Ferry van Daal
Ferry van Daal embraces today’s diverse food culture with healthier, sustainable dishes - powered by Debic Végétop as his go-to base for soups and sauces.
Our food culture has changed.
Ferry van Daal likes to add an Indian touch to his dishes whenever he can. This is out of respect for his grandfather, who was originally from Molucca. These days he also aims to make his dishes healthier and more sustainable. One place where he does that is the company restaurant of his client SAP. Ferry uses Debic Culinaire Végétop as a versatile base for his soups and sauces.
If you ask Ferry van Daal where he works, you get a strange answer.
‘I have a blue heart, but a green pay slip’, he laughs. He actually works for caterer Compass Group, but his place of work is in Den Bosch, on the premises of SAP: the market leader in business software. ‘I feel as if I am completely part of SAP: I work here about fifty hours a week and this is my direct client. Technically, however, I am a Compass employee.’
Ferry is 38 years old and is currently the Executive Chef at SAP, which means he is fully responsible for the Den Bosch site. ‘I run the company restaurant, cater for events of all sizes for SAP and supply all the food for our Experience Center. In this company my team and I take care of all aspects of catering from start to finish, including lunches in the company restaurant, four- or five-course dinners for guests or snacks during company drinks.’ He enjoys his job a lot.
‘For a chef, the working hours are perfect: I start here at 7 a.m. because we make eighty percent of what we provide ourselves. We are usually done by the end of the afternoon and then we are free at the weekends too. If I went into the centre of Den Bosch and called out that I was looking for a job, I would get one tomorrow. However, I am not expecting to leave this place any time soon. I love it here.'
Catering is sometimes viewed with disdain by those in the culinary world, but Ferry does not think this is justified. ‘Somehow catering still has the image of a housewife making a quick sandwich to take to work, but these days it is so much more than that. When LEGO comes here as a potential client, we make them an entire dinner that matches their style: Lego brick amuse-bouches and desserts; we apply one theme throughout. We serve amazing Italian dinners at our Experience Center, in a restaurant designed to recreate an Italian setting, with scenes from central Rome displayed on screens on the walls. You really could imagine that you are in Italy. Our catering is very customer-oriented and standards are high.’
Healthy
Mondays and Fridays have been relatively quiet in the office since COVID, but on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, Ferry and his team provide lunches for about three hundred people. The menu in the company restaurant includes street food, main course salads, poke bowls, hot meals, two fresh soups and a special every day. ‘Soups are perfect for a company restaurant’, Ferry has discovered. ‘Some employees head straight for the soup corner to see what we have made that day.’
Quite a few employees eat lunch in the company restaurant almost every day, so healthy food is very much in demand. ‘People are becoming more conscious about what they eat’, says Ferry. ‘We do still sell a classic Dutch croquette sandwich, but there is a lot more demand for healthier alternatives like vegetarian or vegan meals. Our food culture has changed in recent years, and the food we serve reflects that. What used to be a croquette sandwich has become a Turkish bread roll with fresh pulled chicken and sriracha.’
In response to the demand for more varied food, Ferry likes to cook with Debic Culinaire Végétop. ‘This cooking cream is partly made from plant-based oils, and it is perfect for thick soups. It does not separate and binds fairly quickly. It is very stable and from a price perspective it’s very interesting... For example, I am about to make a curry sauce to accompany our Caribbean chicken. If you use traditional cream, you have to whip it up like crazy, but with Debic Culinaire Végétop you get a good curry sauce very quickly. The product is easy to work with; these days we get through six to eight litres a week.’ Ferry says his guests cannot taste the difference. ‘I hear from people with lactose intolerance that the product is all right for them. That is a nice plus; they are glad we are aware of their needs.’ Ferry does see a difference in terms of the colour. ‘Debic Végétop has quite an intense white colour. Since we mainly process it as cooking cream, however, you don't notice it that much.’
Ferry expects that a more varied diet will become increasingly important in his cooking. ‘Our client wants us to maintain a clear focus on responsible choices in our catering. We are using less plastic in the company restaurant and we aim for at least sixty percent of our lunches to be vegetarian. We are looking for ways to help the protein transition along, and we buy some of our fruit and vegetables through InstockMarket: a wholesaler that gives rejected fruit and vegetables a second chance.’
As a chef, he enjoys keeping up with these trends and developments, but admits that he doesn’t always have the time to follow them all in detail. ‘Compared with 2020, when I had just started here, we have 10 fewer hands in the kitchen, and sometimes there is an immense amount of work to be done in just an hour. In those kind of situations it’s great to have base ingredients you can rely on, which you can use again and again. Debic Végétop is that kind of product: it’s always right, it’s easy to use and it forms the basis for a high-quality end result. Simply works!’
