Having steeped himself in Italian standards for nearly 40 years, Chef Antonio Cecconi, author, educator and executive corporate chef at Dakota Growers Pasta Co., Carrington, ND, has high regard for culinary tradition. Nowhere is this truer than in his approach to fresh soups. “Being a chef, I personally wouldn’t call something fresh unless it is,” he declares. “And by Italian standards, you call a soup fresh if it has beans that you soaked in water overnight and cooked.” Yet, while Cecconi is a fresh-soup purist, he’s also a food-industry realist. “I understand that we are projected into the 21st century,” he concedes. “And you need to make adjustments to formulations. You also need to meet what the consumer sees as a good product.” If that means stirring some convenience into a fresh-soup recipe, so be it. “You cannot get away from that if you’re in the food industry,” he says.
After all, manufacturers need to keep their focus on what counts: serving consumers a warm—or chilled— bowl of nourishment that tastes as good as fresh, anytime, anywhere.
Not long ago, the supermarket was the last place you’d go for a bowl of fresh soup. “We came into the fresh-soup category in grocery and retail about six years ago, and we were really one of the fi rst players out there,” recalls Brian McGinnis, director of marketing, Kettle Cuisine, Chelsea, MA. At that point, he says, fresh soups were “a key middle category that retailers didn’t know whether to buy into or not. But, I think that with the growth of prepared foods within the grocery store, soup has been one of the prepared-food items that has seen a great amount of growth.”
Ron Hendren agrees. While the vice president and corporate executive chef at Harry’s Fresh Foods, Portland, OR, notes his company has been making fresh soups for three decades now, “it’s been in the last three or four years that it’s really taken off.”
Perception is reality
The product-category growth has required some reflection on what “fresh soup” really means. You’ll find about as much consensus among chefs and technologists over what “fresh” means as you’ll find over Astro Turf vs. grass in a sports bar. On one side, you’ve got purists like Cecconi. “Fresh, in my dictionary, means made from scratch and recently made,” he says. “Fresh means using freshly prepared ingredients, or freshly picked vegetables, or ingredients that are assembled in the immediate time preceding the eating occasion.”
Hendren isn’t too far from that view himself: “The fundamental difference is that fresh soup has not been canned or retorted. It has not been frozen. And it is something that, in most cases, the consumer needs to do very little to in order to eat.”
The convenience factor rings true to Volker Frick, executive chef, Kettle Cuisine, who notes “if you can’t simply take it out of the refrigerator case, go home, put it in the microwave and open a bottle of wine,” you’re probably not going to buy it.
But convenience isn’t all—and soup’s “freshness” isn’t purely objective. “From a chef ’s perspective, I think of fresh as being how flavors release: their potency, their impact point,” says Bill Schoenleb, corporate executive chef, CF Chefs, Inc., Dallas. “Do I get them in the front, the middle or the back? Where am I picking up those notes? So, for example, fresh basil is very distinctive. If I can pick up fresh basil on the front end of a soup, then my immediate perception is that’s fresh. Those key ingredients can swing people’s perceptions.”
Perception, it appears, is the key. “Fresh, as it applies to soups and food in general, doesn’t have a defined meaning for consumers, but is a feeling,” says Adam Walker, research chef, McCormick & Co., Inc., Hunt Valley, MD. That feeling partly explains why consumers perceive fresh as better. “The type of consumer that is concerned with freshness is often the type of consumer that has an appreciation for ingredients,” he says. “And, quite simply, fresher ingredients make better soup. Freshness conveys a feeling of health: When you think of nutritious food, you’ll think of ripe, crisp vegetables before you’ll think of retorted soups. There is something alive in a fresh soup that’s not there in a canned one.”
Fresh ‘cred’
Pinpointing the source of that “life force” remains tricky. “What makes one soup better than another?” asks Dan Hemming, senior food technologist, ConAgra Food Ingredients, Omaha, NE. “Ask two consumers and you’ll get two widely different answers.” For example, if we agree that a fresh soup doesn’t come from a can, does that mean that none of its ingredients may? If consumers associate fresh soups with health, does that make clean labels a must? “The product developer needs to define his or her goals for a particular product and market segment, and keep that in mind while progressing through the development process,” he advises.
In Frick’s book, the special something that distinguishes a soup as fresh is fundamentally simple. “It means that as many ingredients as I can possibly get are raw or unprocessed,” he notes, “and then we turn those into soup without the help of any kind of bases, precooked this, or flavor-enhancer that.”
Hendren tries to view his ingredient statements through his consumers’ eyes. “Can you pronounce it?” he asks of his ingredient choices. “And do you know what it is?” That means, in Harry’s universe, multisyllabic gums and hydrocolloids don’t make the cut, even though they are often natural and organic, because the consumer will wonder, “What is carrageenan?” “They do not know that it’s seaweed,” he says. “It’s not a term that the general public has any understanding of.” MSG and HVPs occupy a similar no-man’s land, he says, and “we try to stay away from disodium inosinate and guanylate, and hydrogenated vegetable oil.”
Schoenleb, however, is of a different mind. “The buzzwords out there are ‘all-natural’ and ‘preservative-free,’” he admits. “I think those terms resonate. But I don’t think, at the end of the day, that anybody really cares, as long as it tastes great. There’s a difference between the perception of fresh and the terminology of fresh.”
More often than not, Schoenleb says, perception “is driven by quality. Frozen soups, technically, wouldn’t be considered fresh, yet they can be perceived as being fresh, as can dried, “depending on what you threw into it.” Ultimately, he concludes, “if the soup were preprepared, and yet the consumer didn’t know that—if it still came across that the vegetables were crunchy and colorful and flavorful—I think you could say that it was fresh because the perception would be fresh.” Loosely defining “fresh” this way grants a liberating degree of leeway in making ingredient choices.
Calculated choices
Thus, savvy ingredient choices will enhance a soup’s quality, even if they don’t adhere to textbook definitions of fresh. “So, if you’re doing a tortilla soup,” Hendren says, “and you want some black beans to bring out the color contrast or make it more eye-appealing, the best product you can use is a canned black bean.” Boiled from scratch, black beans can appear purple when rinsed of their cooking liquid. But, once you’ve settled on canned, “then you take it another step,” he says, “and you go after a canned bean that does not have EDTA in it, doesn’t have calcium chloride, doesn’t have added salt and all those criteria.”
Frick similarly justifies using dried herbs. “Let’s take, for example, a tomato soup,” he says. “We would steep dried herbs in the soup as it cooks and then take them out and squeeze out whatever liquid was there to retain all the flavors,” he explains. “We’d build the profile that way to give it an all-around flavor, but then we really drive the point home by finishing the soup with fresh chopped basil and extra-virgin olive oil to give it what it needs.”
Still, individually quick-frozen (IQF) herbs and vegetables can provide “fresher” notes. “In dehydration of vegetables and herbs, some drying techniques add heat to the process,” explains Alan McGuirt, marketing manager, Van Drunen Farms, Momence, IL. “This heat, over time, will rupture cell walls and allow for the evaporation of not only water, but also volatile oils contained in the cells. Losing these volatile oils can result in less flavor than the fresh vegetables and herbs.” While an IQF process causes some cell rupture, he says “freezing takes place quickly after cleaning and further processing of the raw ingredient. Loss of the crucial volatile oils is minimal; therefore, the product retains more of the fresh flavor.”
When strategic ingredient choices account for how the consumer will prepare and serve a soup, they bolster the product’s fresh cred. “You’re going to have to think about how the end consumer is going to use it,” says Schoenleb. “Are they going to take it from a cold state and throw it into a pan and heat it up quickly, or are they going to heat it up and hold it for a couple of hours? Those two applications have totally different processes and ways that you’d build that tolerance into the product.”
If a soup has gone through a freeze/thaw cycle prior to refrigeration, it’ll likely have some cell-structure damage. In some cases, “we engineer products on the back side knowing what’s going to occur in the freeze cycle,” Schoenleb says. “Some of those soups will give off more moisture, so you engineer the product to absorb the moisture on the back side when the consumer gets it. Or vice versa: You make it slightly thicker so that when the cell structure breaks down and you do get some weeping, you engineered it to take that into account.”
To control syneresis, a manufacturer might tap a modified starch. But, as Joe Lombardi, marketing manager, National Starch Food Innovation, Bridgewater, NJ, notes, “The introduction of functional flours in the United States last year has provided food product companies the option to include specialty flour in commercial soup offerings without any problems.” These functional flours deliver the opacity and texture typical of all-purpose flour with the freeze/thaw stability “not otherwise possible with all-purpose flour,” he says. “They solve production issues by eliminating end product variability and improving batch processing time and consistency. They do all this with a simple, consumer-friendly label.”
Such tolerance-targeted formulation—even if it requires ingredients alien to Grandma’s cupboard—is no compromise. “It’s a calculated decision based on what’s the best product you can buy and the best quality that you can put into that product,” says Hendren.
Slow and steady wins the race
Gentle batch processing and postproduction handling techniques are just as—and sometimes even more—important for keeping soups looking and tasting fresh. “When it comes to freshly prepared soups, the clear trend is toward process minimization,” Lombardi notes. “With simpler, less heat-intensive and process-intensive production methods, soup makers can better retain flavors and better manage ingredient integrity.”
Slow and steady wins the race. “Fresh soup takes a reasonable time to cook,” Frick admits. It’s not as simple as “bringing it to 212°F and holding it for two minutes and then packing it.” You mark progress “by judging how the flavors have developed.” Thus, when he makes a classic chicken noodle, “the first step is that the vegetables need to sweat in a high-temperature kettle, at 200°F-plus, in maybe a little chicken fat with very gentle agitation so that they enhance their flavor on their own,” he says. “You don’t have to add any flavor to it; you’re just bringing out what’s already there.” Try doing that by dumping things into a retort and flipping the switch.
Schoenleb also stresses the role of temperature control. “I would say that’s most critical if you want to maintain the perception of freshness in soups,” he says. “What you have to do is figure out how to chill that product down in the process before you bag it. And that’s the critical part of it: If you can chill the soup down rapidly and get it uniformly dropped in temperature before you take it to the freeze cycle, you can preserve the freshness of the flavor. The longer you let it sit, the more off notes—the muskier, the dirtier—it becomes.”
Some aspects of fresh-soup production require the floor crew to act less like technicians and more like chefs. Kettle Cuisine uses light cream in its soups and, while stabilizers could keep it from breaking, they let their employees run interference instead. “You have to follow some basic culinary principles,” Frick says, “meaning that you’ve got to heat up the cream before you add it. You’ve got to temper it like you do in a restaurant. If you add it, don’t just dump it in. And if cream is a small amount of the formula—perhaps 3% of the whole thing—you can add it cold, but add it carefully and under constant agitation, keeping that stirring mechanism at a good clip, but without destroying vegetables.”
Foodservice freshness
Employee responsibility really comes into play when a fresh soup shows up in foodservice. “The biggest problem is not so much the product but the personnel, and how much attention they give the soup,” Hendren says. All too often, “they will turn the piece of equipment up to the highest level at the start of the day to heat the soup and get it going. And, if they forget to turn it down, they’ve got a problem. When these soups are on the steam table or in a soup pot and they’re held there for hours, that is a challenge.”
Even the most conscientious employee can’t ensure that a soup ladled out at 3 P.M. will be as vibrant as it was at 11 A.M. But, where fresh soups have an advantage is in starting from a higher level of quality in the first place. “Your carrots are al dente, your potatoes are al dente,” Hendren says. “In a canned or frozen product, those vegetables have already been overly processed. So those will not hold up on the four-, five-, six-hour timeline as well as a product that was made with fresh vegetables that have never been frozen or subjected to the high temperatures of retorting.”
Foodservice operators can also preserve freshness with just-in-time preparation—adding delicate components at the last minute. “Some foodservice operations use a frozen soup concentrate to which they add fresh dairy ingredients at the point of service: half-and-half, sour cream, real cheese,” says Sharon Gerdes, technical support consultant, Dairy Management Inc.™ (DMI), Rosemont, IL.
Notes Cecconi: “In Italy, whenever you make a soup with pasta, you add the pasta much later, after all the other ingredients are added.”
Using 100% durum semolina pasta also increases the odds of surviving steam-table service. The secret lies in durum’s quality gluten proteins, which, Radwan Ibrahim, vice president, quality assurance, Dakota Growers, says, “are strong and make a pasta that can tolerate overcooking.” Beyond that, he says, foodservice pasta for soups usually has two characteristics: it’s thicker and requires additives.
Those additives, notes Shawn Baca-Baldwin, qualitycontrol supervisor, Dakota Growers, “do basically one thing, and that’s hold starch in the pasta to prevent it from releasing into the soup and to keep the mouthfeel or firmness throughout the residence time in the water and the cooking process.” Egg-white protein is common, thanks to its label friendliness and its ability to strengthen the gluten matrix. The other common additive is GMS, or glycerol monostearate, which is actually a fraction of butter. “What it does,” he says, “is basically have the same end effect as adding egg whites—keeping the firmness of the product throughout the processing and heating postpurchase —but it’s got a different mechanism for doing it.”
As for the increase in thickness for fresh-soup applications, fortunately, “it doesn’t need to be as large an increase as if you were planning on retorting the soup,” Baca-Baldwin says. “The pressures exerted in processing fresh soup, vs. any significantly heat-treated retort soup, are going to be lighter. So, you really only need to increase it, say, one-hundredth to two-hundredths of an inch.”
That leaves a wider range of shapes to choose from, and when Baca-Baldwin makes soup at home, “the rule of thumb that I always use is that you want something smaller than the size of the spoon.” His recommendation tops out at a rotini, which is actually ideal for soups because “the fins, especially in thinner soups, tend to pull in some of the broth with it. You’re creating more surface area, basically, to attach flavors to the pasta. And, by increasing the surface area, you’re making a more-complex bite.”
You’re also increasing the pasta’s potential to absorb water, which “requires a recognition on the part of the person processing or preparing the soup of how the pasta needs to be treated,” Baca- Baldwin cautions. “If you’re using a pasta like orzo, for example—small rice shapes—you can overcook those and they’re not going to get much bigger or absorb that much more water. But if you overcook rotini excessively, it will absorb slightly more moisture and yet the size increase becomes significant.”
Challenging opportunities
Fresh is fleeting, adds Hendren. “We can’t make a year’s supply and put it in a warehouse and ship it out from there,” he says. His soups promise a shelf life of 60 days from manufacture, but distribution alone can eat away a quarter of that, leaving, in effect, 45 viable days. Lower-pH varieties may tough it out longer, but “speaking broadly, anything that has dairy in it is going to have an even shorter shelf life,” he says. “So, if we’re going to guarantee the end user that they’ve got 45 days on our fresh products, we have to make them and ship them and get them to their destinations throughout the United States and still have that shelf life.”
Freshness’s evanescence has a silver lining. “Shelf life in a fresh soup is expected to be shorter,” Walker points out, “and that’s OK. It’s a price consumers are willing to pay in return for higher-quality ingredients”—and, ultimately, higher-quality soups. In fact, some soups simply aren’t conceivable in a form other than fresh. “Gazpacho, a rendition of a chilled tomato soup, is simply not itself if it sees any heat at all,” he notes, making it “impossible to do correctly in a can.”
Manufacturers are capitalizing on fresh, chilled soups to enliven their lines. “We’ve done chilled fruit soups in the past and have had mild success,” McGinnis says. “I think the consumer is becoming more aware of the availability of chilled soups. I think for a while they didn’t get it. But now they’re getting it, and we did pretty well this summer with Volker’s strawberry- and-Champagne and sourcherry soups.”
Such unconventional flavors should come as no surprise. As Walker notes: “The flavor profiles that work with fresh soups are sometimes more adventurous and allow for greater flexibility than retorted soups do, and the same consumer that appreciates freshness oftentimes appreciates more-unique foods.”
This puts the spotlight on global flavors, with classics from the Asian, Latin American and Mediterranean culinary traditions gaining new currency with adventuresome palates. That doesn’t preclude giving our own classics the fresh treatment. “Thai curry, African peanut stew, chicken noodle and cream of mushroom are all at home in the refrigerated soup case,” Walker maintains.
“If a product developer is targeting an aromatic, ethnic-inspired soup, using an herbal base would be appropriate,” says Hemming. He notes that vegetable and/or herb purées are helpful tools to add bright, fresh herbal and vegetable flavors to soups and stews. “The purées are available in everything from garlic and roasted onion to custom profiles, and have chunky particulates, including aromatics like lemongrass and cilantro, which add to the fresh appeal,” he says.
Fresh also lets manufacturers take advantage of seasonal themes. “We have customers in major grocery-store chains throughout the United States who want their menus refreshed,” says Hendren. So, during spring, “they’ll have cream of asparagus. And they’ll have a cream of artichoke that they run through the summer months,” he notes. “Now the winter months are coming up and we’re doing chicken and wild rice—it’s heavier, heartier— and curried butternut squash soup, apple-butternut squash soup. What is on trend, and what are people going to want during different parts of the year?” With today’s formulations in the offing, they’ll probably want fresh soups, no matter the season.
Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a B.S. in Consumer Food Science with a minor in English from the University of California, Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she enjoys eating and writing about food. You can reach her at kim@decker.net.