Flatbread Sandwiches Break Menu Barriers

Then there’s the question of aesthetics. It’s easy enough to craft a dozen visually stimulating flatbread sandwiches. It’s another matter to do 12,000—or 120,000.

“We’re looking for a certain artisan quality to the omelet,” says Frankenthaler. One of the main challenges he and his team, including a partnering company with expertise in eggs, had to overcome was the splash factor of the liquid egg white. “We had to slow things down, to accommodate the omelet’s viscosity,” he says. “We needed the liquid to pass through filler heads and deposit the mix efficiently.”

Another challenge was even distribution of ingredients. “Different items have different specific gravities,” says Frankenthaler. “We want to suspend inclusions appropriately, so we need to think about the science of gravity. This can be affected by temperature, agitation, or perhaps by thickening ‘the mix’ with a starch or binding agent. There’s a certain intuitiveness at play here. As a chef, when I’m making a béchamel or cream reduction, I know how to bend dairy-fat globules. It’s the same idea, but elevated to a manufacturing level with specific formulas and specific parameters.”

ONE FLAVOR LAYER AT A TIME

“We drive the uniqueness of our brands through flavor and form,” says Frankenthaler. “In Culinology, our job is to compound the separate elements of ‘crave-ability’ to develop a menu item that appeals to my customers and creates a desire to repeat.”

For the turkey sausage, Frankenthaler worked with a manufacturer to develop an assertive profile with forward notes of sage and background notes of black pepper and red chile flakes. “We wanted familiarity of flavor with a traditional breakfast sausage,” he says. “And because the sausage is one of several ingredients in the omelet, we needed it to have big impact, so it’s heartily spiced.”

The omelet’s spinach energizes the flatbread’s health halo, but brought another set of challenges. “We needed to control the moisture in the vegetable inclusion,” says Frankenthaler. “We didn’t want a watery omelet, and for safety and other reasons, we have to control free-water activity.” The solution came in the form of a controlled-moisture spinach.

When initially developing its sandwiches, Dunkin’ Donuts first turned to commercially found flatbreads. Once Frankenthaler and his team determined the qualities they liked, they then developed their own formula in order to go global. He notes that “we were looking for a nicely developed bread flavor with good, yeasty notes. We wanted a little bit of chew, a well developed gluten structure that, with high heat and the right development of gases in the dough, would blister well.”