Yet as demand grows, consistent, reliable, plentiful supplies of these ingredients are emerging. Danny Bruns, CRC, CCA, senior corporate chef at Kerry, has witnessed this demand among his own colleagues in the Research Chefs Association. “On the RCA listserv everyday,” he says, “someone’s looking for—and is able to find—some previously ‘exotic’ ingredient. It’s amazing what they’re looking for: precooked chayote, banana leaves. And the availability is there.”
Craig has seen an explosion in the availability of process-ready chiles. “It wouldn’t be Mexican without chiles,” he says. “Hundreds of varieties are used in regional cooking, and it’s no longer enough to use generic chile seasoning,” he says. “Using different chiles, like guajillos or cascabels, adds different flavors and a unique marketing spin to items.”
But, “because it’s not always possible to find the authentic ingredient in a form that’s practical for commercial use,” Bavone says, “we more often than not start with a gold standard using the authentic ingredient, and then try to match the flavor profile using different flavors and ingredient capabilities. You can look for the different top notes that you might be missing from a locally sourced ingredient and then just do your best to replicate the experience.”
Strategic flavoring can also help replicate traditional cooking techniques. “Flavor ingredients themselves add notes that bring an authentic aspect to a dish, whether it’s campfire smoke or a wood grill,” says Danny Bruns, CRC, CCA, senior corporate chef, Kerry Ingredients & Flavors. “The finished flavor profile of the finished product is what you want to keep in mind. If your goal is to make it smoky and pull-apart tender, you can get around any of the traditional technique hurdles without having to steam it in the ground for 24 hours.”
Craig notes that “regional cuisines, like everything, evolve with time and outside influences, so authenticity is a moving target. An abstract concept of authenticity is less the goal than the integrity of ingredients and versatility of product.”
And integrity counts. It’s easy to cook up something vaguely Mexican, point your finger at a map, and name the dish after wherever it lands. It’s legal, too. But just because you can call a chicken casserole “Yucatecan” doesn’t make it Yucatecan. And savvy consumers can increasingly tell the difference.
A far better strategy is to educate yourself about a region’s characteristics, recreate the fundamentals, and bill the results as regionally inspired. Hold your ambitions in check, while you’re at it.
“We always keep in mind the ‘comfort zone’ of the end user,” Craig says, “focusing on how an item fits into the consumer’s lifestyle, while at the same time adding something new to excite their palate and keep them coming back for more.”
After all, authenticity only goes so far. Just take it from Bayless. “I always say that I am so glad that I don’t have a Mexican grandma,” he muses. “I don’t have to be true to any one recipe. What we do is authentic, but we always take what we learn and put our contemporary spin on it.”
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.