The term "cooking sauce" includes sauces prepared with other ingredients for the finished application. Monica Hashimoto, food technologist for savory applications, Ottens Flavors, Philadelphia, describes the increased appeal of these sauces: "As consumers work longer hours and have less time or desire to cook an elaborate meal at dinner, sauces can be used to enhance the flavor of meat that has been reheated in the microwave or briefly grilled to provide the consumer with a richer dining experience."
The nature of these sauces is that they will be diluted by a substrate. For example, a stir-fry sauce will need to have enough intensity to blend with vegetables, meat or tofu, and rice or noodles and still make eating the dish an exciting experience. As we continue to see products marketed for bold flavor, we increase our expectation of what sauces will deliver. Spicing it upThe 2003 "McCormick Flavor Forecast," published by McCormick & Company, Hunt Valley, MD, identifies 12 flavors that will address the demand for strong and ethnic flavors. Not surprising, spices dominate this list and include bay leaf, turmeric, cinnamon, pepper and coriander. Given that a cooking sauce needs to deliver the impact of the spice flavor, the question is: How can spices be selected and used to create an exciting eating experience? On its website, (www.astaspice.org) the American Spice Trade Association (ASTA), Washington, D.C., provides a good description of spices and their components available to the development scientist. The whole spice or herb can be dried and ground according to the required mesh size, appearance, flavor and cost. ASTA lists the extracted flavor components of spice as essential oils, oleoresins and forms of oleoresins that give solubility and stability in various applications. The essential oil is the volatile portion of the spice. "Volatile oils provide the signature flavor of a spice or herb," says Don Bernacchi, vice president of creative development, Griffith Laboratories, Alsip, IL. "Chefs will use fresh herbs because the lower-boiling-point volatiles are still intact in fresh herbs as opposed to dried herbs." He goes on to explain that, in sauce dry mixes, the spice extractive could deliver immediate impact upon opening the package, which would add to consumer appeal. Oleoresins contain the volatile and nonvolatile extractive of the spice, or the volatile oil and resin. "Oils are sometimes not as complete as oleoresins, which contain close to all of the flavor constituents," says Reid Wilkerson, president of McClancy Seasoning Co., Fort Mill, SC. Manufacturers can blend oleoresins with emulsifiers for solubility in water-based solutions or plate them onto a carrier for dry blending. Oleoresins and oils can both be encapsulated for reduced loss of the volatile oils. "The chief advantage of using dehydrated spices in cooking sauces is that you will get more-consistent results time after time," Wilkerson continues. Fresh ingredients can vary in terms of composition, but dehydrated ingredients are typically subject to quality control for selected characteristics, such as volatile oil, pungency and heat. Cynthia Bernskoetter, technical service supervisor for French's Flavor Ingredients, Springfield, MO, explains that oriental-mustard flour has a high heat, or volatile oil, level. Yellow-mustard flour has no volatile oil. Therefore, manufacturers can blend the two mustard sources to achieve the flavor and heat level best-suited to a given application. When developing sauces, it's important to understand what is happening to the flavor components of the spice during dry storage, heating and freezing. While intact, the whole spice will experience relatively little flavor loss. Once ground, the spice's increased amount of exposed surface area will result in an increased rate of loss of the volatile oils over time. "Any time you perform a function, you are allowing some of the volatile oil to escape," says Wilkerson. "One of the biggest keys is using spice that is fresh." Since sauces lose flavor with every processing step, it should come as no surprise that frozen sauces offer the ultimate challenge. Bernacchi notes that frozen entrées have a one-year shelf life, and flavor is lost in both the cooking and freezing steps. Most spice-oil encapsulants will dissolve during the cooking process. He suggests dual encapsulation of spice oils for frozen sauces. Bernacchi also provides guidance when it comes to spice and salt content: "In using ground spice to season a sauce, or any product, a good rule of thumb is that the delivered spice content should be less than the salt content, which is usually 0.75% to 1.25%." Spirited saucesAlcohol and spirits have livened up cooking sauces for centuries. "Using wine is a trend that has never lost popularity," says Jim Polansky, national sales manager, Todhunter Foods, West Palm Beach, FL. "People are doing more and more with the authentic, chef-made-type products." Joe Colucci, technical sales specialist for the company, adds that "there's an appeal in marketing for naming specific wines on the food product label." For classical culinary sauces, wines should stay true to the original recipe. "Using wine imparts true wine flavor to the sauce which bears its name," says Polansky. For example, wine selection for sauce madère, with Madeira wine, or sauce bordelaise, with Bordeaux wine, is straightforward. He suggests adding denatured vodka to give authentic flavor to tomato-based vodka sauces. As ethnic sauces continue to gain popularity, rice wines, such as sake and mirin, are finding their way into supermarket products. Colucci explains that sugar content differentiates mirin from sake, similar to sweet and dry Marsala. Sake functions in Japanese sauces like white wine does in European sauces. A basic Japanese cooking sauce could combine mirin with sake to add sweetness to the dish, balancing the saltiness of the soy sauce.
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