Cooking for the front line

A group of chefs in Kyiv are cooking restaurant quality food for soldiers on the front line: we went to try it for ourselves before they set off on their next trip to Eastern Ukraine.

In an outbuilding behind the headquarters of a catering company on the outskirts of Kyiv, the three friends behind the volunteer group Bud De, Druzhe are busy packing dried ready-to-eat meals into boxes, ready to drive to the east. Oleksii Maslyanskiy, the co-founder, describes himself as the project manager: he leaves the cooking to Valerii Pasichnik, known as Maestro - and fellow chef Yurii Kulik: both have racked up decades of experience in some of Kyiv’s top kitchens. They created Bud De, which means ‘Anywhere’ at the start of the full scale invasion, at first making food at home for the troops who were defending Kyiv, then scaling it up in a restaurant kitchen until they were making a thousand portions a day for a Special Forces unit in the city. When the Kyiv region was liberated and the unit was redeployed to the new zero line, they wanted to continue helping - and began working out how to make dried food which could be transported anywhere and cooked in the woods, in a field, in a hospital or stabilisation point. And most importantly, they wanted to use their experience to make truly restaurant quality food “so our boys and girls at the front could remember the times of going to cafes and restaurants again”. 

Yurii cooking the pasta dish

Every few weeks, they drive to frontline units themselves to deliver supplies, and cook hot meals for the units they meet up with: burgers, caesar salads: “It really will be restaurant class food, They can always have canned food, potatoes with stewed pork - but we want to recreate the feeling of a peaceful life for them, even just for a moment”, Oleksii says.

From the very beginning they opted to cook for soldiers rather than civilians - after all, there were other big organisations catering for refugees and families in need. “When you take food to the military guys they say thank you - please give it to my brother, he is injured - they always want to help someone else. It really is much more rewarding to work with the army.”

The two chefs began brainstorming recipes: and how to create something that would taste delicious and be as nutritious as possible. They came up with a pasta bolognese and a carbonara: a Tom Yum soup and a cornmeal dish called banosh with mushrooms and porcini with plenty of cheese. For breakfast, they developed a porridge with cinnamon and dried cherries, with banana: sealed up inside a packet, all you need to do is pour on boiling water, stir for a few minutes and then it’s ready to eat. 

The cinnamon cherry porridge is ready

In the development kitchen along with some dehydration units, there are big bags of dried mushrooms and cheese, tomatoes and onion powder. Much of it comes from Valerii’s parents farm where he grew up, spending time in the garden and then in the kitchen before deciding to become a professional chef. He shows us pictures on his phone of pallets of juicy tomatoes and spring onions, rightly proud of the produce they use. There’s even a home made smoker which they’ve managed to set up in the yard outside, where they make smoked pork which “smells like barbecue”.

The funds come partly from their catering business and partly from donations - once they’ve managed to raise enough to pay for a trip, then comes the logistical challenge of planning it all, at a time when the front lines are dangerous and very fluid. “It all takes time”, Oleksii explains. “First we need to earn the money, then we communicate with different brigades, to understand where they are - they move a lot and often they rotate with other units. We started our trips with a military hospital in Druzhkivka, Donetsk region: we have been there seven times now, and there we met many new friends.” The mission has changed somewhat over the last two years: soldiers are not going hungry, so they want to spend a bit more than the cost of basic rations. “We cook burgers for them, quesadillas, chargrilled meat - we used to try and feed as many people as possible, our record was around 3,000 people per trip, now we feed about 500 people a day but it is much more beautiful food. But we also bring around 1000 packs of our dried food, so it will be 1500 overall.”

Meals ready to eat

They travel to risky frontline areas like Kupyansk, Lyman, Zaporizhia - spending three or four days on the road together.  “It is very intense, very hard work - but volunteers have to be very flexible people, above all - that’s the main skill!”

While we’ve been talking Yurii has been busy preparing the dried food packs for me to try. We start with the porridge which is creamy and just sweet enough - then the cornmeal with mushrooms and cheese - comforting and rich. The pasta dishes need to be reconstituted in a pan of hot water, but nothing more complicated: after a few minutes of patient stirring the pasta bolognese is ready - Valerii is unable to resist adding a flourish of truffle oil and freshly grated parmesan which I am sure isn’t automatically available on the front line - but either way it is a real triumph of a dish and you would never be able to tell it came out of a long life packet. The tasting session over, the Bud De team begin packing boxes into their van, ready for the long trip east the following day. And they have hope, for the future: “Ukraine will win because even after a generation, they (the Russians) failed to break our desire to reach for light and love - and not like them, for darkness and hatred” says Yurii. Oleksii echoes that. “We are for our children and the future, for the light of freedom.” And Valerii says he’s looking forward to victory - and to new culinary challenges. As if anything could be more of a challenge than creating thousands of restaurant quality meals for soldiers fighting on the front lines. If they can do that - they can surely do anything, anywhere.