The Royal Navy - Catering Services ( Production Chef Apprenticeship )

About the Role

The Royal Navy represents the United Kingdom worldwide, forging new alliances and maintaining old ones. Being a Caterer in the Royal Navy is a career that is literally miles from anything you could do at home. Taking responsibility for ordering, receiving, and accounting for provisions to sustain the menus you write and there’s a good chance you could be at sea for months at a time. The role of Caterer becomes about a lot more than food.

You’ll be at the centre of keeping morale high and health at its optimum while you are on board, while maintaining excellent standards of personal, food and kitchen hygiene. Ensure compliance with procedures, menu specifications and recipes and produce food meeting portion controls, and budgetary constraints. Adapt and produce dishes to meet special dietary, religious and allergenic requirements and follow, complete and maintain production schedules, legislative and quality standard documentation. Use specialist kitchen equipment, communicate internally and externally with customers and colleagues and commit to personal development activities.

Training and Development

Most of your apprenticeship is spent working. You’ll learn on the job by getting hands-on experience. Apprenticeships include time away from working for specialist training. You’ll study to gain professional knowledge and skills.

Course Contents:

• Prepare and cook pre-portioned fresh and frozen meat, fish, and poultry to business standards.
• Prepare and cook fresh and frozen fruit and vegetables to business standards.
• Prepare salad vegetables to business standards.
• Cook poached, simmered, steamed, boiled, braised, stewed, baked, grilled, and fried dishes.
• Regenerate dried and frozen ingredients and dishes.
• Undertake stock control, storage, and rotation.
• Communicate professionally with colleagues, line managers, stakeholders, and customers.
• Work as part of a team to support service delivery.
• Follow specifications to produce, portion, and present food.
• Manage own time to ensure allocated tasks are completed.
• Use techniques for maintaining good mental health and wellbeing to support self and others, including asking for and giving help with daily tasks.
• Use feedback to improve own performance.
• Prepare and close down an area for service.
• Use problem solving techniques to resolve routine and non-routine issues within scope of own role.
• Maintain prep and par levels according to business need.
• Clean and maintain manual and electrical food-preparation and cooking tools, equipment, and technology.
• Follow standard operating procedures to select and safely use appropriate knives and boards for the task, for example red handled knife and red board for raw meat.
• Monitor and record food temperatures and manage allergens during preparation, cooking, holding, and serving.
• Apply hygiene management techniques to maintain a safe clean work environment, for example COSHH, personal hygiene, and uniform.
• Reduce the waste of resources, acting to measure and reduce plate waste, exercise portion control, and maximise yield.
• Comply with health and safety legislation, regulations, guidelines and procedures, including stress management.
• Follow equity, diversity, and inclusion legislation and organisational policies.
• Deliver to key performance indicators to support the production, performance, and budget within own area of responsibility.
• Use manual and electrical food-preparation and cooking tools, equipment, machinery, and technology.