Meat Flavors Evoke Home Cooking

Prepared Foods, Nov, 1999 by FRAN LaBELL

Folks want to sit down to a family dinner that's well cooked and wholesome, but they just don't have the time to simmer a pot roast or roast a chicken and make gravy. A new group of flavors helps foodservice and home meal replacement producers to provide these comforting flavors to consumers with busy lives.

Homestyle Flavors from FIS, Solon, Ohio, capture the familiar flavors people associate with good home cooking. These new all-natural flavors in paste form come in four varieties. Rotisserie Style Chicken captures notes of chicken that's been carefully seasoned. Country Style Chicken tastes like the rich gravy made from roasting pan drippings. Homestyle Beef Pot Roast provides the flavor of beef that's been simmering for hours, and Prime Cut Beef Style imparts an au jus flavor typical of slowly roasted prime ribs.

"FIS believes the true test of flavor is taste," says Denise Reed, product manager. "Using our Techno-[Culinary.sup.TM] team of flavorists, chefs and food technologists, FIS has captured specific cooked meat flavors with homemade appeal."

To create these intensified meat flavor profiles, FIS used its expertise in flavors and incorporated the specific notes from the cooking process. These flavors enable food manufacturers to use efficient industrial cooking methods to achieve the same flavor profiles as slower, home-cooked methods.

Produced in a USDA-inspected facility, these ingredients are all natural, with meat and concentrated meat stock as the primary ingredients. Their specific processed character allows technologists to incorporate processed meat flavors without the need to replicate the process on site. This allows for flavor consistency during manufacture.

The flavors are ideal for frozen and prepared meals and are a nice addition to the home meal replacement and meal assembly arenas. They can be used to impart familiar flavors and home-cooked aroma to soups, sauces, gravies and packaged prepared foods.

Recent market testing resulted in significant interest in the new flavors. Testers described the flavors as "rich, warm, deep flavor," "comfort food," "fresh-cooked aroma," "tastes like homemade," and "evokes childhood memories.

The flavors can be used alone or in combination with other flavors to create custom-tailored flavor systems. They are refrigerated and have usage levels that range from 1-3% depending on the application and other flavors used to develop a flavor system.

Products with distinctive flavor profiles can be created by combining the paste flavors with onion, garlic, mushroom and other vegetable flavors. Herbs, spices and wine flavors would also complement them nicely. The flavors are freeze-thaw stable, so they can be used in frozen entrees, soups and side dishes. The paste flavors dissolve readily in aqueous systems.

An extremely busy lifestyle need not preclude the possibility of a wholesome, nourishing family dinner. If a family can sit down to a dinner of savory pot roast or chicken with gravy that they picked up on the way home from work, they can make the most of their time spent together.