What's on at the university?: Canteen

Schnitzel, Bratwurst and Joppie Burger

Jonas Jansen

Business correspondent in Düsseldorf.

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Ilka Kopplin

Business correspondent in Munich.

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Gustave parts

Business correspondent in Stuttgart.

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"Semolina porridge or a piece of apple pie after a stew: I know from my home in Baden that there is something sweet at lunchtime twice a week," says Peter Bachelle, head of the kitchen at the central canteen at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.

In Mainz, the students prefer to eat hearty food, which is why he rarely includes rice pudding on the menu.

Planning the food for all Mainz canteens every day and thinking about the menus about two weeks in advance - that is a large part of his work.

"Although my office is in the kitchen, I don't even stand at the stove myself anymore, but spend most of the working day sitting at the computer," says Bachelle, who has been working here as chef de cuisine since 2008.

"Here I think about which dishes are going down well and sometimes I look at 'Chefkoch' or the menus of other universities when I'm looking for recipes." Getting his job was "very lucky";

Working hours like in the canteen don't really exist for cooks anywhere else.

"I don't work a single weekend, I'm free between Christmas and New Year's Eve and every public holiday." What exactly is cooked has changed a lot.

The schnitzel and bratwurst stayed, but otherwise the students eat a lot more vegetarian or vegan.

“Some would prefer it if we only offered vegetarian or vegan food.

But we can't do that, we have a catering mandate for all students - that means we have to please everyone." For this winter semester, however, a single canteen - the one in the Georg Forster building - was converted to a completely vegan-vegetarian offer switched.

For this, the chefs also received vegan training, for which a vegan chef came to them for three days.

For example, he and the employees cooked a vegan Joppie burger and a jackfruit burger.

"It's very popular right now, but I haven't tried it myself yet," says Peter Bachelle.

On the other hand, there is still a separate bakery on campus.

Here, a master baker and a baker make, for example, marble cake, brownies, cookies, lemon cake and also the very popular nut corners themselves. However, baking and cooking everything on campus is not possible.

"There are simply too many students eating here." Nevertheless, the number of guests in Mainz has roughly halved compared to 2019.

The chef believes that the people in Mainz will probably not reach numbers like 3,000 lunches a day, which were common before the corona pandemic.

The students have changed and now bring more food from home.

Corona is not the only crisis.

"After the start of the war in Ukraine, it was incredibly difficult to get cooking oil - for a moment we were even close to not offering any more fries." And in the energy crisis, the canteen team is now thinking about how energy is used in the kitchen can be saved - a difficult undertaking.

Part of the solution: "We'll switch on the heating trolleys and fryers later and combine cold stores."

Nuts and porridge during exam week