Bountiful Basil Meets Tomato

For a chef, creating a flavorful, fresh tomato sauce is easy. Starting with the best ingredients and following our taste buds made it difficult to go wrong when creating the goldstandard, chef-driven recipe here.

Creating a manufactured version—for Paradise Tomato Kitchens, Louisville, KY—with the same flavor profile as the gold standard was the challenge, and put into play many factors a typical chef never has to consider. All obstacles were overcome by teamwork, using the knowledge and skills of both a food scientist and a research chef. The end result is a truly marketable sauce with fresh tomato and basil flavors.

The biggest challenge in re-creating the gold-standard sauce in a manufacturing plant was maintaining the fresh basil flavor. The flavor notes of fresh basil leaves are very volatile, and during the heating in manufacturing, many of these subtle notes are quickly lost. Since fresh basil is not practical for use in a manufacturing plant, as it is very fragile and can be inconsistent in flavor, individually quick-frozen (IQF) basil was chosen as a replacement. Adding basil oleoresin offset flavor loss caused by manufacturing.

Since it is not feasible to chop or mince fresh onion and garlic in a plant, IQF products provided an easy-to-use solution that maintains flavor integrity. They are ready to use, easy to portion and weigh, and retain much of their original flavor due to the freezing technique used during ingredient processing.

To replicate the flavor of fresh tomatoes, we combined two tomato-paste varieties. When manufactured, coldbreak tomato paste has less exposure to heat and results in a bright, fresh-tomato flavor. However, the pectin enzymes are not completely destroyed, and it tends to release water, or cause syneresis, when used alone in a finished sauce.

To solve this, we added a hot-break tomato paste. While it does not offer the bright tomato flavors of cold-break tomato paste, hot-break paste does not cause syneresis, since the additional heat in the production process deactivates the naturally occurring enzymes that break down pectin.

Combining the cold-break with the hot-break tomato paste provided flavor and functionality in the final manufactured sauce. The textures of the two pastes were also carefully selected to replicate the texture and mouthfeel of the gold-standard sauce. The ideal Brix—the measurement of sweetness, based on the concentration of dissolved solids in the solution, typically measured with a refractometer—for the sauce is 12 to 14° Brix.

The product is hot-filled into pouches. It has a pH below 4.6 (4.25 ideal), and therefore is shelf stable.