Q: What is your favoUrite food?
A: A chicken sandwich with homemade mayo on challah toast with a real ice cream milkshake. But variations on Italian, Thai and French Classics have probably filled my professional days. My specialty? Whatever’s in the fridge and cupboard, turned into a quick snack!
Q: What are some of the challenges facing research chefs today, and the areas of culinary R&D in general?
A: Chefs are taught from the beginning, “fat equals flavour,” but this causes a bias against the essential health and wellness model that has to be our future. Instead, chefs should be leading the way with innovative and natural offerings, not following the flawed approach used by some food scientists who try to use reduced fat concepts that compensate with extra calories or artificial ingredients. The other big challenge is the push for food safety, often over common sense. It’s OK if after some time has elapsed, mould grows to like your food; if bacteria won’t eat it why should you?
Q: What opportunities do you see for your sector of the industry?
A: Food industry companies are furiously trying to re-invent the wheel with “natural preservatives” in R&D, but really our great-grandmothers knew a lot about “putting up” the bounty of the summer, so maybe we should start there. We will be seeing many more ancient resources labelled as breakthroughs, from almonds to spices and plant extracts. There’s a big rush of research into this field.
Q: What else can you tell us about the work you’re currently doing?
A: Educating the public is the most satisfying challenge. A great thing about the dressings sector is that most of the ingredients are already natural preservatives. Natural antioxidants can also help keep food stable for months and years. The next project is Super Omega Salad Oil that uses the benefits of Sacha Inchi. It’s a fair trade tree nut from the rain forest that’s 50 per cent omega-3, -6 and -9 by weight, more than any other substance.
Product Spotlight
Why can’t a salad dressing be made with few simple ingredients, each of which is in itself a preservative? I saw a gap in the marketplace in between the low-end commercial dressings and the high-end imported balsamic and flavoured vinegars and oils. Once I started talking to the customers who like this kind of product, I found that lots of people never buy pre-mixed dressings but are happy to make it from scratch. Hence one of my taglines – dressings for people who love to make their own. Another revelation about marketing is how much people love to discover a new brand. The ginger lychee idea actually started two years ago when I took a recipe for apricot jam with fresh squeezed ginger juice (from Bob Blumer, the Surreal Gourmet) changed it around to use a lychee fruit purée and used it with shrimp at my catered parties. That and the peanut sauce I made myself were so popular that my customers insisted that I bottle it and get it in the stores. So I fooled around with a number of flavour combinations, then got some bottles and tested some labels. It turns out the ginger lychee is very difficult to make, the PH is all wrong and it tends to ferment and turn into soda pop (and blow up the bottle!). So I concentrated on the pomegranate, and it turned out to be very easy to make, low in PH, high in sugar, low in available water. The hardest part, and what a chef can help contribute, is the exact balance of sweet and tart. Each of the new dressings will have an intense concentrated impact and a unique marketing profile. The key is the “bright fresh balance” of the product, combined with a new yet familiar taste.
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