Capturing Culinary Quality in the Plant

Working with several manufacturers, Miller says he ran perhaps 20 trials of roasting chiles and tomatoes with conventional plant equipment without matching the character he produced on his own kitchen range. “We analyzed what the manufacturer was doing and found that in the blackening or roasting process, they weren’t getting the intensification that was necessary,” he says.

Eventually, Miller found a co-packer that could do the job. “He was a small guy who did a lot more hand labor,” he says. “He had an old-fashioned conveyor hamburger grill that ran at a slow speed and blackened satisfactorily.”

A conveyor oven also helped Charlie Baggs, executive chef and president, Charlie Baggs, Inc., Chicago, overcome a plant-based culinary challenge. He says that one of the challenges in creating culinary-driven flavors is the caramelization of proteins and carbohydrates and has found that an impinger-type oven is the best way to create the Maillard reaction in the individually quick-frozen (IQF) proteins. “The challenge is to simulate a culinary process like we would prepare on a stovetop,” says Baggs.

The impinger worked better than browning meat in fat in a plant kettle. “You need product that has been thawed and drained so that when it hits the oil it starts to caramelize almost immediately,” says Baggs. “This is a real challenge, and there isn’t a perfect or cost-effective solution in a typical manufacturing line.”

WEIGHING YOUR OPTIONS

Most product developers find it’s best to look at variety of options before choosing custom manufacturing.

In some cases, notes Baggs, a commercial flavor can successfully create a roasted note in a product. But, he notes, if you want a really clean label, and you’re trying to do things with more of a culinary focus, you need to focus on actual flavor-creation processes like the Maillard reaction. “It affects your label and the integrity of the product.”