Puréed Fresh Vegetable Flavor

Todays food manufacturers have increasingly begun gravitating toward one-stop ingredient shopping, complete with simplified formulation solutions that instantly enable the design of new products and lines with proven benefits, including on-trend flavor. Along those lines, Gilroy Foods, a ConAgra Foods brand, has developed a line of GardenFrost® Softfrozen purées.

The purées are available in single-ingredient or ethnic flavor combinations, and in totally custom blends. Fire-roasted tomato, fire-roasted jalapeño, garlic, roasted garlic, onion, roasted onion, ginger and roasted sweet red bell pepper are all singular-flavor solutions. Ethnic blends include Asian (garlic, ginger, onion and lemongrass), Latin (chiles, cilantro, cumin and lime) and Mediterranean (herbes de Provence and olive oil). They add flavor to sauces, marinades, salsas, dips, pizzas, salad dressings and breads. They also add interest to processed meats like sausages.

The blends simplify manufacturing by replacing multiple ingredients and/or culinary bases. Lower sodium levels are on the minds of many designers these days, and the products in the GardenFrost line have less sodium than most typical culinary bases. The purées can replace culinary bases, which can have lots of sodium, says Amy Marr, director of marketing, Gilroy Foods & Spicetec. The purées have 0% to 4% sodium compared to 11% in some bases. Since the purées do not contain any added acids or preservatives, they help enable a cleaner label.

Consumers have been responding favorably to freshness in processed foods, and Gilroy Foods delivers what the company calls fresherthan- fresh flavors via its proprietary Soft-frozen process. We take ingredients at the peak of freshness and simultaneously process and freeze them to lock in that fresh flavor, says Marr. She notes that maltose is added to most of the products to help achieve the Soft-frozen consistency, which permits their use in a frozen format; the purées are often referred to as scoopable. This characteristic is important for foodservice since the ability to make precise measurements of a frozen purée eliminates the need to thaw ingredients ahead of time.

The purées remain fresh and stable under frozen conditions for two years, and can go from the freezer to refrigeration temperatures and back to the freezer again without quality loss. They thaw four times faster than hard-frozen ingredientsa 40-lb. pail thaws in 10 hours under refrigeration. Once thawed, the ingredient can safely remain under refrigeration for two weeks.

Gilroy Foods 
1350 Pacheco Pass Highway 
Gilroy, CA 95020 
Phone: 800/851-9618 
Website: www.gilroyfoods.com