Street food as a source of margins
After the loss in turnover caused by the coronavirus, we are all looking for new sources of margins. Street food offers a good deal of inspiration. Easy to make, inexpensive to produce and the ideal take-away meal.
Street food is gaining market share these days. It is the ultimate comfort food, and anyone who has tried it once will simply want more. Street food means the kinds of dishes sold in Asia from food stalls or at markets. Ready-to-eat dishes that you can eat on the spot. Street food is soul food. And we can all use some of that at the moment!
Street food is easy to make. The number of steps is limited, and you don't need a lot of equipment. What’s more, street food is easy to transport and eat on the way. These are important factors for profitability.
When you think of street food, you think for example of fried chicken. Chicken is generally a bit more affordable than most other types of meat. Well made fried chicken can therefore be a real margin booster on your menu, and can also be made efficiently. The recipes we have developed, for example Korean fried chicken are easy to make; only the marinating takes a bit of prior planning.
Debic’s culinary cream gives this chicken perfect tenderness. The cream will stick to the chicken, ensuring the best breading needed for this super-crunchy variant. Experiment with various flavours, but also with different types of flour and starch in order to get a perfect chicken. In our recipes we use parboiled rice, which we grind to a powder. Because the starch in this rice is already partly cooked, it gives these recipes a super-crisp final result.
Tacos are also a form of street food. For example, the Carnitas tacos: the essential Mexican taco and one of that country’s most important dishes. Extremely delicious, easy and cheap to make. And in this case not with pulled pork but with carnitas.
Noodle soup, such as the Japanese ramen, is one of the ultimate street foods. But there are many possible variants. Laksa, a somewhat less subtle but stronger cousin of the Japanese ramen, is likely to be the next big trend and can be a very profitable dish to put on your menu. Laksa is the national dish of Malaysia and is sold from many food stalls in Singapore. It was invented by the Chinese-Malaysian or Javanese culture known as the Peranakan culture.
Because laksa has many different varieties in the region, it is difficult to determine the precise origin of this dish. And therefore, as a chef you can easily give it your own distinctive twist. Our recipe for laksa is based on the strong, complex but balanced flavour of the soup, in combination with local ingredients. We use the shells of grey shrimp to enhance the flavour of the broth.
Do you want to know more about margin on takeaway meals?
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