By Ryan Slattery
During the Enlightenment, or siècle des Lumières, French cuisine was elevated to an art form, and described in terms of harmony, chemistry, and spirituality. Cooks learned to prepare fine flavors through extracting, blending, and simmering ingredients. Today, the finest chefs on earth still rely on this practiced method, but it takes hours of preparation, precise timing, and lifetimes of honed expertise.
Today, Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition North America, Inc. (AHN) brings the precision and intentionality of this technique to the industrial and foodservice scale with their More Than Gourmet (MTG) product portfolio. As experts in elevating the nutrition and taste of food, AHN positions the MTG line to increase the reach and capability of quality cooking, benefiting consumer products such as stocks, broths, and sauce concentrates that would otherwise need to compromise on taste due to the time investment of creating the extracts.
Bringing the MTG product portfolio to scale means industrial and foodservice kitchens don’t need to invest in the time or manpower needed to create the perfect demi-glace or mother sauce. Instead, they can rely on the experts at AHN to provide the foundation for delicious cooking with the MTG product portfolio.
Drawing from AHN’s history in honoring authentic cuisine and the discovery of the fifth taste, umami, the MTG portfolio elevates this expertise in new applications. The AHN passion for delivering deliciousness is the motivation behind bringing these authentic cooking methods to scale in a portfolio spanning from MTG stocks and broths to authentic Asian sauces, umami ingredients, and breakthrough flavor concepts such as kokumi ingredients.
“Our collaborative team of experts in culinary, food science, and nutrition are perfectly positioned to bring these traditional cooking techniques to scale,” says Xiaoxi Liao, a Research and Development Senior Food Scientist at AHN. “Our More Than Gourmet line is a leader in the development and innovation and bringing Culinary Grade™ stocks and broths to scale in the food and industry. We apply authentic recipes and classic methods to produce shelf-stable and minimally seasoned products, which serve as a versatile base for the development of a variety of stocks, broths, and sauce concentrates.”
“The essence in More Than Gourmet’s portfolio lies in the preservation of traditional home-style cooking,” Liao explains. “Long-time simmering is translated into large scale capabilities with superior kettle technology to provide high-quality products without nutritional compromises.”
With a product line that includes 20 varieties of stock and sauce reductions, More Than Gourmet broths and stocks are simply made by boiling vegetables, bones, or shells in a steam kettle to resemble home-style cooking methods, creating products that are completely natural, using a “no shortcuts, no compromises” long-boil approach.
The base sauces, Liao says, provide, “a blank canvas to make anything, from a pepper sauce to a bourbon mushroom sauce and beyond. The sky’s the limit when it comes to supporting innovation in product development and giving chefs in industrial and foodservice kitchens the ability to add components like spirits, herbs, and spices, at will.”
The liquid bone broth concentrate is a prime example of the versatility MTG products offer. It contains no preservatives, has less than 1% fat, and is highly concentrated for freight efficiency. Broth concentrates like chicken and beef offer multiple degrees of Brix (concentration level), which provides flexible uses to streamline inventory. Aseptically packaged bone extract concentrates have a 24-month shelf life from the date of manufacture.
MTG products can be applied for a host of large-scale uses. Liao says that AHN’s expertise helps them act as an innovation partner with customers, and recently on a ramen project, AHN’s umami and kokumi expertise allowed them to create a customized formula. Using the stock concentrate as a base, they were able to elevate the flavors and add complexity by utilizing highly functional yeast extracts and authentic Asian ingredients, such as sesame oil and tamari soy sauce. AHN was even able to utilize a by-product from their broth production and rendered fat to advance the mouthfeel of this product. Ultimately, Liao says, it met both flavor and nutritional demands.
Our world has changed significantly since the earliest days of French cuisine, but thanks to products like More Than Gourmet, time-honored traditions can keep pace with our constantly growing and changing society, providing quality without compromise.
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For more information, visit https://www.ajihealthandnutrition.com/solutions/stock-broth-concentrates/
