Delicious, next-gen journeys in the formulation of plant-derived foods

Plant-based foods are a hot topic — which you can read more about in SupplySide Food & Beverage Journal's plant-based digital magazine — yet they can be a bit of an oxymoron.

The word “plant” implies simplicity and wellness, but often plant-based foods are conglomerations of ingredients that consumers don’t understand, much less equate with wellness — the epitome of ultra-processed foods. Food manufacturers need to meet consumer expectations for unsophisticated ingredient decks while delivering optimum nutrition and flavor experiences.

Upping the ante

Melissa Machen, principal technical account manager of protein ingredients at Cargill, suggested perhaps “trying to make a product that tastes exactly like a beef burger or a dairy beverage may not be the objective.”

From a developer’s perspective, Andrew Hunter, president of Chef Andrew Hunter company, called analogues a concession. “They're not what they purport to be. They’re essentially imposters. This trickery makes the job of a product developer difficult. Creating plant-based analogues is “really an exercise in chemistry,” he said. “You really need to have scientists.”

As an R&D chef who focuses on menu and operations development for restaurant groups and product commercialization for industrial clients, Hunter takes a different slant, but one that could upscale the category.

Related:Next-gen plant based: Delicious and futuristic – digital magazine

To take plant-based products to the next level, he prefers blending analogues with real plants such as roasted and ground mushrooms, onions and butternut squash. “If you’re making a patty, you can blend in roasted vegetables as much as 30% into the analogue and the protein will still bind. If you’re making a loose grind for taco meat, sloppy Joes or meat pies, you can use 30% of the analogue with a majority of the matrix being vegetables,” Hunter continued. “By adding plants, we’re able to introduce a natural product and the aromas smell delicious. Restaurant operators like the blending idea because it extends their purchase, and it can lower the cost significantly.”

Patties made with vegetable inclusions can be cooked on a flat top or griddle. In manufacturing, they can be put through a conveyor oven.

Hunter likes to blend other ingredients with analogues, too. Adding herbs, spices and condiments such as soy sauce, barbecue sauce or mustards not only ramps up the flavor, but he said it can be less expensive than straight analogues.

To make formulation of plant-based dairy or meat alternatives easier and potentially more affordable, Machen suggested starting with a neutral-tasting base. “Protein is the most-used ingredient (second to water), so selecting the best possible protein for your specific application is absolutely key,” she stated. “It will be the ingredient with the most influence on your base flavor profile. There is a little more room to play with savory and meaty flavors, and smoky and roasted notes. Flavors are much more exposed in a plant-based dairy-alternative product, making it that much harder to hide the beany or earthy notes often associated with plant proteins.”

Related:Innovative plant-based meat alternatives target the deli counter

Machen recommended a pea protein produced by Cargill’s joint venture partner. PURIS has developed a proprietary approach to protein extraction and processing that results in clean-tasting proteins — and doesn’t rely on chemical hexanes. Besides creating a neutral-flavored pea protein, another advantage exists. The technology “results in a range of pea proteins with some of the lowest sodium levels on the market today, including PURIS Textured Pea Protein LS and PURIS 870 LS, with 85% less sodium,” she said.

A cleaner-tasting protein base will be less reliant on heavy modifiers. “While flavor maskers are great at hiding off-notes, they also mute all the flavors in a system,” Machen pointed out. “That means formulators will need to bump up expensive characterizing flavor loads to compensate. It’s easy to end up with a very expensive flavor system when formulators start down this road.”

Related:It’s time to start taking plant-based cheese seriously

Lauren Senne, a flavorist and manager of taste modulation at Imbibe, cautioned that ingredients like pea protein pose a challenge because they vary from supplier to supplier. Strongly flavored actives like ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) may also be hard to work with. When developing beverages or dairy alternatives, “There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to tackling difficult ingredients, but it’s very important to mask before flavoring and often before sweetening,” she said. “If the off-notes from your base are not fully neutralized, you risk having your flavor or sweetener acting as a partial masker. When this happens, it’s hard for your flavor or sweetener to break through in the base. You might find you’re adding tons of additional flavor and sweetener, but not getting much impact. That’s a sign that you might need to revisit your masking system and then optimize flavor and sweetness.”

The choice of fat in an analogue is equally important both from a flavor and an oxidative perspective. Machen noted that fat oxidation leads to off-flavors, and some fats are more prone to oxidation than others. With protein and fat selections in place, formulators can then determine what flavor systems and seasoning blends need to be added.

Expanding flavor experience

Hunter prefers using pantry ingredients to build layers of flavor. “I'd rather focus on everyday ingredients found in most home cabinets than to get too fancy with ingredients that have long and funny names. I find myself battling the industry norm because I think a lot of the big food companies want to use encapsulations and sprays and so forth because it’s what they’ve always done, and they’ve had success.” He said his approach isn’t necessarily more wholesome, but it’s a strategy that attracts clients who want to deliver on the same approach.

“I’ve recently become enamored with and adept at using natural extracts because they capture the taste and aroma of real ingredients in their essential oils,” he said. Extracts of herbs and spices can add what he calls “a point of view.” An Italian sausage or meatball for example, will contain tomato powder, basil, oregano, fennel, garlic and chili flakes. He said he always adds chili flakes into that kind of a product, even if it’s not spicy. If he’s creating a spicy Italian profile, he adds more chili flakes and possibly cayenne to boost the assertiveness.

“A lot of times, commercial products don’t have enough flavor embedded in them,” he contended. “Don’t be ambiguous about your flavor profile: Make it taste Italian.” He suggested a hero flavor such as tomato, fennel or garlic — and then to add a layer of flavors. “It’s the middle flavors that should be identifiable,” he continued. “They give dimension, but they’re not as prominent as the hero. And then you have a layer of flavors. If this were a rock ’n’ roll band, they’d be the supporting vocals. You might not notice them — salt, sugar, maybe earthy chilis, a little smoke or tamarind. They’re not really used at a high enough percentage for them to register, but they still give dimension. And if you took them out, it wouldn’t be as good.”

Delivering flavor

Flavor perception is tied to sense of smell. Hunter observed one major challenge of plant-based analogues is that in raw form, they don’t smell particularly good. “You start at a disadvantage. When they cook, they smell better because the salt and the fat in the analogue starts to caramelize and heat up and everything blends together,” he explained. Of course, the addition of other ingredients such as onion, garlic and spices add to the olfactory experience.

He said the trick to optimizing the sensory attributes is to balance assorted flavors with different intensities. The challenge for developers is capturing those flavors and intensities if not formulating with preservatives. “I’m actually a big fan of freezing food,” Hunter said. “It locks everything in. With freezing, you don’t have to use preservatives. And you don’t have to worry too much about flavor degradation. And with modified atmosphere, or high-pressure pasteurization, otherwise known as HPP, you can avoid most if not all of the preservatives and still get a really nice retention of flavor.”

Flavors themselves, however, are volatile and will be affected by heat processing, “oftentimes in the form of loss of impact, especially in terms of the lighter top-notes that are so important to aroma,” Senne stated. “A good practice is to add extra flavor to account for loss when heat processing; or overload some of the lighter, more volatile flavor components so that the profile comes into the right balance after processing. Additional challenges are added when you have base components that change in flavor/aroma profile after processing, like protein. For protein base, we’ll often process unflavored base, allow it to age and then work out the flavor profile. Once we have the profile where we like it, we’ll process everything together and see how it performs. In terms of storage, it’s always best to store flavor and finished product in a temperature-controlled environment for optimal profile.”