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Produce Show Daily 1 5 Monday, June 25, 2018 A Serious Foodie Delivers a World of Peppers By Lorrie Baumann Jim Pachence takes peppers more seri- ously than most. He's the entrepreneur behind Serious Foodie, which offers a line of cooking and finishing sauces that feature fusion flavors, most of which cel- ebrate the flavors of peppers grown around the world. His idea was to focus on the unique flavors of the peppers, rather than relying solely on their burn. Pachence, who has a Ph.D. in bio- physics, started Serious Foodie in 2015 after a 40-year career as a serial entrepre- neur in the medical devices industry, fol- lowed by culinary training in the U.S. and Europe. He and his family then worked for a few years to develop recipes based on the peppers and flavors he'd discovered during his world travels. "I started off as a very serious ama- teur cook," he said. "While phasing out my biotech career, I wanted to do some- thing around the culinary business. We had thought of wanting to do something in culinary art, and I had an interest in – not necessarily hot – peppers. I wanted to know why the world has so many peppers. Why and how do peppers taste different when they're grown in different places?" "Some chilies are very harsh and are bred simply to be hot, not to be flavorful, sometimes painful," he continued. "We started to look at the opposite: What are the species that are bred to be flavorful? Why are there a thousand Mexican vari- etals?" The answer to those questions, he decided, is that different varieties of pep- pers are cultivated around the world to complement the various flavors that typ- ify their cuisines as a whole. For instance, the aji panca pepper from Peru is used in just about every Peruvian dish in one way or another, Pachence said. It's used both fresh and dried, sometimes in a paste. When it's fresh, it has a sweet, slightly smoky, fruity flavor that inspired Pachence to experiment with how it could be used in sauces that would com- plement the vegetables and proteins that comprise the American culinary lexicon. "It's slightly spicy, has multiple levels of flavor, is truly unique to the cooking of that country," he said. "The taste is used everywhere. The Peruvians use it on their vegetables, so we played with that. Meaty fish, incorporated into a ceviche – those are some of the examples where we reflect how the sauce is used in the U.S. versus how it's used in Peru. We made a Blood Orange and Aji Panca sauce, which reflects the bracing acidity that you see in the Peruvian dishes, but using our own fusion twist." The Blood Orange and Aji Panca Cooking Sauce is one of seven different sauces in the line that started three years ago with Roasted Hatch Chile Cooking Sauce, which was the result of a friend's invitation to visit him in New Mexico and take in the Hatch Chile Festival, an annual Labor Day weekend celebration of southern New Mexico's most famous crop. "As I started to do my culinary experiences, I was interested in the local cuisines of semi-exotic places around the world," Pachence says as he explains how a visit to a small-town harvest festi- val evolved into a family business that employs his son, Paul, as its marketing executive and his daughter Lisa as a part- time sales executive, with the occasional assistance of his wife, who's still a prac- ticing physician. "I wanted to teach my children what it meant to be an entrepre- neur," he said. "I'm just very strong on the entrepreneurial spirit and how that helps people around the community. It helps create jobs. It helps improve the local community. I like to connect the community – that whole idea of thinking globally but acting locally." "The science geek in me went about creating the sauces systematically, trying to find the flavors in the chile that would match with flavor profiles," he said. He ordered himself a supply of Hatch chiles and started playing with different combi- nations of fruits and herbs with the pep- pers, and ended up with a blend of the peppers with passionfruit juice and herbs. "We created something that people really liked and wanted to buy," he said. From there, the line grew to seven different sauces targeted at consumers from 25 to 55 with discretionary income, who are really interested in both gourmet food and healthy eating, but who don't necessarily have a lot of time to experi- ment with flavors in their own cooking. The sauces are all natural with no artifi- cial preservatives or genetically modified organisms. They have low salt and low sugar. "We approach cooking as a holis- tic, healthy, flavor-packed experience," he said. "We show people how you can make a gourmet meal without using a lot of fat that adds extraneous calories." The sauces are also gluten-free, and while a couple of them include anchovies, the others are vegan. They're made in small test market batches at a commercial kitchen in St. Petersburg, Florida, and by a co-packer based in Albany, New York, who's familiar with the demands of artisanal food production, according to Pachence. "We try to keep the flavor profile medium or lower, as far as the spiciness is concerned," he said. "Most people can tolerate the sauce. We always say that you can always add hot back into it, but you can't take it away." The sauces are currently sold in 150 stores around the country and perform best for medium-size gourmet shops that also have meat and cheese departments, Pachence said. "Almost every sauce we have has a personal travel experience associated with it," he added. "We'd tast- ed something like this somewhere else that we wanted to recreate." For more information, visit www.serious- foodie.com. Tools To Avoid Avocado Hand By Greg Gonzales Some people like avocados, others love avocados... and then there's me. Avocados tremble before me. I slice them up for turkey sandwiches, salads, occa- sional smoothies and even peanut butter sandwiches. Luckily, I wasn't involved in the swath of stories that spread across the nation about the influx of emergency room patients with the dreaded "avocado hand," the common name for a number of knife injuries connected to poor avocado cutting protocol. I know my way around a knife enough to slice up avocados and not hurt myself. Not everyone does, however – especially new home cooks and kids – so gadget innovators got to making avo- cado-specific tools that are safer and eas- ier to use for less experienced cooks. In general form, avocado tools are multi- function, and feature a handle, a scooper with blades to make uniform cuts while scraping the meat out and a sharp edge for splitting the skin. Over the course of a month, I went through even more avoca- dos than usual to test out three standout avocado tools for ease of use, safety, durability and best applications. The easiest tool for me to use was the OXO 3-in-1 Avocado Slicer. It's a plastic tool with a rubber grip, scooper, slicer, knife, and my favorite part, the stainless steel pitter. The three steel teeth grip pits with a light press, and pull them out with a quick twist. The knife end is made of plastic, and while sharp, isn't likely to pierce skin with even minimal attention to the task. The $9.99 tool is compact, so it easily fits in a drawer, but a hook hole allows for hanging on racks, too. For more information, visit www.oxo.com. My favorite pick for kids was the Kuhn Rikon 5-in-1 Avocado Tool. The $5 entire tool is made of a solid piece of plastic, with no sharp edges – I made a scientific effort to check safety, dragging each edge across my arm with just a little force, and found none of them even left a scratch. On top of safety, this simple- looking tool features five functions: pit, cut, slice, scoop and mash. The masher end looks like a spoon with holes in it, which made quick work of avocados des- tined for the guacamole bowl. The serrat- ed edge on the masher end was thick enough to prevent cuts, but sharp enough to get through the skin without much effort; all I had to do was saw a bit, and the edge sunk right in. Pitting was a cinch as well, with a circle of little teeth on the handle that required a light push and twist. More information can be found at www.kuhnrikon.com. For cooks who prefer steel over plas- tic, whether for sharpness or durability, the Crisp Avocado Tool is the way to go. It features steel wire slicer, and a foldaway stainless steel knife that folds back into the soft-touch handle for safety and storage. The half of the knife closest to the handle is wavy, so it also functions as a pitter. However, unlike the plastic knives, this one is sharp enough to slice hands, so I still made sure to be careful with it when the blade was flipped out. The frame around the avocado-shaped slicer is slight- ly sharp, but not razor sharp, just enough to cut the meat closest to the skin just like butter. It's dishwasher safe, and easily hand-washes. It's available for $14.99 at www.crispcooking.com. Covo Drinkware Relaunches as Freeheart Precision Products' brand Covo Drinkware, Made in the USA thermal insulated drinkware, is relaunching under the brand name Freeheart™. "We wanted a name that is more emotive and communicates the core brand elements of Adventure, Openness and Passion to our retail partners and consumers," said Rainer Kuhn, President of Covo Drinkware. "The name is all- inclusive, like our brand personality. It's also more reflective of our target market and retailers we're choosing to partner with as we accelerate our growth." The name Freeheart was decided upon after three months of developing hundreds of options, all focused on the brand's core attributes. The company consulted with branding agencies, marketing and commu- nication professionals and key retail partners. After careful con- sideration, the Freeheart name was chosen. "We're entering our sixth year of operation and have transi- tioned from being simply an injection molding company to an emerging consumer brand. We thought the time was right to make this move and create some excite- ment and passion around our high quality, innovative products," said Kuhn. Freeheart is in the process of developing a new logo and building a new website with the URL www.gofreeheart.com.