Roux reviews to savoring savory flavors

Prepared Foods, Feb, 2003 by Laura A. Brandt

Meat and brown flavors are the culinary keys to perfecting great tasting soups, sauces and other savory products. Armed with a fundamental understanding of traditional sauce preparation and the ingredients derived through flavor chemistry, today's formulators can work towards duplicating the sensory experience of the world's great cooks.

Rick Bayless, world-famous chef, recommends making food more flavorful by advising cooks to: "Brown food. Cook it a little more slowly and a little longer. Everything has more flavor."

Such advice is difficult to follow in industrial settings, however, where an increase in production time translates to an increase in product cost. Armed with an understanding of the basics of savory flavor development, formulators must look to industrial options to help replicate gold standards created by chefs.

Brown type savory flavors begin with traditional cooking methods such as roasting and sauteeing. Flavorful bases and dishes result from soup stocks cooked for hours and meats slow-roasted in the oven. This results in richer flavor and headier aromas. Sauces make the difference between ho-hum meals and knockout dishes. Soups that are robust and flavorful can act as part of the meal or the main course.

In today's fast-paced world, instant flavor is highly desirable. Processed meat flavors, savory brown flavors, broth and stock flavors, vegetable flavors, and even roux flavors are staples of the culinary flavor larder.

Taking Stock of Flavor

While adding meat flavors, spices, and other savory notes can greatly impact overall flavor, sometimes food technologists need to go back to basics--cooking basics.

Traditional French cooking involves creating sauces starting with a roux and a brown stock. "The basis of French sauces is built around the caramelization of flour and fat, which is a building block of the mother sauces," says Eugene Wisakowsky, Ph.D., chief technical officer for a roux supplier. White or brown sauces both begin with a roux. Cooking the flour with oil or fat coats the starch and prevents it from lumping when added to a liquid such as stock. While the greatest flavor is derived from pan drippings in brown sauces, butter and oil can be used for lighter sauces (white or blond sauces). A roux provides some thickening and adds opacity to soups and sauces. During the process of slowly cooking a roux with or without vegetables, unique flavors develop.

Brown sauces include the classic Espagnole and demiglace, as well as pan sauces and reduction-style sauces based on a brown stock (e.g., veal or beef) and a brown roux (browned fat). A basic brown sauce that serves as the foundation for other flavors and variations involves browning bones and meat trimmings, adding mirepoix (a flavorful blend of sauteed onions, carrots, and celery), spices and, perhaps, tomato sauce. Brown stock is added to the mixture and then it is simmered for two to four hours to extract flavor and reduce the volume of liquid to concentrate the flavor. The sauce can be thickened by using a roux (as in Espagnole); utilizing both roux and reduction (demiglace); or making a starch slurry (jus lid).

Cajun brown roux can be made with lard, vegetable oils, bacon fat or even duck fat that is cooked to a dark brown. This is the "secret" ingredient in Cajun cooking that gives it a deep, rich nutty flavor.

Today's food processors do not have the time to develop sauces by classical French techniques. However, they can take advantage of flavor bases that are meat and/or vegetable based--these include flavors based on roux, stocks, broths, meat extracts, and animal fats.

Wisakowsky, trained as a food scientist, considers roux an important savory building block. If a roux based on a plastic fat is used (such as beef tallow or chicken fat), or a plastic cottonseed oil, the end result is a paste or semi-solid. If hydrogenated soybean oil is used, the finished product can be made into flakes that can be used in dry blends.

Roux bases plus hydrolyzed vegetable proteins (HVPs) can be used to smooth out HVP flavor while using less of this ingredient in a product, says Wisakowsky.

"Food scientists need to research and understand the formulation history of the sauces they are trying to copy or create--this will enable them to produce better quality sauces," he notes.

Savoring Savory Notes

From roasted meat flavor to sauteed onion flavor, flavor houses provide customers with any type of meat and vegetable notes possible.

Various sweet and savory notes round out flavor profiles. A hint of bacon, smoky notes, soy sauce, wine flavorings, herb and vegetable extracts, even vanilla and cocoa can add "signature" flavor notes to savory items.

"We have a little bit of cocoa in one of our flavored beef stocks--typically, in French cuisine, chefs add a little cocoa in their meat type glaces to bring out more of the beefy notes," says Lisa Selk, manager of technical services for an ingredients supplier.

Roasted coffee also can enhance meat flavors. Many brown flavors such as meats, roasted coffee, cocoa and nuts obtain their flavor, color and aroma nuances from the Maillard reaction where proteins and sugars (i.e., pathways between amines and reducing sugars) lead to a complex mixture of products with varying degrees of "brown" flavors. The brown flavor is a function of the types and amounts of proteins and sugars present, length and temperature of heating, water activity and pH.