Oser Communications Group

GOURMET NEWS JUNE 2019 www.gourmetnews.com SUPPLIER NEWS 1 8 Duck Fat Now Available in a Cooking Spray in Omaha and needed beef tallow to make the authentic sauce, and his source for his "secret ingredient" happened to men- tion one day that he could also sup- ply duck fat from a Pennsylvania pasture-raised duck farm if Schuett had a use for it. That greased the wheels in Schuett's culinary brain. "I got on the computer and started learning more and more about duck fat and found it to be one of the most wonderful cooking fats I'd ever dealt with," Schuett said. "This, you can spray on food. You can spray it on your pan for a wonderful pan release, but you can feel good about spraying it right on your food." He learned that duck fat was shelf-stable with a melting point around 58 or 59 de- grees and that it has a high smoke point. "So I thought, 'what a wonderful cooking fat it could be if we could put it into a spray application for searing or for using as a binder for rubs and spices,'" he said. "It would be so much easier than heating up a fat or using a brush and trying to get all the areas covered." That began Schuett's search for the way to turn the duck fat into an aerosol spray. "I started looking at the world of aerosols, and for the most part, I didn't like what I found," he said. "Many ingredients had nothing to do with the flavor." When he discovered bag-on-valve technology, which features a product-filled bag inside a can that uses pressure between the can and flexible bag to propel a spray without the need for chemical propellants, he was, he says, "the happiest person in the world." With the technology secured, Schuett next had to find a co-packer that was certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to handle a poultry product and that was will- ing to house Schuett's new equipment be- fore he could go into production. Schuett found that combination in the state next door to his Nebraska home, and he now has a product that's already being embraced by specialty food grocers around the U.S. and by competitors on the country's barbe- cue circuit who are finding that it allows them to achieve a great reverse sear with at- tractive grill marks. "It's sure nice on veg- etables too," Schuett said. "Air fryer folks are using it too. It's like a godsend for those. It's easy to clean up, and you hardly have to use any, and it creates a wonderful sa- vory finish on fish, on pork or beef – I could just go on and on." Cornhusker Kitchen Duck Fat Cooking Spray retails for $8.99 to $12.99 for the 7-ounce can. Cases contain six cans. For more information, call Dennis Schuett at 402.306.5958 or email dennis@duck fatspray.com. GN BY LORRIE BAUMANN Cornhusker Kitchen has introduced Duck Fat Cooking Spray to the market. Packaged in a 7-ounce can with a two-year shelf life, Duck Fat Cook- ing Spray delivers a fat beloved by high-end chefs in a format that ap- peals to home cooks, including those who grill and barbecue, as well as consumers who are practic- ing keto and Paleo lifestyles, said Dennis Schuett, who developed the product and introduced it to the market along with his business partner, Roger Brodersen. "The duck fat doesn't overpower – it just makes food better," he said. "We have such a diversity in our customers – it's amazing." Schuett's development of the Duck Fat Cooking Spray happened over the course of four years and started with Coney dogs. Schuett was serving Coney dogs in his cafes True Salt: Clean, All Natural, Affordable water bodies in the world, according to Egan. "What's great about the Sea of Cortez is that it's not really touched by the global water flow. It's phenomenally clear and pure and beautiful, with sun and consistent tempera- tures that create a wonderful environment for both salt and natural evaporation," he said. There, the company produces a natural, unfiltered, unprocessed sea salt that's sepa- rated from the sea water by natural solar evaporation. "It creates wonderfully clean and beautifully tasting sea salt," Egan said, adding that top chefs in the southwestern U.S. who've tried it have told him that they still taste the sea, with its brininess without overly heavy salty taste, and the True Salt really acts to bring out the natural flavors. From Mexico, the salt is imported into the U.S. to Phoenix, Arizona, where it's hand- sifted and packed into 1-pound bags for re- tail sale at around $3.79 and larger bags and buck- ets for culinary and hospi- tality applications. There are currently four prod- ucts: a fine-grain salt, coarse-grain salt, a kosher grind that's milled to the same size grain as mass-market kosher salts and a cocktail rimming salt that's a mixture of fine and coarse grains. A flake salt is on the way. "We priced competitively, so we're able to switch these chefs and restaurateurs away from their iodized salt and enable them to use an all-natural sea salt in their foods and enable them to tell that health story," Egan said. "We are leading demand for the industry to move to a healthier product." The retail product is currently being sold in Oregon, with distribution into other areas of the Pa- cific Northwest on the way and nationwide distribution projected for later this year. For more information, visit www.true- saltco.com. GN BY LORRIE BAUMANN True Salt is a brand based on the simple idea that the culinary world needed a pure sea salt that would enable high-end chefs and home cooks alike to make the switch from mass-market iodized salts to a higher-qual- ity sea salt in a price-neutral way. "We had been looking at a number of opportunities within the ingredients stack – areas that we can disrupt and add value to the ingredients eco-system," said True Salt co-Founder Kelly Egan. "We spend a lot of time keeping it as natural and untouched as possible, and that comes out in the end product." True Salt is harvested in Mexico on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, one of the cleanest New Bakery Brand Brings Handcrafted Flatbread Style to U.S. on open shelves where they're stored at am- bient temperature, Owen said. "The shop- ping behaviors are quite different," she observed. "We want to make sure that we deliver the best product we can to the American consumer – we wanted to get it into the bakery, where we knew the con- sumer already visited." The flavor profiles for the Breadeli Rustic Flats, based on Bakkavor's consumer re- search in the U.S., are Basil Pesto, Original, Italian Herb, Roasted Tomato and Garlic Butter. The bread beneath the flavor top- pings is a schiacciata, a relative of focaccia whose origins go back to 15-century Tus- cany, according to Ed Metzger, Bakkavor Senior Director of Business Development. "In order to test the ovens, they'd take a chunk of dough and throw it onto the hearth of the oven," he said. "It's an almost instant bake on the hearth, and essentially, that's what we've replicated in a modern fashion.... It's a pristine deck with about 10 ingredients on each product offering – all ingredients that people would be familiar with. There are no artificial flavors and no preservatives." A lot of hand-crafting goes into the prod- uct, starting with two starters – one of them a sourdough starter that originated more than 15 years ago on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. that contributes tangy flavor and some of the airy pockets in the bread – and then a 24-hour fermentation. The dough is divided carefully, to preserve the air pock- ets, and then each loaf is hand-stretched to size. "No loaf will ever be identical," Met- zger said. Once it's stretched, the loaves re- ceive their flavor toppings, and then they're baked at an extremely high temperature to develop a crispy crust and expand the in- terior voids. As soon as they're baked, the loaves go into a blast freezer to maintain all of their freshness. The bread is shipped frozen from Bakka- vor's new 35,000 square-foot state-of-the- art bakery plant in Charlotte, North Carolina. It has a nine-month shelf life in the freezer, thaws in 20 minutes, and then has a five-day shelf life after thawing plus an additional two days for the consumer. Bakkavor is supporting the roll-out, which will start on the East Coast, with both digital, social media and a variety of in-store marketing assets that will help to direct customers who are already in the store, where 70 percent of decisions on products are made, over to the bakery aisle, Owen said. "My goal as a marketer is to drive traffic to the bakery and to drive total bakery sales by driving Breadeli," she said. "Marketing will be a big element. Sampling will be another key element because we be- lieve that when people taste this, we've got them hooked." Taste Breadeli Rustic Flats at this year's IDDBA Show, or for more information, visit www.breadelibreads.com. GN BY LORRIE BAUMANN Breadeli is a new brand from Bakkavor, a British company that's already familiar to American grocers who buy fresh prepared foods like hummus, burritos, meals and dips for their private labels. Although Bakkavor has heretofore been invisible to American consumers, it has decided to come out of the shadows with its Breadeli branded Rustic Flats. "We know that this product is fabulous; it resonates globally, and we wanted to bring it to the U.S.," said Tanja Owen, Bakkavor Marketing Director. It took Bakkavor two years of product development to tweak a product already a hit in the United Kingdom so that it would be a better fit both for American prefer- ences in flavor profiles and for American shoppers who expect to see their breads in the bakery aisle. British shoppers expect to find breads that incorporate fresh ingredi- ents in their grocer's refrigerator case – the same place that Americans would look for fresh pasta, while Americans are used to buying products like Breadeli Rustic Flats

• Cover