Expanding Culinary Horizons with Dried Mixes

Whether it’s high school teens speaking a mix of Cantonese and English in a local teahouse, older gentlemen conversing in Arabic over a game of backgammon or Hispanics discussing local events, the multiculturalism of San Mateo, CA, is readily apparent. But when it comes to creating food products that meet the multi-ethnic tastes of such a diverse consumer base, what’s a food designer to do?

A quick trip to Draeger’s Supermarket, a local grocery in San Mateo, offers an answer. To examine the heart of the store’s commitment to satisfying its consumers’ diverse tastes, head to aisle 1B. That’s International Row, where shelves launch shoppers on a tour of the world’s culinary capitals, as well as some of its back roads. Alongside packages of Dickensian spotted dick and plum pudding, look for boxes of Dutch boterkoek and German semmel-knödel. For cuisines from sunnier climes, grab a bag of seasoned paella rice or falafel mix, or perhaps the bulgur wheat and couscous (both small-pearl and BB-sized Israeli varieties). Packets of channa dal, shahi pilau and saag chole fulfill a craving for Indian. The Far Eastern end of the aisle displays a Hunan chile-noodle kit, a box of Japanese buckwheat soba with soy-ginger dressing or that old standby, a classic pad Thai mix.

If you just felt the earth shake, it was only an aftershock of the seismic demographic shift that’s changing the American diet and rendering previously alien items, such as pad Thai, downright ordinary. The rumblings aren’t just felt in ethnically dynamic San Mateo. Nationwide, groceries have taken note of who their shoppers are and adjusted inventories accordingly. While retailers have expanded selections of ethnically influenced foods, in part to accommodate the changing face of America, the “exotic” profiles have also attracted born-and-bred Americans more inclined toward macaroni and cheese than murgh korma.

“The American consumer continues to become more sophisticated — more curious,” observes Marc Halperin, culinary director and partner, Center for Culinary Development, San Francisco. “The more people travel, the more they read and the more they experiment with new cuisines, the more their interest in those types of cuisines grows.” And once they get a taste of what riches lay beyond our shores, there’s no turning back.

Mark Miller, cookbook author and chef-owner of Coyote Café restaurants in Santa Fe, NM, and Las Vegas, points to another force pushing American tastes across international borders: new cuisines are stimulating. “We live in an environment flooded with stimulation, whether it’s videos with sound and movement and dance, or restaurants with high-end décor,” he says. “Anything that’s vibrant enough to burst through all the background noise is bound to pique our interest. Because of the mere fact that these foods are unknown, they create a response. People like differences, whether it was chop suey and the miners in San Francisco during the 19th century, or my mother cooking quasi-Mexican food in the 1950s. ... So you’ll continue to see ethnicity as a trend in product development.”

The willingness with which younger consumers adopt global cuisines supports Miller’s prediction. The six-to-12-year-old ‘tween set and its big-sibs in Generation Y have grown up among more dining choices than their parents ever imagined, When Halperin and his colleagues surveyed ‘tween consumers last year, “we were all astonished to see that something like 40% or 50% of the ‘tweens surveyed knew what samosas were, had tasted them and liked them. That’s unbelievable.”

Communities across the country, thanks to immigration and the exposure to global cultures that comes with technology and travel, have cultivated an $800 million market for emerging ethnic foods, according to Chicago-based Mintel International Group. Between 1996 and 2001, $40 million of that market’s growth came from retail products, including convenient, shelf-stable dried mixes.

After all, boxes of risotto and tabbouleh aren’t filling supermarkets’ international aisles for nothing. Whether it’s rice, pasta or grain dishes; batters and baked-good mixes; packets of sauce or seasoning mix; or complete meal kits, the dried-mix format seems inherently amenable to ethnically inspired interpretations.

Approachability is one factor. Michael Holleman, corporate chef, Indian Harvest Specialtifoods, Inc., Bemidji, MN, reasons that consumers’ high level of familiarity with dried mixes lowers the psychological hurdle to trying something new. “By combining ethnic seasonings or simple ethnic ingredients, such as jasmine or basmati rice, with ingredients consumers already are used to — like orzo, legumes, wheat berries and so-on — we can make the decision to purchase and try ethnic foods a little easier for home cooks,” he says.

When dried mixes serve as platforms for unfamiliar side dishes — instead of full meals — consumers can control their exposure to new foods, making the experience less daunting and less polarizing, says David Groll, executive chef/director of culinary development, IFI-Kerry Foodservice, Irving, TX. So, if they’re not too fond of Lebanese stewed chickpeas, at least they’ve got salad and grilled lamb to tide them over. Dried mixes’ shelf-stability and quick-and-easy prep also buoys their appeal. “They present a low level of threat and require very little damage control in return for setting consumers on the uncharted path of new cuisine frontiers. No fuss, no muss, and you can have a 30-second culinary adventure for under $5.00,” he notes.

Halperin has another theory as to why ethnic flavors fit into the dried-mix model so well: “A lot of these ethnic cuisines come from countries that don’t have a long history of cold-storage preservation of fresh food. So if you can’t preserve food by either freezing or refrigerating it, you’ve got to do something else. And, basically, that means drying it. You dry herbs, you dry spices, and then you end up with a cuisine that relies heavily upon making small amounts of protein taste good with some sort of preserved product.”

Dried products are more efficient to produce, pack, store and distribute than fresh or frozen. So, Mark E. Vermylen, vice president, A. Zerega’s Sons, Inc., Fair Lawn, NJ, notes: “Many of these ethnic mixes originated in the specialty-food, rather than mainstream-grocery, trade. Specialty-food manufacturers tend to be much smaller than the major food processors. So, given the capital constraints these small specialty-food manufacturers face, perhaps it’s no surprise that there are more dried ethnic-product offerings than frozen or refrigerated.”

Furthermore, thanks to their straightforward bench-top development, Vermylen surmises that manufacturers “should have a much easier time running trials on dried products than if they had to run them on a frozen-food line. Small prototypes can be produced easily and with very little difference from what would eventually be packed in the dried-food plant.”

Groll adds that the dried format not only gives the developer more control over the finished product, but the low-risk, simple preparation steps induce consumers to experiment more often and use the product more frequently.

As consumers turn with more frequency to items such as samosas, fish sauce and Lebanese chickpeas, their choices underscore a truth about the emerging ethnic-foods market: sales of spaghetti sauce and commonplace taco seasonings don’t account for that $800 million total. Mexican, Italian and even Chinese foods emerged so long ago that, according to “Ethnic Cuisines II,” a recent report from the Washington, D.C.-based National Restaurant Association (NRA), they no longer can claim legitimate ethnic status. What’s emerging today and gobbling up an increasing share of Americans’ dining dollars more likely comes from the kitchens of Singapore, Morocco or Peru.

Changes in society and eating habits call into question what, exactly, ethnic means. “The word ‘ethnic’ is bandied about a lot,” notes Miller. “But it should mean something. If you’re going to use it as a marketing tool, then you should actually define it. Is it ethnicity based on religion or based on place? After all, everybody comes from somewhere. Or is it defined by your historical antecedents?”

Lucien Vendôme, senior executive chef, Kraft Food Ingredients Corp. (KFIC), Memphis, TN, believes the concept’s roots reach even deeper, describing ethnicity as “an instinctual mechanism, like part of your body. You cannot change it.”

When U.S. consumers label foods as ethnic, it’s mostly shorthand for what falls outside the mainstream Northern and Western European tradition. Back when most Americans hailed from that tradition, that made sense. But as the population changes, it makes more sense to consider how immigrant groups and their cuisines change what it means to be American — and how Americanization changes those cultures and cuisines. Assimilation, to some extent, is inevitable, and when it overtakes traditional foodways, it weaves them into the fabric of the crazy quilt we call our national cuisine. Thus, heretofore-ethnic specialties, such as enchiladas, chow mein — even pizza — have evolved into American culinary institutions.

That raises another question: When designing ethnic boxed mixes, how authentic can developers go? Moreover, how authentic should they go? Miller, Vendôme and Halperin all agree that presenting a mass American market with rigorously authentic products is not only impossible, but also inadvisable. “Unless you’re talking specifically to the heart of an ethnic community, you don’t want to offer truly authentic ethnic,” says Halperin. “It’s just too unfamiliar to the wider group. Authentic Thai or authentic Indian cuisine in a box is going to scare off too many consumers.”

Miller believes that before manufacturers develop novel products for American consumers, they first must understand the psychology guiding their food choices. “People have ranges of stimulation that are pleasurable versus not pleasurable,” he says. People begin defining these ranges as children, building them, in part, upon a foundation of what they eat at the family table and outside the home. With age, these ranges become increasingly entwined not only with food preferences but also with the very sense of self-identification. So while we may demand ever more stimulation on our dinner plates, we don’t want so much stimulation that the experience breaches our tolerance range and pushes us into sensory territory where we fear to tread.

“When people eat out at a restaurant,” Miller continues, “they generally rank convenience and comfort above price or food. And I think you can probably say the same thing about food products. How comfortable are consumers, psychologically, with those products? Are they accessible, or are they too challenging? Because if they’re too challenging in terms of techniques, ingredients or flavors, then they’re not comfortable anymore. So when people talk about comfort food, they’re not necessarily talking about food that comes from childhood; they’re talking about a level of psychological effort, an amount of emotion that you have to activate psychologically in order to do or value an activity or object. And Americans have only a certain capacity for that.”

Take ginger, an integral component of Asian cuisine and herbal medicine from Bengal to Burma. Yet, according to research Vendôme and KFIC have conducted, ginger is also one of four or five “buzz” ingredients that stand to gain more traction with American consumers in the coming years. “And that’s because ginger is nothing new for Americans,” he says. “They’ve been drinking ginger ale and eating gingerbread all this time. But the point is that when they discovered that ginger is an important element in Asian cuisine, that made Asian cuisine more accessible, and all of a sudden they want to see more ginger. They don’t necessarily want to eat ginger with the chiles, and preserved fish and vegetables that you might see deep in the heart of Sichuan, but they still want that element.”

Miller offers another for-instance: “Most Americans are familiar with southern Thai food, which is very aromatic — it has coconut, and sweeter elements. But again, you see, it’s based on a flavor core of sweetness and sourness that is mirrored in Americans’ palate and in the American flavor spectrum.” He notes that with southern-style Thai foods, U.S. consumers are really not expanding that spectrum.

The successful ethnic product will respect that spectrum’s boundaries, sticking close to traditional cuisines that reflect American tastes. “Once a product goes past the line of comfort and accessibility,” Miller warns, “it will not be seen as a real choice. It will be seen as something that is not convenient and not comfortable. And then it becomes foreign again.”

To land an ethnically influenced product within the target market’s pleasure zone, manufacturers’ sometimes have to change the cuisine’s original intent. Bringing foreign foods to the American table necessitates some sort of compromise. Processors need to weigh the consumer’s reluctance to branch out against his aspirations to do so. They’ve also got to balance manufacturing constraints with the cuisine’s traditional spirit. Halperin calls this balancing act “keeping one foot in the familiar,” and he thinks it’s a must, at least to start.

Halperin doesn’t think that there’s a quantitative measure as to how far developers can go toward authenticity. The only way to push the authenticity envelope is to make a best guess and then gauge the response. “So you may try going 50% or 60% of the way toward exhibiting some of the core ethnic flavors,” he says. “And then you test the waters with consumer research: Is this too hot? Is this not hot enough? Is the fish sauce in here really turning people off, or are they saying, ‘Boy, I don’t know why I like this, but I do’?”

It also helps to work with those who have their ears to the ground. “We comb the popular literature — because who else is reading the popular literature but the consumer? We travel. We have a bank of 85 chefs who, basically, do nothing but feed people for a living. You need to be able to tap into all of those resources as a product developer,” Halperin says.

“The acceptability of ethnic food is vastly improved when it’s promoted by someone who has status in society, whether it’s someone in the media or a restaurant chef,” Miller says. Maintaining a close developmental relationship with these culinary professionals can mean the difference between catching a trend before its wave crests and riding it out in style — or just getting soaked. “Given what I and other chefs did with Southwestern cuisine about 20 years ago,” he continues, “I don’t think nuevo Latino or regional Mexican would’ve been accepted without that prestaging and premarketing of Southwestern ingredients in high-end foods.”

Many of the ingredients usually found in dried ethnic mixes — dried seasonings and vegetables, grains, nuts, and starches — are domestically familiar. Dried mixes often don’t demand much in the way of gee-whiz ingredient technology. And Halperin notes that from a manufacturer’s point of view, as long as the mix lasts on the shelf, the fewer ingredients required, the better.

The correspondence between original recipe and boxed-mix ingredients isn’t one-to-one. Plenty of fresh herbs, vegetables and sauces augment the dried ingredients in traditional, from-scratch ethnic dishes. Trying to match the contribution of these fresh ingredients can hamper formulation when developers are limited to dried, shelf-stable, and cost-reducing alternatives. “It can be difficult,” Miller admits. “Anybody who works in the industry wants a one-year shelf life. And to get ingredients that inert, you have to go to powders and oils and ingredients that mirror ethnic flavors.” For example, he says, you’d be hard-pressed to find a boxed mix that uses the amount or quality of saffron that’s commonplace in Spain, Morocco or the South of France. As a compromise, turmeric might work, but it won’t have real saffron’s distinctive, almost acrid, flavor. But at least it mimics the color.

If substituting turmeric’s color for saffron’s flavor is too blunt, don’t lose hope. Flavor companies have been hard at work creating dried, shelf-stable flavors that represent entire cuisines, sometimes all within one flavor ingredient. According to Debbie Jarrettbangs, global category marketing manager, savory flavors, International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc., South Brunswick, NJ, “Provided that a talented flavorist is involved in creating the flavor and a skilled technologist applies it, authentic profiles can be reproduced for dried ethic foods.”

The trick is to understand which flavor combinations define a cuisine’s identity. “It’s all about those flavor companions,” Jarrettbangs adds, “the ones that go together to make up each traditional cuisine’s profile. For Latin, it’s smoked chiles, cilantro, roasted vegetables and lime. For Thai, it’s lemongrass, garlic, ginger, cilantro and peanut. For Mediterranean, it’s garlic, olive oil, sun-dried tomato, Parmesan cheese and basil.”

What strikes Vendôme as a cuisine’s essence “is the way it layers its flavors, one on top of the other. Recreating those layers is the key to any success you will have in developing ethnic foods. Without them, the product won’t have any depth. It won’t be very interesting to the palate.”

How can product developers layer dozens of “reference-point” flavors, as Vendôme calls them, into a boxed mix, especially when many ingredients responsible for those flavors are mysteries, or difficult to source or control for quality? Absent a feel for the cuisine, Vendôme warns, developers might end up putting 30 or 40 different ingredients into a formula in a misguided attempt to secure the correct profile.

By studying cuisines in-depth and identifying each one’s flavor “fingerprint,” flavorists do the legwork for product developers. “We can come up with a well-balanced foundation flavor, representative of a cuisine’s overall profile, that you, the product developer, can customize,” says Vendôme. How do flavorists map a cuisine’s “genome”? “Say you were to cook dozens of regional Italian dishes,” he proposes. “If you were to put 10 people in a room, have them taste each Italian dish and ask them to tell you which flavors stood out most, you’ll hear one person mention garlic, another will say, ‘Well, I taste a distinct kind of fattiness,’ and then another will tell you olive oil.” At the end of the exercise, he says, certain overarching flavors emerge as defining themes. “So now,” he concludes, “if you were to create a product with all of those key components in one ingredient, right there you’ve already taken care of a lot of the work for the product developer.”

Working from this template, the product developer can enhance or diminish those constituent flavors to shunt the profile toward something more specific. If the goal is to give a general Chinese flavor a Cantonese-style accent, amplify the template’s sweet and sour elements. For more of a Sichuan bent, bring in the smoky-spicy notes. Using a template as a base also lets designers tailor the product’s profile to a specific market: if the target consumer can withstand an all-out habañero offensive, go ahead and add more capsicum fire to a customized Jamaican-jerk flavor.

If flavoring ingredients were blood types, soy sauce would be type O, the universal donor. Although it’s most associated with Japanese, Chinese and other East Asian cuisines, Matt Hutchinson, manager, research and development, Kikkoman marketing and planning, Elgin, IL, says: “You can use soy sauce in just about any savory application. And you can be really creative with it, too, especially if you understand what, technically, soy sauce contributes to the product.”

That would be umami, the meaty, savory “fifth taste” that helps balance the remaining four (sweet, sour, salty and bitter) and round out an overall flavor profile. The concepts of culinary balance and flavor enhancement are the same in any language, which might explain why soy sauce can pass as local in everything from lentil curry to mushroom risotto to Texas-style chili. “Pan-Pacific and California-style cuisines both go particularly well with soy sauce,” adds Hutchinson, “as do Caribbean or Jamaican food.” In fact, soy sauce traveled to the West Indies so long ago (via Chinese laborers brought to work in colonial sugar plantations) that it’s a standard ingredient in jerk-style marinades and seasoning rubs.

Hutchinson reserves some of his highest praise for the cross-culinary union between soy sauce and Mexican cuisine. The cuisine’s meaty base notes get a savory boost from soy sauce, and soy sauce provides a richly flavored foil to the sheer sensory shock of chile-based heat. “Soy sauce pulls that heat into balance,” he says. “It enhances the smoky notes of roasted and dried chiles, and it puts their flavor — not just their heat — into context.”

When advising developers of Asian-style or Asian-fusion products, Hutchinson recommends determining the formula’s overall salt level, then replacing the salt with soy sauce so that the salt level comes out about equal. “That,” he says, “usually brings out the soy sauce flavor.” But if the development path leads more westward, designers might not want a demonstrable soy sauce flavor. In that case, he says, simply replace a smaller proportion of the salt with soy sauce. “It’ll still bring in that umami,” he adds. “It still fills in those empty spaces in the flavor.”

A product that needs to sit high-and-dry on a shelf can avail itself of the wonders of soy sauce, made powder, thanks to spray-drying. It’s the real thing, with maltodextrin as a carrier. To sidestep the hygroscopicity that sometimes bedevils boxed mixes, choose a granulated version; agglomeration makes them less dusty on the production floor, too, notes Hutchinson. (But, if the appeal of liquid is too much to resist, add it to the box in the form of a single-serve packet.)

All these flavor ingredients would be so much tasty powder without something to flavor. In dried mixes, that something usually means pasta, rice and other grains, which provide the dietary foundation for most of the world’s cuisines. Conveniently, those starchy starting points are almost always available dried.

Product developers working in noodle-heavy cuisines — Italian, Asian, and Central and Eastern European — profit from pasta’s familiarity factor. Semolina pasta and egg noodles have achieved near-total penetration of the American market, funky shapes and flavors included. Even Asia’s nonwheat noodles, such as buckwheat soba, rice noodles and brittle threads of mung-bean starch, raise far fewer eyebrows than they once did.

All the same, notes Vermylen: “Since pasta is such a good carrier of flavor and sauce, many typical Italian shapes can also be used in other cuisines. ... A pasta maker with a wide variety of shapes, and the ability to develop new shapes to meet its customers’ needs, can provide shapes that look good in other types of cuisines.”

Matching a pasta’s shape to a cuisine is only as important as matching a dried-mix’s sauce or seasoning to the pasta. Vermylen says flavored varieties, such as lemon-pepper or tomato-basil, work well in lightly sauced sides that don’t blanket the pasta’s flavor. “Vegetable pastas containing spinach, tomato or beet purees add lots of variety, too,” he notes. And while the tri-color blend of plain, spinach and tomato pastas remains trendy, he suggests a simpler mix of plain pasta with just 25% spinach pasta for an upscale side dish.

From a manufacturing perspective, dried mixes open the door to a much wider range of pasta shapes than do retort, fresh or frozen applications. “Since the consumer is cooking the pasta, it isn’t exposed to the rigors of processing, agitation and pumping that it sees in other formats,” Vermylen points out.

Finding a size to fit the box or pouch can be an issue — 10-in.-long spaghetti is hard to cram into a 6-in. box, and curly or large tubular noodles don’t always fit standard packages either. In both cases, pasta suppliers can provide a solution — a shorter spaghetti measuring 2 to 5-in. in the first case, or a special flat noodle in the second. Vermylen is currently working on one such project: providing a dried-soup maker with an Asian-style noodle compact enough to fit into the pouch, which then expands into a long, straight noodle once cooked.

Preparation times also determine proper pasta picks. In general, the longer the pasta cooks, the more resilient it must be. Vermylen points out that a thicker-walled pasta will cook more slowly, so it will be firmer in a given cook time than a thin-walled shape, which can cook up in minutes on the stove or in the microwave. Because technical constraints limit a pasta’s thickness, pasta producers often need to add ingredients, such as egg white, to help the pasta hold up. Pasta walls measuring 0.03 in. aren’t uncommon in quick-cooking varieties, but special dies can produce even thinner versions of popular pasta shapes, such as penne or shells.

Vermylen reminds product developers to consider ingredient compatibility when formulating with pasta. “Some dry-mix manufacturers find that seasoning or particulates can get trapped in shapes like shells or small tubes” he notes. And despite dried pasta’s credentials as a low-moisture product, it’s not unheard of for noodles to donate moisture to other ingredients in a mix. In that case, low-moisture varieties can eliminate resultant clumping before it happens.

Perhaps even more widely recognized than pasta, rice makes the perfect ingredient to use as a base for dry mixes. “Something as familiar as rice, when combined with a touch of ethnic flavors or ingredients, is almost always a winning combination in today’s market,” Holleman says.

While rice’s simplicity and omnipresence may have saddled it with a measure of anonymity in the past, these days, “rice has finally moved to a place of what I would call culinary respect,” says Miller.

But along with that respectability comes a formidable complexity. “The first thing to note is that not all rice is the same,” says Holleman. “This is obvious to some people, but others still think that any rice requires a 2:1 rice-to-water ratio, which obviously doesn’t always work.”

Blame it on starch chemistry, among other factors. The ratio of amylose to amylopectin among different rice varieties — which may also have different grain lengths — leads to differing cook times, cooked textures and, according to Miller, an inherent challenge in combining different types of rice into blends. Nevertheless, processing technologies such as precooking, parboiling and instantizing all help modify cooking times and textures, making blends more successful.

“We use different processes, such as scarification, which is essentially scratching the bran layer to enable quicker moisture penetration, producing a quicker cook time to match that of other ingredients,” says Holleman.

Ethnic dried mixes can take advantage of the rising profiles of specialty-rice varieties that go well beyond the usual white, brown and wild. Floral-flavored jasmine rice from Thailand and India’s nutty basmati are only the tip of the iceberg. Holleman is enamored of Thailand’s hon mali rice, which he says has a buttery, popcorn-like aroma when cooked, with a flavor to match. It cooks in nine quick minutes, too. His company has had particular success with a proprietary variety of red rice called Colusari, grown from an heirloom seed and named after the California town — Colusa — that houses the company’s processing facility. Other colorful rices that Holleman considers of note include purple Thai and Chinese black; but as appealing as their appearance and ethnic associations may be, their inadequate availability limits the extent to which product developers can formulate with them.

Holleman also touts a new addition to the company’s lineup, available to foodservice customers — bamboo rice, a short-grain variety infused with chlorophyll from baby bamboo plants in southern China: “The infusion process, or recipe, really, is an 800-year-old process that has recently been brought back to life. The green appearance and green-tea flavor profile have made it an incredibly popular choice among many chefs.”

Also in the short-grain vein is Koshi-Hikari, which originated in Japan. This variety cooks up with a superior stickiness, making it well-suited as a sushi rice. It works equally well in other applications calling for starchier, creamier grains, including risottos, desserts and side dishes. Miller developed four flavored-rice dishes using Koshi-Hikari; shiitake, Thai, Indonesian and Hawaiian. “I tasted every rice out there on the market, and I developed taste profiles for these products that were closer to mirroring the traditional profiles that exist within the cuisines — limited, of course, by having to use the dried food products. But I found that these were better than any of the products out there,” he says.

The story’s moral: Dried mixes may be the perfect vehicle for delivering the foreign flavors that Americans are greeting with open arms. The era of culinary free trade has arrived, and it’s packed in a box.

Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a bachelor’s degree in consumer food science with a minor in English from the University of California-Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and enjoys cooking and eating food in addition to writing about it.