From West 55th Street to the Original SoupMan

Al Yeganeh is one misunderstood man. To the extent that you may understand him at all, it’s probably as the persona based loosely on Yeganeh and made infamous in a 1995 “Seinfeld” episode that quickly slipped into pop-culture lore. But Yeganeh is simply a man with passion, and his passion is to make the best soup in the world.

Yeganeh ran Al’s Soup Kitchen International, a spartan Manhattan storefront on West 55th Street, for 20 years beginning in 1984. But how do you go from being the best on 55th and Eighth Avenue to being the best across the country?

Yeganeh’s solution was to assemble a crew as deft at managing commercial production as they were at protecting his soups’ culinary integrity. “The whole driving force from day one was making sure these soups were as close as possible to the gold standards that Al had made all these years,” says Eric Sparks, CEC, director of product development, Park 100 Foods, Inc., Original SoupMan’s Tipton, IN–based manufacturing partner. And the way to do that, he says, is “through blending the culinary with food science.”

Original SoupMan has opened over 30 franchise locations in Colorado, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Toronto, sited mainly in malls, airports and bustling food courts. Meanwhile, more than 2,000 retailers throughout Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania sell 15-oz. grab-and-go bags of Original SoupMan turkey chili, jambalaya, seafood bisque, chicken vegetable and garden vegetable soups from the refrigerator case.

This endeavor involved commercializing 35 of Yeganeh’s recipes into kettle-cooked, flash-frozen soups. And, according to participants, manufacturing expediency did not factor into the choice of which soups to ramp up. “If you were to look at any other soup product,” says Michael Joy, vice president of culinary operations, Original SoupMan, New York, the company that has brought Yeganeh’s legendary soups to kiosk franchises and retail locations throughout the northeast since 2004, “you would not call these easy to produce, just because of the amount of ingredients and quality of ingredients.”

The soups that made the cut represented a fair sampling of Yeganeh’s classics: vegetarian soups, protein soups (beef, chicken, turkey) and seafood soups (lobster bisque, crab bisque). Down the road, those might spin off into a Louisiana crab bisque, says Sparks, or perhaps a seafood minestrone.

Take the case of the baby mussels. During his Soup Kitchen International days, Yeganeh built his seafood soups into flagship varieties based on the pristine caliber of their shellfish, and he intended to sustain their esteem with his Original SoupMan line. But while “the absolutely gorgeous green lip mussels that Al would hand-chop” were the norm on 55th Street, when it came to lining up supplies for industrial production, “we couldn’t find them,” Sparks says. “No one’s going to take a gorgeous mussel like that and pick it out of the shell and then chop it up for you. Suppliers are just not going to do that. So we had to search the entire world to find these baby mussels, and when they came in, they were pretty cool!” At about 90 count to the pound, they’re small enough straight out of the shell and into the formula.

The crew found themselves taking on a similar expedition in their search for lobster. “We wanted clean-label lobster meat,” Sparks says, “and we didn’t want any preservatives or anything like that. We wanted just whole claws and that’s it—no liquid, no nothing.” A trip to Boston’s International Seafood Show with Yeganeh in tow took them right to the lobstermen they were looking for. “We talked to them and told them exactly what we were looking for, and they said, ‘We can do it. As long as you tell us what you want.’”

It didn’t come cheap, but then lobster never does. “Some of those things, you always think they’re unattainable in what we do on the industrial side,” Sparks says. “But they’re really out there, and Al was the big driving force in finding them.” It’s not that he wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. Rather, “He would just always ask, ‘Why not?’”

“If we were working on a vegetable soup,” he says, “we might have it scaled out two different times. Al would come in and we’d cook one together, and then we’d go back and scale and he’d say, ‘I’d like to change this bean, I’d like to change this Brussels sprout, I’d like to add two types of carrots, I’d like to make the broth thicker,’ and so on. We would make all those notes, and then we’d come back and scale it again, and make it again with him, and at the same time we were taking analytical measurements and things like that. That’s how we took his recipes and what was in his head and finally got them into an actual formula that we could then repeat.”

This early in the game, they left plenty of wiggle room for Yeganeh’s continued modifications. “We’d have Al going through the process on the floor, saying, ‘I don’t want the carrots to go in there; I want them over here,’” recalls Sparks. “Then he’d say, ‘I also want them bigger.’ And we’d say, ‘OK, instead of ¼-in., we’ll make them ½-in.’ Then he’d tell us, ‘But I don’t want them all ½-in.’ And so we’d go through that.”

So energetic and involved did Yeganeh become that the techs on the job had to slow him down in the interest of accurate note-taking. “We had to remind him that we have to make these soups again and again, and then we have to make sure that someone else can be successful making them again and again in our plant,” Sparks points out. Without thorough documentation of the analyticals, such replication would be impossible.

“Once we got to where Al said, ‘This is the soup,’” says Sparks, “we’d take it out of the kettle and weigh it right away. Then we’d take out a refractometer and we’d get the solid readings and note where they’ll need to be in the future. And then we’d quickly pull a little more and have it tested for salt. Then we’d pour it all through a strainer and we’d weigh the percentage solids.” With quantitative data for comparison in subsequent runs, he says, “we had another way of validating that we’re staying on course, besides just Al saying we’re OK.”

Park 100 had a system for assigning appropriate kettles and pumps based on the qualities of the soups themselves, choosing “certain kettles to run certain soups to get the culinary integrity that Al wants,” Sparks says. “If you have a brothy soup, then you’re going to want a kettle that’s going to have a certain type of agitation that’s going to be more of a blending type, a rolling type.” For a soup with a heavier viscosity, like cream of tomato, he says you might use something with a larger cooking surface to get a cooked flavor more quickly. Maintaining the variable particle integrity so integral to dynamic contrast was also a function of kettle agitation. “Some kettles are just gentler than others,” says Sparks.

“On production day, just because you’ve got a great product in the kettle doesn’t mean you can relax,” Sparks says. For their first run, they plowed through 20 formulas in five 12-hour workdays. “And when you’re running 5,000-lb. batches, four a day, and with Al there,” Sparks adds, “that was the most stressful time of my life.”

And Yeganeh was indeed active in the process. “He was still trying to make changes at the kettles at that point,” Sparks recalls. “And that was somewhat tough, because now you’re holding up an entire plant.” But the delay was worth it, he says.

The team pulled bags as they came off the line for evaluation. In addition to the usual analyticals—drain weights, viscosity, soluble sugars, etc.—“we’d always take some back to another setting—not the production floor, but to another lab in the plant where it’s calm and there’s different lighting. And we’d compare them to the control that we’d made so that Al could sign off,” Sparks says.

One discrepancy they noted involved color outcomes. “When you scale up and you have a lot more agitation,” Sparks explains, “if you’re working with tomato products, you tend to incorporate a little more air into them, and you incorporate the fat a little bit more. So you may have a chili that in the lab was red, but when you scale it up tends to be a little less red and more orange.” Of course, that’s nothing that a little oleoresin of paprika couldn’t fix, “but Al didn’t want that. He could live with the color difference. He understood why it was there, and that was OK to him.”

To this day, constant tweaking toward Yeganeh’s ideal is de rigueur, notes Joy. “While the processes in place are very strict at Park 100 and very accurate, Al will see some little differences that he wants to address. He’ll come in, and we’ll taste all the production soups that we have in current inventory. It might take two or three days, and it might take a week.” But they do it because Yeganeh, true to form, would have it no other way. “Things change over time,” Joy says. “It’s not that the process changes, but you need to keep tasting.”

As a matter of fact, says Sparks, “I have right here on my desk eight pages of notes from a tasting Al did last week that he sent us with some comments on the soups that he had at the stores in New York.” There’s apparently no rest for those in search of soup perfection. “I never would’ve thought of adding these types of seasonings and these sensations to this type of product,” he goes on. “At times, I look at our formulas and I still pinch myself.”

Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a B.S. in Consumer Food Science with a minor in English from the University of California, Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she enjoys eating and writing about food. You can reach her at kim@decker.net. 

Dynamic Contrast

During scale up, identifying the source of each soup’s character was a crucial first step. If one factor explains the soups’ quality, it was Al Yeganeh’s sixth sense for generating what’s known among sensory scientists as dynamic contrast. A concept introduced in 1993 by Steven A. Witherly, Ph.D., president of Technical Products Inc., Valencia, CA, and Robert J. Hyde, associate professor, San Jose State University, dynamic contrast is the notion that, when it comes to the pleasures of food, change is good.

In their studies with the human palate, Witherly and Hyde “came up with the finding that the human palate is capable of detecting, and actually thriving on, multiple changes in the mouth as you’re eating,” says Michael Joy, vice president of culinary operations, Original SoupMan, New York. Think of the cold-creamy-melty-sweet sequence of a spoonful of ice cream, or the sensory complexity in a single piece of chocolate. In these cases, “you’re always tasting something different because it’s always changing,” he says.

What’s so interesting, Joy says, is “Al has figured this out on his own.” Dynamic contrast—although he might not dub it as such—has been a quality in his soups from day one. “His great soups have a lot of different things going on at once,” he says. “Some people talk about the integrity of the vegetables—are they crisp when you want them crisp and soft when you want them soft? Or is the viscosity or thickness of the soup exactly right?” And while Yeganeh didn’t deliberately set out to create this sensory interplay, “he just inherently knew in his head and from his travels that this is what you need to make a great soup: different tastes, different flavors, different textures going on.”