A Sneak Peek Inside the JetBlue Mint Test Kitchen
“Are you interested in our tasting this morning?” my bespectacled flight attendant in JetBlue’s Mint class asked me once we were 35,000 feet into the air. “It’s a caramelized pineapple and banana smoothie.”
Of course I wanted to try the tasting item.
It was delicious.
It’s been one year since JetBlue launched its premium Mint service for flights across the country between New York and San Francisco or Los Angeles, and since then the airline has been lauded for having some of the best food in the domestic premium space.
Saxon + Parole chef Brad Farmerie crafts an eggplant mousse for the new JetBlue Mint menu. (Photo: Jo Piazza)
This praise is due largely to Brad Farmerie, the chef for Manhattan restaurant Saxon + Parole and the creator of the Mint menu. The food in Mint is a little different from what you would expect in premium class on a plane. It’s typically tapas style, with several dishes instead of one fancy main. Current courses include a fontina-stuffed gnocchi, an herb-crusted monkfish, and a brioche French toast.
Related: JetBlue Teaches Passengers to Be Less Rude
As Mint approached its one-year anniversary, the airline made the call to revamp its menu and create 25 new dishes.
It all started a couple of months ago when the airline’s product team convened a meeting to go over customer feedback about the menu. What did customers love to eat at 30,000 feet? What did they hate? What did they want more of? Less?
Turns out the folks traveling from LAX to JFK wanted more poultry dishes. They wanted healthier options. They wanted more hot dishes. They wanted less pork.
And so JetBlue took all of the dishes from the Saxon + Parole menu and ranked them based on how easy they would be to prepare in the air. For example, fried chicken was knocked out in the first round. You can’t prefry it and then reheat it on the plane. It just doesn’t work. And while Farmerie is bullish on the re-creation of a seafood tower in-flight, the JetBlue team just isn’t sure of the best way to dispose of the shells in the air.
Related: Inside the Quirky World of a JetBlue Superfan
The next step was a bit of a kitchen boot camp. Farmerie and the Mint chefs from JFK, LAX, and SFO gathered for a Mint menu meeting at the commercial kitchen a couple of miles from LAX.
Each airport kitchen tested different recipes. (Photo: Jo Piazza)
They invited Yahoo Travel to watch while they spent three days creating an exacting recipe playbook for the upcoming year in Mint class.
The “recipe bible” specifies the exact brand of products and the exact cut of the vegetables in each recipe. Things are measured and weighed. They are tasted over and over again. Each of the chefs makes changes to the recipe page until they reach a consensus.
They whittle away recipes that don’t work, sometimes arguing among themselves about what does and doesn’t work.
We watched as the chefs meticulously created an in-flight eggplant mousse.
Crafting a recipe in the air isn’t easy.
“The flavors have to punch more. When we first started this project, we saw that statistically you lose 20 percent of your taste and smell at that altitude,” Farmerie explained.
All of the elements needed to make the perfect eggplant mousse. (Photo: Jo Piazza)
Crafting the perfect mix of ingredients with a little extra punch is incredibly important to make sure the recipe will taste the same in the air as it does on the ground.
“We want to make sure the flavors are very on-point. You want to eat it with your eyes so it has to be beautiful, but the flavors have to come through and have nice pops so it isn’t a boring dish,” Farmerie said. “Every bite should be something exciting.”
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