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NATURALLY HEALTHY www.gourmetnews.com n SEPTEMBER 2019 n GOURMET NEWS NH 3 6 VitaClay Digital Express Cooker VitaClay Digital Express is the one daily kitchen counter top machine you'll use every day and never put away. You want delightful, delicious, fast and af- fordable meal choices. You want versatility and the ability to get great results with rela- tively little skill. You don't want piles of dishes and a huge countertop clean-up. Some- times you want to cook for just two, other times six. You don't want to put in all the time, effort and ingredients to risk a failure. The VitaClay Digital Express is a cooker that combines high tech with ancient art. Vi- taClay has combined one of the most simple, delightful, slow cooking techniques that has been used around the globe on every conti- nent for 2,000 years and added the speed of digital technology plus mild sealed pressure to simplify your cooking while intensifying flavor. At the push of a button, you can have over a dozen world class cooking techniques at your fingertips and get incredibly succu- lent results. This is not just an appliance to replace a slow cooker, a roaster, a pressure cooker and a crock pot. It replaces a rice cooker, a steamer and more. About the only thing it does not do is deep fry or scramble eggs. The Vita- Clay delivers incredible versatil- ity with delayed timed start or instant start with cook cycles that range from minutes to hours with auto warming at the end. Perhaps the most important feature of the VitaClay Digital Express is actu- ally the clay itself. Clay is natu- rally alkaline and slow heat allows a full bouquet of flavors to develop. The slight pressure of the device helps lock in nutrients that the high heat of a pressure cooker can destroy. The secret is the combination of sealed clay pot cooking that allows continuous, even low heat with mild pressure. For more information, go to www.vitaclay chef.com or call 800.395.4361. Smart Flour Reformulates Ancient-Grain Pizzas Smart Flour, which makes ancient-grain piz- zas and crusts, has reformulated its lineup to deliver more flavor in every bite. The com- pany has replaced its original whole-milk mozzarella with low-moisture, part-skim mozzarella in all of its pizzas so they're less likely to burn and come out of the oven with better texture. The meat pieces are cut into smaller pieces now in both Smart Flour's Un- cured Pepperoni and Chicken Sausage Piz- zas. That ensures that consumers will get even distribution of the toppings, so they taste the meat in every bite. Smart Flour Classic Cheese Pizza is now Four Cheese Pizza, with Parmesan and romano cheeses now added to the original mozzarella and provolone blend, and for its Traditional Margherita, Smart Flour is now using fresh basil. What hasn't changed is the brand's com- mitment to serving up ancient grains in every slice. Smart Flour's certified gluten- free pizzas start with a Non- GMO Project Verified crust that's made with a unique flour blend of sorghum, amaranth and teff. These ingredients give the pizzas a healthy boost of fiber, protein, calcium, vitamins and minerals that far surpasses the nutri- tional profile of other whole-grain- and gluten-free options on the market. The gourmet pies are then topped with care- fully-selected, clean ingredients that in- clude a tra- ditional and tasty tomato sauce, hor- m o n e - f r e e c h e e s e blend, and the best-tasting, nitrate/nitrite- free uncured pepperoni and hand-selected sausage in the meat versions. Smart Flour's pizzas are available at select natural and mainstream markets nationwide for a suggested retail price of $6.99 to $7.99. Visit www.smartflourfoods.com for more info. Barbecue Sauces for the Sugar-Shy By Lorrie Baumann For health-conscious consumers who've woken up to the realization that condiments and sauces may contain ingredients that they're no longer comfortable with ingest- ing, Maurice Jenkins, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mugger's Marrow LLC, has created Stick 'em up! sauces. These are an organic spin on traditional bar- becue sauces that contain no granulated sugar. They're also low calorie, low sugar and low in sodium. A long-time grilling enthusiast, Jenkins got his start in the food business when he looked at the ingredients label of the barbe- cue sauce he'd been buying in his local gro- cery store. "I noticed that there was a lot of stuff that isn't good for you," he said. "I just looked at that and said, 'That stuff has no business going in your body.'" Other barbecue sauces on the shelf pre- sented much the same issue to him, so he de- cided that he was going to have to make his own. At first, the sauce was just for his own use, but then he decided to take some barbe- cued ribs with him over to a dinner at a friend's house. The fruit that he'd been using as an ingre- dient happened to be out of season at the time, so Jenkins had to do some tinkering with his recipe, substituting in different fruit, but he had new sauce ready when it was time to fire up the smoker, and the ribs were a hit with his friends – and, more importantly, with an older relative who was visiting his host's home. "Older folks will tell you the god's-honest truth about how something tastes. He just loved it," Jenkins said. "He had a big smile on his face, and he nodded and let me know that he really enjoyed the sauce.... That gave me the inspiration to go forward.... The flexibility of the product just gave me the impetus to try to market it." He's now offering his Stick 'em up! sauces in four flavors: Spicy Orange and Pineapple Jalapeno, the first two in the line; Mango Ha- banero and Agave Garlic. The sauces work well with any sort of meat, fish or chicken, according to Jenkins. "My vegetarian customers love it as well. It's very vegan friendly," he said. "It can go into dips, nachos, pizza topping. Mango Ha- banero, in particular, has been used as a cocktail sauce for oysters, and it makes a great Bloody Mary mix." Each of the sauces is based on agave and garlic, with three of them containing some peppers for a kick and some fruit to balance out the heat with some sweetness. Spicy Or- ange is a smoky sauce, the most like a tradi- tional barbecue sauce, with paprika, cayenne and chipotle to provide the smokiness. "Pineapple Jalapeno has a nice balance of sweet and spicy," Jenkins said, "and the Mango Habanero brings the heat along with the great taste." For more information, visit www.muggers marrowllc.com. New Bakery Brand Brings Handcrafted Flatbread Style to U.S. 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 fabu- lous; 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 de- velopment to tweak a product already a hit in the United Kingdom so that it would be a better fit both for American preferences 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 ingredients 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 on open shelves where they're stored at ambient temperature, Owen said. "The shopping 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 consumer 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 toppings is a schiacciata, a relative of focaccia whose origins go back to 15-century Tuscany, ac- cording to Ed Metzger, Bakkavor Senior Di- rector 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 in- stant 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 in- gredients that people would be familiar with. There are no artificial fla- vors 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 pockets, and then each loaf is hand-stretched to size. "No loaf will ever be identical," Metzger said. Once it's stretched, the loaves receive their flavor toppings, and then they're baked at an extremely high temperature to develop a crispy crust and expand the interior 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 Bakkavor'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 mar- keting assets that will help to direct cus- tomers 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 believe that when people taste this, we've got them hooked." For more information, visit www.breadeli breads.com.

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