Soup-er Mixes

May 2003

The soup my grandma could put together with a couple potatoes and an old hen — a “souper” chicken, in the butcher’s argot — inspired awe. Today’s consumers, however, are more likely to find themselves running to their next appointment, rather than to the local poultry dresser. They still want a soup that tastes like what grandma made, but finding the time to make a homestyle pot of goodness is usually easier said than done.

So where can soup aficionados turn when they want real soup with real integrity, but don’t want — or have the time — to make it from scratch? Try a dried mix — and not those powdered onion packets typically made into dip for chips. Today, dried soups can harness age-old traditions to cutting-edge technology, blending homegrown character into a convenient package that meets a sophisticated market’s tougher demands. Given the current vogue for all things rustic and regional, it’s no surprise that the ultimate bowlful of comfort has risen to the level of high-end meal.

Trading in time
Decades ago, the smoky smells of navy bean and ham or split pea with bacon often signaled suppertime. Chicken simmered in the stockpot along with leeks and mustard greens in spring, and zucchini and tomatoes come summer. Year-round, the frugal virtues of those navies and splits filled out the provisions, asking little more than a shake of salt, a ham hock and a few hours on the stove.

But when time in the kitchen gave way to time at the office, a simple crock of soup assumed the allure of opulence. It’s the story of today’s younger generation — one that inherited grandma’s heirloom china, but not her kitchen proficiency. We are a nation that hasn’t quite learned to cook; or if we have, we probably can’t find the time to do so. Food-marketing expert and “Supermarket Guru” Phil Lempert notes that less than 25% of Americans know what they’re going to eat for dinner by 4 p.m. that afternoon. This generally rules out soaking a kettle of beans for 8 hours and simmering them for another 3 hours after that.

Yet the busier (and clumsier in the kitchen) consumers get, the savvier they’ve become about the very foods they no longer have the time or skills to prepare. Frequent restaurant outings and mounting collections of Gourmet have introduced everyone to quality and authenticity standards that outpace attempts at meeting them. And while grandma herself might’ve opened a trusty can of chicken noodle in a pinch, this newfound fealty to artisanal foods and half-hearted aspirations toward the “slow food” lifestyle make today’s cooks loathe to follow her lead, convenience be damned. Even homestyle soups packaged in folksy mason jars fail to satisfy weekend cooks eager to use more than just the microwave in their custom-renovated kitchens. It all adds up to a market ready for gourmet tastes from easy-to-use products, one that demands today’s dry-mix items step up to the soup pot and deliver homemade goodness that would make the family matriarch proud.

High-end comes down to Earth
Earlier generations thought “fancy,” “refined,” and perhaps even “expensive” or “French,” as synonymous with “high-end.” For soup, that narrowed the choices down to lobster bisques and vichyssoises served by tuxedoed waiters. These proper Gallic potages owed their elitist reputations, in part, to their rarity in American kitchens. Today, with white-tablecloth dining now as easy to come by as frozen pesto pizzas, high-end has settled down-to-earth. These days, the simple pleasures of soothing, hearty soups are in short supply — and in style.

“We all want to travel back in time to the comfort foods that we remember, whatever our reference points may have been when we were younger,” explains John Farrar, head of product development, specialty food and beverages, Boyd Coffee Company, Portland, OR. This retreat into nostalgia has set store shelves and restaurant menus on rewind, particularly post-9/11. In fact, among the few segments of the restaurant industry to escape the current economic lethargy are those that pedal hearty, heaping helpings of le cuisine de haute mom.

Restaurant and retail consumers have embraced emerging ethnic cuisines, too, their bold, fresh flavors recharging palates numb with too much of the same-old. According to Danny Bruns, CRC, CCC, corporate chef, Kerry Seasonings, Waukesha, WI, a soup can earn high-end status simply by virtue of its unexpected, ethnically influenced flavor combinations, such as cilantro-lime, chipotle-pear or rosemary ginger.

Despite the apparent gulf between our ethnic exploration and fashion for “throwback” dining, the trends may actually be two sides of the same coin; as globalization redefines our very notion of “home,” we may soon consider soups such as ribolita, caldo gallego or tom kha gai as domestic as grandma’s chicken noodle. Folks in Tuscany, Cuba and Thailand sure do.

The ingredients make the soup
Cultural critics could fill volumes examining the psychosocial factors behind the lowly soup’s ascendancy. Is it a response to rampant technology? Are we cocooning again? What role do demographics play? But after peeling away theories, what’s left is a critical core of flavor. A soup could provide as much comfort as a chenille bedspread or as much ethnic zest as the U.N. lunchroom, but if its flavors don’t live up to consumers’ escalating expectations, they’ll grab a sandwich instead.

Years in the kitchen have taught Volker Frick, executive chef at Kettle Cuisine, Inc., a Boston-area manufacturer of fresh-refrigerated soups, that the quality of a soup’s flavor is proportional to the quality of its ingredients. “To keep the flavor alive, use the best ingredients, and don’t be shy about it,” he advises. But he adds that the simplest ingredients stand up best to the toughest scrutiny: “A good loaf of bread with fresh butter can be a gourmet meal. But if you have lousy bread and lousy butter, it’s not going to amount to anything.” The same goes for minestrone.

Consumers, however, speak their own dialect when defining high-end and often equate terms like “natural,” “whole” and “minimally processed” with top-of-the-line. They look for soups with the beans, grains, herbs and vegetables they stock in their own kitchens — and they expect to see and taste those familiar ingredients in the finished dish. As for nutrition, fat-free austerity impresses them less than good old-fashioned wholesomeness. And if a seasoning can convey a sense of place the way curry powder suggests Bombay, or coconut milk transports the palate to Malaysia, it scores additional points for ethnic authenticity.

This, the industry can work with. But in their zeal to purge food labels of undesirables, consumers often blacklist ingredients that manufacturers count on. To make matters worse, these lists reinvent themselves as quickly as the media’s fractured focus shifts from one forbidden food to the next. “Eight or 10 years ago,” recalls Ron Steel, Boyd Coffee’s manager of research and development, “people were really afraid of tropical fats.” Thus, palm and coconut oils became label liabilities. Now, concerns about trans fats have vilified hydrogenated oils, while tropicals no longer seem so threatening. Then there’s that indispensable flavor enhancer, monosodium glutamate. Once concerned consumers’ bugbear, MSG has “made it past the general consumer as okay,” Bruns believes, although he acknowledges that some holdouts will never warm up to it.

On a brighter note, if consumers have rejected some ingredients outright, they’ve become more tolerant of the natural variations they find in others. They have accepted that not all diced peppers are precisely 1/4-in. cubed, and that a tomato tastes differently on Presidents’ Day than on Labor Day. This tolerance has its limits, though, and peril awaits the product developer who insists on testing them. Nevertheless, a growing respect for food’s seasonality, coupled with the comfort some consumers take in a little roughness around the edges, has given rustic whimsy a leg up on cookie-cutter consistency.

Regardless of the shorthand consumers apply to food labels — all natural and organic equals good; allergens and GM equals bad — a high-end imprimatur often balances on the crafty construction of a soup’s image. Restaurants know that something as simple as a well-worded menu, by flattering a customer’s culinary erudition, can elevate a dining experience. Which, for example, would you rather order: tomato soup, or “seasonal soup of fire-roasted heirloom tomatoes”? While a prefix like “Santa Fe-style” bumps a chicken soup a few rungs above the norm, if that soup lacks the chiles and corn to justify the upgrade, the label will fool no one. Ditto for a “summer vegetable” gazpacho without cucumber, or a broccoli-cheese soup whose “aged Asiago” tastes more like vintage Velveeta®.

Technology toys with tradition
It’s enough to make a product developer break out in a cold sweat. Pleasing foodies is hard work. After all, how many of them truly appreciate the extent to which functional ingredients, fine-tuned processing and sheer technological magic make a soup taste … simple? Like professional ice skaters, high-end soup manufacturers have to make their job look easy.

While no one’s saying crafting a gourmet dry mix is easy, the forward march of technology has smoothed the path toward high-end soup mixes worthy of their names. Farrar expresses amazement at the strides the dried category has made of late. In fact, he maintains that “in a lot of areas of foodservice and the food industry, dried mixes give you a better taste profile and mouthfeel than canned, frozen, refrigerated, aseptic, and even liquid versions made from scratch.”
Steel agrees, observing: “Each of the categories has its own pros and cons, whether it be canned, frozen, dried or whatever. But product developers have many more dried-mix technologies at their hands than they had 20 years ago.”

Most significant has been a widening and deepening of dried-ingredient options. These days, notes Bruns, you can get practically anything “to match the authentic flavor of fresh vegetables and seasonings, whether it be through flavor systems, other dried items or functional ingredients that duplicate mouthfeel and texture.”

Much of the credit for the quality belongs to cutting-edge dehydration methods. “It used to be that everything was just air-dried,” says Steel. “Then freeze-drying came along, and they perfected those techniques to come up with better products that rehydrate more quickly, and give you better flavor and color.” The advances have yielded superior vegetables and seasonings, starch systems, flavor systems, and a whole variety of systems unavailable 15 years ago that add to the food technologist’s repertoire, he says.

The good, the bad and the tradeoffs
When charged with translating a traditional soup into a functional, stable, convenient and high-end dried mix, even the sharpest tools have their work cut out for them. “There are always tradeoffs between making a fresh soup and something that has to have dehydrated ingredients,” Steel admits. “You have to ask yourself, ‘How far can we really go in making this as homemade as possible?’”

Developers can get the ball rolling just by knowing the ingredients: their specs; their vulnerabilities; and their capacity for behaviors, both good and bad. For instance, while microbial issues rarely plague low-moisture dried soups, ingredient-to-ingredient and ingredient-to-environment interactions still limit a mix’s organoleptic shelf life. Steel cites the complications of working with certain creamer systems as an example. He notes that if you combine a creamer system that has coconut oil with a spice system containing black pepper, you can wind up with a very soapy flavor in about six months after compounds in the pepper hydrolyze soapy lauric-acid chains from the coconut triglycerides. “So,” he adds, “you have to be very careful to formulate with compatible ingredients.” In this case, designers may perhaps use a creamer system based on soybean oil instead.

The more complex the soup mix, the more carefully a product developer has to coordinate cook times among its motley ingredients. Many high-end mixes pack beans, rice, pasta, vegetables and seasonings into one pouch, setting the stage for considerable fine-tuning. Starches and other thickening agents, for example, can delay the rehydration of whole beans, and the pasta in pasta e faglioli will always outhydrate the faglioli unless it contains an instantized bean with a hydration rate compatible to that of the pasta.

Steel also advises examining packaging when working with delicate natural ingredients. “If you’re packaging a mix in something that doesn’t offer a lot of protection from light, and that mix contains natural colorants like beet-juice powder, you can get a lot of color fading in the finished product because of exposure,” he says.

Above all, Steel says designers need to make sure that they’ve done their homework with regard to mix stability. Don’t let the soup’s dried nature lull you into a false sense of security. “If you’ve developed, say, a cream of chicken soup, you’ve got to do the proper shelf-life studies to make sure that six months, maybe nine months down the road, your cheese powder hasn’t combined with another ingredient and started a browning reaction,” he says. Something as simple as a slight discrepancy in water activity can lead to minor disasters, such as caking of important functional ingredients, or worse.

Because a product designer may find it difficult to anticipate all potential ingredient interactions, Steel advises regular consultation with suppliers. “They can be tremendous sources of knowledge and experience as to how their ingredients are used,” he adds.

In any event, dried soups wouldn’t have achieved their current popularity were it not for their convenience and resiliency. They’ve got economy going in their favor, too. Since they’re lighter than cans, they’re cheaper to transport, and — in contrast to frozen and refrigerated soups — they don’t exact heavy energy costs during storage. Even the manufacturing process is often largely just a matter of mixing to a consistent blend, then careful packaging.

However, the initial consistent distribution can suffer from ingredient striation — when the larger, denser beans settle out from the lighter dried vegetables, for instance. If that’s the case, equipment with separate hoppers to meter out individual ingredients can help; however, unless the manufacturer finds it’s packing a lot of soup mix, the costs of such equipment can outweigh the benefits. Lower-volume operators might consider hand-packing trickier ingredients or, as Steel comments, “you can always send it to a copacker to take care of that part of the process, too.”

As for ensuring uniform distribution among finer ingredients such as starches and seasonings, flow agents and blending aids keep them clump-free, as does coprocessing or agglomerating them into granulates. Of course a low-tech solution, such as packaging powders in their own pouches, will also work.

Kim Peterson, senior food applications scientist, Proliant, Inc., Ames, IA, describes a handy method for blending chicken fat or beef tallow into a dried soup mix. She says manufacturers can plate fat on salt, sugar and other dry ingredients, creaming them together “so that after the starch and maltodextrins have been added, you still have a dry seasoning blend.” Usually, though, these fats don’t appear at levels high enough to lead to caking. “You should use just enough fat to give you the flavor, the characteristic fatty notes and the richer mouthfeel you’re looking for,” she suggests.

The power of powders
In the olden days, when cooks wanted richer mouthfeels and flavors, they had to work for them, roasting soup bones, browning rouxs and reducing pots of stock. Some cooks, including Frick, still do.

When it comes to creating a lobster bisque, Frick uses these traditional methods to produce a great-tasting soup. “I start with 40-gal. braising pans full of about 50 to 100 lbs. of lobster bodies,” he says. “Into that, I add around 100 lbs. of butter and I cook that until the butter is completely clear and red from the lobster. That’s what I use to make the lobster-butter roux. But then I use more lobster bodies simply to make the stock. And they get roasted, and vegetables get added as a mirepoix … It’s classic technique from the ground up.”

Consumers have developed a taste for that classic technique, and they’ve come to expect it in high-end soups. But when the kitchen needs a ready-to-eat soup requiring little more than a dousing with hot water and a five-minute steep on the counter, it doesn’t get a chance to develop subtle, slow-simmered back notes and textures. So the top-of-the-line mixes’ secret weapons are ingredients that translate technique into technology. With the help of dried broths and stocks, mirepoix and roasted-meat flavors, and functional starch systems, soup developers can paint their dried mixes with a more responsive culinary brush.

“We make stocks and flavors by doing the reactions ourselves, and develop the high-end flavors that way,” Peterson explains. “We’ve taken the time so that the consumer can get those flavors in an ‘instant,’ so to speak. When they add the water to the dried mix, they only need five to 20 minutes of heating it in order to get a nice-flavored soup that tastes as if they’d spent hours cooking it themselves.”

But to ensure true-to-technique results, Peterson recommends choosing dried stocks made the old-fashioned way, by cooking the bones with their adhering meat, “just as you would at home.” Not only does this method yield authentic, brothy flavors, but it allows for clean labels, as well. “All of our broths would appear as beef, turkey, or chicken stock or broth,” she says. And for European markets still skittish about mad cow disease, a growing selection of “spinal-column-free” dried broths and stocks contribute homestyle flavors minus the anxiety.

Chicken or beef powders, in contrast, “are slightly different products” than dried broths and stocks, Peterson continues. “They’re made from mechanically deboned meat, and they use a slightly different cooking process. They’re labeled differently, as well.”

Reaction flavors derived from chicken and beef offer benefits similar to those presented by dried stocks and broths. They distill hours of technique — in this case, roasting and caramelization — into easy-to-use flavor-delivery systems. As Peterson describes them, “they add the impact of whatever specific meaty, savory notes you’re looking for.” Also, like naturally dried broths, they boost a soup’s meatiness without forcing the use of ingredients that might scare label-readers. “We’ve tried to make our reaction flavors as clean as possible,” she says. “All of the flavors will list the specific species of stock as a starting ingredient, and then they might include salt, or maltodextrin, or beef tallow, or a flavor.” But you won’t find MSG, disodium inosonate or disodium guanylate that might frighten off some consumer.

A splash of wine or sherry makes a classic complement to those rich, meaty notes. And, adds Jim Polansky, national sales manager, Todhunter International, Inc., West Palm Beach, FL, “When you use wine in a soup, it not only gives the soup a better flavor, but it gives it a culinary association when it appears on the label.” Consumers could’ve told you this themselves, as part of their allegiance to better food is an increasing interest in wines — for drinking, cooking and, thanks to publicity about the “French Paradox,” for a Euro-style approach to cardiovascular health.

Now manufacturers can add that Old World elegance to their dried soups with dried wine powders — not wine flavors, but the wine itself in powdered form. As Polansky says: “We’re a winery that’s making our own wine powders. We’re not a flavor company making wine-flavor powders.” The company’s spray-drying process retains a high percentage of wine solids; those solids allow dried wine powders to reflect more accurately the character of the original libation. The high solids content also reduces the threat of clumping and caking in the dried mix that might result from excess moisture.

Successful starches
While wine powders, reaction flavors and dried broths convince the taste buds that a dried soup spent hours on the simmer, manufacturers need to bring full-bodied texture to the product without a big investment of time or technique. Sometimes, the soup’s own ingredient can do the trick. “Pureed vegetable soups, particularly those made from scratch, owe their characteristic homestyle texture and appearance to the starches that the vegetables release over time,” says Jane Petrolino, marketing manager, AVEBE America, Inc., Princeton, NJ. Such is the case with a porridge-like potato chowder, or the hearty viscosity of a long-cooked bean stew.

Since the requisite stove-time for those textures to bloom on their own isn’t available, product developers can use a potato starch, which Petrolino says contributes “that pulpy structure reminiscent of the pureed soups of old.” When dairy ingredients are not an option, a smoother, more delicate texture reminiscent of cream-based soups might result with the addition of tapioca starch. While maltodextrins turn up in dried soups primarily as filler, Dale Bertrand, manager of research and commercialization for AVEBE America, points out that they can work in concert with starches to enhance mouthfeel, too.

The beauty of potato starches, tapioca starches and even maltodextrins — particularly with respect to high-end soups — is that consumers don’t mind seeing these ingredients on labels. It’s even better if those starches aren’t chemically modified. Of course, not all dried soups can get away with going native when it comes to starch selection, and the final choice usually boils down to a matter of cook times and temperatures.

In general, the lower the cook temperature, the longer the starch takes to swell. So matching the starch to the time-temperature relationship “will give the best character to the soup,” Bertrand says. “For example, soups that need to be heated or simmered for five to 15 minutes have sufficient time and a boiling temperature to swell the starches, and provide the desired structure and viscosity.”

Soups that don’t get that kind of treatment can rely on cold-water swelling or pregelatinized alternatives designed to develop the proper texture quickly or without a lot of heat. “Here, potato excels by having the lowest pasting temperature of any starch. Potato starch also has the highest viscosity compared with equivalent use level of any starch,” Petrolino adds.

Also to potato and tapioca starches’ credit: They’ve got the lowest concentration of fatty acids and proteins among commonly used starches, so they won’t overpower the soup’s own flavors. The use of these starches allows the flavors of gourmet or high-end soups to burst through, enhancing the homestyle taste,” says Petrolino.

That’s not to say corn starch doesn’t have its own advantages. Waxy maize starches, composed almost entirely of amylopectin, have the lowest tendency toward retrogradation of all common starches. Overprocessing can lead to amylose reassociation, and if granule breakdown occurs, the starches will gel. Celeste Sullivan, senior application scientist, Grain Processing Corp., Muscatine, IA, says that most soup formulators need not concern themselves too much about this possibility. “This gelling is concentration-dependent and typical usage levels in soup are not high enough to create a gel if fragmentation occurs. The best selection for a dried-soup application would be a chemically modified starch product, to help avoid starch-granule breakdown,” she notes.

Depending upon the desired end product, a waxy maize starch can provide medium to moderately high viscosity. It has a clean flavor and typically, good shelf life. Sullivan notes that corn starches are often more cost-effective for use in a dried-soup application. But what about a soup that hardly spends any time on the stove at all? “Instant granule cold-water-swelling or hot-water-dispersible instant corn starch is designed for dry-mix-soup applications,” she says.

Companies concerned with maintaining a natural profile for their soup product can avoid the word “modified” on their label with the addition of a native starch. To glean some of the advantages of modified, without the chemical process, National Starch and Chemical Co., Bridgewater, NJ, makes a line of starches processed for improved resistance to acid, shear and temperature compared to traditional native starches.

According to Jacqueline Andreas, food technologist, food division, National Starch, the Novation® line contains pregelled and cook-up corn starches with different levels of process resistance and/or hydration rates. The former are designed for products do not need heat to thicken, and the latter are for soups that are cooked up on the stove. The newest line extension, Novation 9460, is an instant, certified-organic, functional natural starch made from waxy maize, designed to reconstitute well at cold or ambient temperatures, providing a smooth texture in instant foods such as dry mixes.

Spilling the beans
Nothing enhances a soup’s homestyle taste — as well as its texture, appearance and lofty reputation — like the ingredients that have been the category’s stock-in-trade since Biblical days. Take legumes, for instance. Conventional folklore may have it that Esau got taken when he sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils, but the emergence of boutique, heirloom legumes, such as butterscotch calypso beans, scarlet runners and Jackson wonder limas, may spur some soup aficionados to enter into a similar bargain.

According to Bemidji, MN-based Indian Harvest Specialtifoods Inc.’s website, “Quite simply, an heirloom bean is one that is grown from seed that is handed down from generation to generation.” In other words, these beans have histories. Suppliers work with “alternative trade organizations,” such as Decorah, IA-based Seed Savers Exchange, to find treasured seeds that raise a dried soup mix above its shelf mates. Why stick with the usual drab lentil when you can formulate with black beluga, petite crimson or French green lentils instead?

Strategically chosen beans, when paired with the appropriate seasonings, also have an uncanny knack for giving soups specific ethnic identity. The chickpea alone can pass as local in any number of ethnic soup recipes, from Indian mulligatawny to Morocco’s chorba bil hamus. And French green lentils are the only kind they use in Le Puy, France, where the unique climate and volcanic soil produce a lentil so distinctive that the French government has awarded the bean its own appellation d’origine, the mark of culinary merit.

Bruns notes that white northern and cannellini beans are “very trendy right now, especially if used in Tuscan or other Italian recipes. They’re good in Mediterranean soups, too.” Consumers have also shown such interest in black-bean soups that chefs are taking them beyond their traditional Southwestern and Latin American roots into Asian territory.

Product designers might also consider combining complementary legumes into playful soup bases and supplementing them with contrasting vegetables and spices. Bruns offers the idea of a calico-bean soup, a mixing of black, white and kidney beans “with a light broth of herbs and wine, and a splash of tomato.”

Even though foodies can’t get enough “whole” foods, developers don’t have to worry about alienating them with some broken beans in the mix. Those slightly crushed legumes not only hint at a rough-hewn rusticity that consumers read as “homemade,” but they release starches that thicken the soup without any additional cost or fat. Label-friendly legume flakes and powders achieve similar results, with pregelatinized versions appropriate for instant-soup mixes, and precooked powders suitable for simmer-soups that need more than a quick steep to rehydrate fully.

Speaking of rehydration, busy consumers may romanticize legumes’ historical connotations, but not their historically long cook times. Suppliers have reconciled this dilemma with quick-cooking legumes that differ from their slower ancestors only in their enhanced convenience. Precooked and dehydrated legumes, instantized by infrared, drum-drying or freeze-drying, reduce cook times to anywhere between three and 20 minutes. Additional benefits include higher yields per pound than canned, frozen or raw (thank a lower moisture content); more-consistent flavor quality; and improved cook-up performance.

Nicer rice
A bumper crop of specialty-rice varieties, produced both domestically and abroad, has given heirloom legumes a run for their money, with floral Thai jasmine and India’s nutty basmati only two among many that are earning household-name status. While brown and wild rice have been soup staples for years, they’ve lost none of their specialty standing for that familiarity. Blend specialty rices with some of the aforementioned legumes, as well as with other grains such as amaranth, wheat berries, quinoa and kasha, and you’ve got a soup base with the right color, flavor, and texture balance to liven up a standard soup.

Functionally, the amylose-to-amylopectin ratio predicts whether the grain will cook up sticky and moist (it will if it’s got more amylopectin) or free-flowing and fluffy. Generally, the longer the grain, the more the ratio leans toward amylose, and the drier the rice cooks. Which variety a developer chooses will depend on the textural qualities the manufacturer wants in the soup. For a creamy, almost pudding-style stew, stick with shorter-grain varieties; in soups where the grains should remain distinct and recognizable, use longer grains.

Instantized brown and white rice, produced by cooking and dehydrating the original grains, reduce cook times to anywhere between two to 10 minutes. The precooking sacrifices some of the rice’s visual kernel properties, along with some flavor, aroma and other typical characteristics. But in a soup packed with other grains, beans and vegetables, it’s likely no one will notice. Besides, quick-cooking mixes that don’t require boiling “protect” the rice’s integrity by not subjecting it to heat levels very much higher than its starch gelatinization temperature.

A pasta partnership
Pasta partners perfectly with a soup’s beans and rice, too. Like beans and rice, the pasta category has expanded as consumers seek out shapes, sizes, colors and flavors that do grandma’s dainty egg noodles one better. Sometimes, all a soup needs to grab a consumer’s notice is the appearance of, say, Israeli couscous, tri-colored orzo, spinach fusilli or another novel noodle.

Developers of quick-cooking soup mixes can benefit from pasta’s functional developments, as well. Mark E. Vermylen, vice president, A. Zerega’s Sons, Inc., Fair Lawn, NJ, notes that thin-walled pastas take less than five minutes to rehydrate in microwaveable soups. Dry, precooked pasta, he says, needs no further cooking in soup cups that rehydrate with the addition of boiling water. And in applications where the consumer simmers the soup long enough to cook the pasta, he says standard 100%-semolina pasta will perform well.

Vermylen does caution that “thin-walled, precooked pasta, by its nature, is not hearty and doesn’t have the mouthfeel associated with traditional al dente pasta.” But we’re talking about soup here and the textural benchmark is supposed to be softer than al dente. In fact, there’s something innately comforting about a tender soup noodle.

The Japanese have known this for ages — just sink your teeth into the plump and doughy noodles in a traditional udon soup. Like Western pasta, udon noodles are wheat-based, but nonwheat Asian noodles — such as rice-flour noodles, cellophane noodles made from mung-bean starch, and Japan’s buckwheat soba — make great additions to high-end dried soups, not only because of their international cachet, but because their generous capacity for absorption makes for quick and easy rehydration.

Taking it to the next level
So where should product developers set their sights in anticipation of tomorrow’s dried-soup trends? The frenzy for ethnics and nostalgia has the legs to carry it for some time, but there’s room in the pot for other players — like that elder statesman of soups, the bisque. That’s right. Be on the lookout for a comeback. In fact, Farrar’s company has successfully launched a selection of dry-mix squash and seafood bisques. “It’s absolutely a trend,” he says. “And adding the squash to the traditional seafood is great for the vegetarian market. You can do so many things with it, take it in so many different directions.”

Bruns agrees, suggesting that manufacturers update the theme by basing bisques on multiple carriers — such as seafood and vegetables — and introducing “bold, upfront flavors that get compelling back notes from herbs and spices. For example, a spicy Thai shrimp bisque could begin with a good seafood broth with lemongrass, coconut and other local ingredients, supported by basil, mint, or peanuts, and finished with a touch of cream.”

When applying foreign accents to familiar soups such as bisques, maintaining strict ethnic verisimilitude is less important than simply nailing the right flavor. Bruns’ ideas for successfully fusing elements old and new include giving a cream of tomato soup a salsa verde profile with tomatillos. Or, he suggests substituting jalapeños for the broccoli in a typical broccoli-Cheddar soup; the chiles lend needed zip, while the cheese tones down their heat in favor of their fresh, green notes.

Products can’t lose with Latin American flourishes such as chiles and tomatillos, or with their tropical cousins from the Caribbean. Farrar recently did some serious dining in Miami’s South Beach and still can’t shake the vibrant flavors from his palate. “There are some really wonderful, exciting Jamaican, Caribbean, and Cuban foods and beverages out there, and I’m certainly going to be looking at what we can do with that region of cuisines.” From the opposite side of the world, regional Asian is making its way west, picking up companions from the Indian subcontinent, North Africa and the Mediterranean along the way.

By moving a bit closer to home, product designers can tap into the growing interest in seasonal foods, offering a rotating selection of soups whose ingredients and flavor profiles reflect nature’s changing bounty. Lighter soups, such as tangy broccoli and lemon or spicy corn with zucchini, feel refreshing in spring and summer; fall and winter could usher in richer, more-filling offerings, including curried carrot and turnip or cream of lentil with garlic, bacon and smoked trout.

Keeping the emphasis on what’s fresh and in-season — which is hot right now — dried soup mixes can double as “interactive cooking kits.” The category has a distinct advantage over its canned, jarred, and even ready-to-eat counterparts, in that dried soups let the consumer in on some of the preparation. That’s no small change to someone who considers cooking a recreational sport. In addition to “assembling” the beans, pasta, grains and seasonings provided in the mix, consumers can also augment the soup with whatever they’ve got fresh on hand: herbs, shredded turkey, maybe some sweet bell peppers from the garden. A virtual cornucopia of mixtures can be spelled out on the label for less-creative cooks. And if they really want to make it special, they can even ask grandma if she wants to help.

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.

3400 Dundee Rd. Suite #100
Northbrook, IL 60062
Phone: 847/559-0385
Fax: 847/559-0389
E-mail: contactus@foodproductdesign.com
Website: www.foodproductdesign.com