-toothed disposition were probably first to recognise that the "variety" did not always extend to the end of the meal. Dessert fans are all too familiar with how menus in different restaurants appear alarmingly similar. Then starters seemed to follow suit, as pâtés and even such delicacies as duck confit, became more and more standardised.

So if they're all beginning to look the same, who is responsible? What's going on in restaurant kitchens, or more importantly, what's going on outside them? A visit to Pallas Foods provides some of the answers. One of the country's largest food distributors, Pallas services restaurants and hotels all around Ireland and in the UK. Its main hub is a sprawling warehouse in Newcastle West in Limerick, crammed full and whirring with conveyor belts as food products are sent to more than 6,000 kitchens here and in Britain. Much of it is raw produce, but beside the racks of lamb and cuts of beef stacked and sorted on endless shelves are a plethora of other products that reveal a whole new story about how much Irish kitchens rely on distributors such as this to serve up meals for which they then often take full credit.

Sacks of pre-peeled potatoes, packages of pre-chopped vegetables and buckets of liquid egg - that's egg that has already been cracked and beaten - reveal the number of short cuts available to Irish kitchens, and judging by the bulging shelves of Pallas foods, many are only too happy to take them.

But for Pallas's development manager Patrick Clement, a French-born chef, the availability of so many pre-prepared items is inevitable in a country where the exploding demand for dining out has created a dearth of skilled kitchen staff. He also makes it clear that while many chefs still create meals from scratch, others resort to the kind of pre-prepared produce that is alarming foodies all over Ireland, but for very practical reasons.

"The higher you go in restaurants, the more skilled the kitchen is going to be. They'll buy the raw ingredients," he says, but adds that, because space is at a premium, the average sandwich bar or cafe has neither the room nor the money to pay staff to peel potatoes, chop vegetables or even crack eggs. So in a factory elsewhere, someone - or some machine - does it for them, and as Clement points out, the short cuts have other advantages too.

"If you bring in a bag of potatoes with dirt and everything you have the problem of dirt coming into the kitchen. But if you buy them peeled, you have less," he says. But it becomes steadily clearer during a wander through the Pallas warehouses that many restaurants in Ireland are not only supplied with the kind of prepared ingredients that do away with the need for a commis chef, but also with entirely finished products that simply require reheating or cooling before ending up on your plate.

"We sell pesto," says Clement to illustrate the range of needs that Pallas caters to, "but we also sell the basil, the oil, the pine nuts to make your own pesto. You can get the finished product dessert, or all the ingredients to make that dessert."

WHICH BRINGS US back to desserts, the first casualty in the labour and time-saving corner-cutting that many Irish restaurants are opting for.

One of Pallas Foods' many suppliers is the Dublin-based outfit Couverture, a small dessert-making company headed up by sisters Margaret Lynch and Geraldine O'Connor and their friend Celine Hayes, which first began manufacturing high-end desserts for restaurants and hotels almost 10 years ago.

With an ever-expanding range of products to reflect Ireland's changing tastes, it is cheering to see the appearance of novelties such as an orange and ginger Bavarois on a list that for the most part is comprised of cliched dessert staples such as the ubiquitous tiramisu, Black Forest gateau and Baileys cheesecake. "The regular products such as banoffee, cheesecake, tiramisu - you always have to have those," explains O'Connor, before Lynch interjects: "But we make really good ones!"

She's hit on the key concern for those who worry that pre-made desserts - frozen almost as soon as they're baked - could mean a loss of quality and could lead to the inclusion of artificial additives to maintain a longer shelf-life.

"We don't use colourings, flavourings or preservatives," Lynch says as we tour the small Inchicore factory. Yet, despite the vast quantity, these desserts are still for the most part handmade, with the only machines visible on the busy factory floor an enormous icing bag, which pipes specific amounts of thick chocolate icing on to a tantalising stack of chocolate cake, and a gigantic whisk. The numbers are telling: it's clear that thousands of restaurants around the country are allowing the likes of Couverture to take over where pastry chefs formerly reigned.

THE QUESTION IS whether or not such a production line necessarily means that the sweet-toothed are being short-changed. Should we be moaning the dearth of skilled pastry chefs? Or celebrating this industrious little plant for a consistency of which they are deservedly proud. "If you're relying on pastry chefs, your dessert might look very home-made but the quality isn't guaranteed," says Lynch.

Even with strict quality controls and a commitment to natural, local products where possible, if so many restaurants are ordering the finished product when it comes to dessert, the danger is that our options when we dine out will become increasingly limited. Even the Taoiseach, it appears, has encountered this problem, with O'Connor recounting how, on one particular day, Bertie Ahern attended three different functions, all of which were offering Couverture sweets.

According to Michelin-starred chef Derry Clarke, of L'Ecrivain in Dublin, restaurants in Ireland have long been buying in finished products, with bread an obvious example. "It's always happened, though maybe not on the scale it is nowadays," says Clarke, who points to labour costs as the reason why mid-range restaurants buy in pre-made items such as desserts. "The reason why they're doing it straight off is labour costs, and the hardest area to sort in the kitchen is the pastry section," he says. "We have four people employed in that area, which is four salaries."

Though everything at L'Ecrivain is made on the premises, he says Irish diners aren't always willing to pay the price that a freshly produced dessert entails. When you go out and have a three-course meal, he says, "you'll never want to pay the same price for the dessert despite the fact that to do a very good dessert can be as much if not more work than the other two courses."

While those at Couverture attempt to bring a sense of the home-made to Irish dessert plates, it turns out they don't crack their own eggs either. What becomes increasingly clear is that, before you sink your fork or teeth into a slice of chocolate torte, there's been a whole series of assembly lines involved, cracking eggs, crushing the biscuit, shaping the chocolate, and shipping it out before it is neatly arranged on a plate and ferried through the swinging kitchen doors.

But are we suffering as a result? Not necessarily, if local manufacturers such as Florrie Purcell of Scullery Fine Foods are to be believed. Her high-end, carefully crafted relishes and compotes are distributed by Pallas to restaurants all over the country. "I wouldn't be able to get out to the market without Pallas on board," she says.

So maybe some chefs aren't making their own cheesecakes, and cheesecake makers aren't cracking their own eggs, but this may not mean Irish taste buds are getting a raw deal. With distributors such as Pallas attending farmers' markets regularly to find new local suppliers, and traceability regulations strictly adhered to by suppliers, the days of melon balls may well be behind us for good.