I learned how airplane food is made at Logan. I’m never complaining again

What’s the deal with airline food? A lot more than I ever imagined.

It involves a “ghost kitchen” preparing up to 12,000 meals per day, a meticulous system that tracks where every single knife is, a separate kitchen that is locked and sealed by a rabbi, transport trucks that can be raised as high as seven stories and a former “Top Chef” contestant who made her own canned brown bread for a concept meal.

I hadn’t heard of gategourmet, the world’s largest airline caterer. So when I got an invite to visit their facility at Logan Airport, I didn’t know what to expect.

Whatever, they make airplane food. How hard could that be? Get a bunch of pretzel bags. Load some Coke and ginger ale on a cart. Get some premade meals shipped in. That’s what they do, right?

The degree to which I was wrong dawned on me as soon as I stepped in the door, which had to be unlocked with a security pass. It escalated when I had to wear what they call a “ninja hair net,” which is a double hair net setup that covers my beard stubble and hair (whatever’s left of it).

For the next 90 minutes, I was guided through an intricate labyrinth of logistics responsible for prepping and cooking food that will end up being served on the plane that very same day.

It turns out that, no, things aren’t premade. They’re made right there in the kitchens. I saw employees cutting up mangos, peeling potatoes and flame-grilling steaks — all in an effort to crank out up to 12,000 meals per day.

The volume is staggering: the kitchens go through 400 pounds of carrots and 600 pounds of rice in a day. What is mind-blowing as well is the variety. At any given time, the facility has 76 kinds of spices, 20 types of yogurt and six types of olives.

You want cheese? Oh boy do they have cheese — 125 types. That includes four kinds of brie and six types of camembert.

It was like walking through a Cheesecake Factory that consists of just kitchens and walk-in freezers — with a menu that’s also ming-bogglingly large.

To be clear, the bulk of food prep done at this facility was for international flights. Sorry, you’re not getting this on your connecting flight to Charlotte.

The gategourmet facility in Boston provides catering for 12 international airlines, including Qatar Airways and Air France. They’re all airlines that, if you check into a hotel and tell staff what you flew, you’d get an, “Oh, that’s a good airline.”

Knives out? Never.

It has come to my attention that, generally speaking, airlines don’t like it when people bring sharp knives onto their planes.

Well, gategourmet has a lot of knives. It’s pretty important that none of them wind up on a plane.

So it’s a good thing that there’s an intricate system in place to stop that.

In the kitchens, there are a series of screens that display a live inventory of every knife in the facility. It shows the type of knife, the name of the employee who signed it out, where it is and when it was collected.

Then at the end of the day, every knife is put back into a locked cabinet and subject to a nightly inventory check.

It’s an intense process. But when you’re serving up to 12,000 meals a day, there’s not much room for error.

The asparagus has to be 4.0 inches long, not 4.5

At first glance, the facility responsible for feeding a plane full of cramped, grumpy passengers looks and operates like a streamlined mega-restaurant taking the world’s most ludicrous DoorDash orders.

It’s actually more complicated than that.

During our tour, we were regularly reminded of the strict guidelines that must be followed for every meal.

The first issue is temperature. Every ingredient must follow a cold temperature “chain of custody.” From receiving to storage to final process, the food cannot go over 40 degrees. If it does, staff get an alert on their phones and the food must be discarded.

Then the food gets cooked in state-of-the-art ovens that can cook four or five different recipes at one time.

After that, the food is put into a blast chiller and must go back under 40 degrees within two hours. If it doesn’t, it gets tossed.

The food stays cold until the moment it’s prepped by the staff on the airplane. When that happens, the meals have to be exactly the same for every passenger.

The meals you get on a flight are determined by the individual airline. Each customer comes to gategourmet and tells them what they want for each meal. If they want a crustless quiche for breakfast, it has to weigh an exact amount, by the gram.

The meal comes with asparagus? It has to be an exact length. If they ask for four inches and it gets cut at 4.5, that’s bad news. It won’t fit in the container.

The kitchen at gategourmet receives the menu from each airline. From there, their task is to execute it to the exact specs so that everything is ready for the crew.

“You get on board the aircraft. You think everything’s done by (the airline),” says gategourtmet chief commercial officer Chris Kinsella. “We’re almost a ghost kitchen for the airlines.”

What separates an airplane caterer from a restaurant is the wiggle room. If you go to a bistro, it’s not unusual to see someone else’s dessert and think, “Oh, that looks better than mine.”

How do you pull that off? With iPads.

The kitchen area at gategourmet consists of several stations where staff are given a “gold sample” that they need to replicate. Each station has an iPad showing exactly what needs to be made and the exact measurements that need to be used for each serving.

After that, each plate is packed up with whatever plates and silverware the airline asks for. That way, all the aircraft crew needs to do is follow the directions on the case.

From ‘haute couture’ to ‘airplane food’

So, you’re on a flight from Boston to Dublin. Who decides what goes on your plate?

Ultimately the airline does. But they get a lot of input from companies like gategourmet. They also get ambitious concepts from people like Molly Brandt.

Brandt is the company’s executive chef for culinary innovation. As a former contestant on “Top Chef,” Brandt has plenty of cooking credentials. What she doesn’t have is a background in airplane food. In fact, that’s a big reason why she got the job.

The company wants Brandt to come up with ambitious meal ideas. She calls it her “haute couture” collection, comparing the idea to that of a high-end designer.

She whips up the stuff that shows up on the runway. If the ideas resonate, they’re taken to scale by gategourmet’s 14 design chefs across the country. They’re the ones that take the idea and streamline it into something that can be cooked en masse and served on an airplane.

During our visit, we got a chance to try some New England-inspired concepts. One was a bluefish paté topped with caviar and served with brown bread. Just like the New England classic, it was cooked in a can (repurposed chickpea cans in this instance).

We also tried a “lobster roll salad,” a spruced-up take on “corn beef and cabbage” and a nifty spin on crab cakes.

Now, those plates won’t be showing up on passenger trays in economy any time soon. But the concepts may lead to something fun and new that goes out on planes.

Will gategourmet be busting out caviar and brown bread for everyone? Probably not. But a lobster roll salad? That could show up in business class. Crab cakes? That’s a reasonable seafood option.

The ideas go from Brandt to the design chefs and ultimately a series of workshops that gategourmet holds with airlines each year where they collaborate and share ideas.

A kitchen under lock and key

The airlines ultimately decide what they want to serve. But actually cooking the food and getting it onto the plane — that’s done by an easy-to-miss super-kitchen just outside the airport. Never, ever mess with the kosher kitchen.

The gategourmet facility in Boston is a flagship location for the company, which is based in Switzerland and has over 200 locations across 60-plus countries. In particular, the Logan-adjacent space specializes in kosher and halal catering.

Most food produced at gategourmet comes out of what’s called the “Western kitchen.” That serves nine of their 12 airlines out of Logan and caters to most allergies and dietary restrictions.

Except the kosher and halal. Those have their own kitchens and specially trained staff for specific airlines. For example, all food served on Qatar Airways is halal.

The kosher kitchen at gategourmet has better security than most offices I’ve worked in. On the day we visited, the kitchen was locked and sealed. There was a tarp, a metal grate and even a special seal that was secured by a third-party rabbi who was hired by the airlines.

That kitchen could not be opened until the rabbi returned to unseal it himself. Even after that, the only people allowed in that kitchen are the rabbi and kitchen staff who have received special training to work in the kosher kitchen.

Likewise, the halal kitchen is a separate operation staffed only by those who have received training to work there.

It’s not just the food that is monitored. Cutting boards, pans, silverware and other materials for the specialty kitchens are marked and cannot be used elsewhere.

This applies to everything that comes off the plane as well. Plates that were used to serve meat cannot be washed in the same place as plates that had dairy on them.

For those who follow Jewish dietary laws, this must be obvious. But for an Irish-Italian catholic kid from Massachusetts, learning about the challenges of such restrictions at such a large scale was mind-blowing.