A head chef shows how a school kitchen feeds four hundred before noon.

The film opens at 9.14 in the morning in the kitchen of Northgate Academy, a secondary school on the edge of the old town, where four large steel kettles are already steaming and a tray of onions is disappearing under a mechanical dicer. By the time the clock on the wall reaches 11.50, the same kitchen will have served a hot lunch to just over four hundred pupils. Our six-minute video compresses that morning into a single, slightly breathless sequence, narrated by the woman who runs it.

Bernice Okonjo has been head chef at Northgate for nine years and has a team of five: two cooks, two kitchen assistants and a part-timer who comes in for the lunch rush. The school has a budget of about £1.35 per pupil per meal for ingredients, which she describes, without obvious irony, as “a challenge I enjoy”. Most of what goes out is cooked from scratch on the day.

The morning, minute by minute

The menu on the day we filmed was a chickpea and sweet potato curry with rice and flatbread, with a vegetarian option as the main dish rather than an afterthought. Okonjo explains why on camera: it is cheaper, it holds well in the hot cabinets and, after two years of tinkering, it is the dish pupils ask for most. Meat options appear three days a week.

“People think school food is about fancy recipes,” Bernice Okonjo says in the film, wiping down a ladle. “It is not. It is about timing. If the rice is ready at twenty to twelve and the curry is ready at twenty to twelve, you are a genius. If one of them is ready at ten past, you have four hundred hungry teenagers and nowhere to hide.”

The video follows the sequence closely: onions and spices first, sweet potato into the ovens, rice washed and racked in the combination steamer, flatbread dough left to prove beside the warm pass. At 11.25 the cooks taste, adjust the salt and transfer everything to the serving counter. At 11.40 the first bell goes.

The recipe, scaled down for a family

For those who want to try it at home, Okonjo has scaled the recipe to serve four. The quantities below are hers, and so is the method.

  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1 large onion, finely chopped
  • 2 garlic cloves and a thumb of ginger, grated
  • 2 teaspoons mild curry powder and 1 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 2 medium sweet potatoes (about 500g), peeled and cut into 2cm cubes
  • 1 tin chopped tomatoes (400g)
  • 1 tin chickpeas (400g), drained and rinsed
  • 200ml coconut milk or 150ml natural yoghurt stirred in at the end
  • 2 large handfuls of spinach, salt and a squeeze of lemon

Heat the oil in a wide pan over a medium flame and cook the onion for eight to ten minutes until soft and golden. Add the garlic, ginger and spices and stir for one minute until fragrant. Tip in the sweet potato and stir to coat, then add the tomatoes and 200ml of water. Bring to a simmer, cover and cook for fifteen minutes. Add the chickpeas and coconut milk and cook uncovered for a further ten minutes, until the sweet potato is tender and the sauce has thickened. Stir in the spinach until wilted, season with salt and lemon, and serve with rice.

Okonjo’s school version roasts the sweet potato separately in the oven to save hob space, and she recommends doing the same at home if you have time: twenty-five minutes at 200C with a little oil gives the cubes more colour and stops them collapsing into the sauce.

Behind the hatch

The last third of the film is the lunch service itself, which is where the real pressure shows. Two lines run at once, the cooks refill trays in under thirty seconds, and a Year 7 boy asks three times whether there is any more flatbread. There is. Around one in four pupils at Northgate is entitled to free school meals, and Okonjo says for some of them lunch is the main hot meal of the day, which is why she refuses to cut corners on portion sizes.

Her deputy, Lenny Paskin, who has worked in the kitchen for four years after a career in hotel catering, says on camera that he has never worked anywhere faster. “In a hotel you have a dining room of eighty and a whole evening,” he says. “Here you have four hundred of them and twenty minutes, and they all arrive at once.”

The video ends at 12.31, as the last tray goes back through the hatch and a kitchen assistant begins scrubbing the steamer. Okonjo is already writing tomorrow’s order on a whiteboard. Tomorrow is fish, she says. Fish is harder.