The Perfect Purée of Napa Valley
Perfect Purée products are all natural and developed to be unique and value added for professionals in the foodservice industry as well as to food savvy enthusiasts. The succulent, single-note flavors inspire everything from muffins to marinades, salad dressings to sauces, cakes to cookies, canapés to cocktails, and sorbets to smoothies. Many of these flavors are now showcased in appetizers, main dishes, accompaniments, salads, desserts, sweets, and beverages that feature global influences from Asia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean. Puree flavors include raspberry, mango, prickly pear, lychee, white peach, pink guava, pomegranate, blood orange juice, key lime, and Meyer lemon.
Pureed fruits and vegetables have long been produced by hand by classically trained chefs as a staple kitchen ingredient. When European prepared purees were first introduced in America's professional kitchens in the late 1970s, chefs readily integrated them into their cooking. Chefs constantly seek innovative ways to reduce costs while still offering top quality. Most professional kitchens simply cannot afford the added time and cost associated with hand-prepared purees. Often produce prices, availability, and quality fluctuations hinder restaurants from providing a complete array of hand made purees year-round.
Concentrates of fruits deliver a powerhouse of taste and convenience to create sorbets, mousses, and cocktails. The trend to offer more fruits in beverages such as a banana lemon smoothie or a pineapple passion shake is another opportunity for fruits to dazzle customers while meeting the challenge to increase fruit intake for Americans. Chefs' imaginations are also sparked by tropical fruits in savory menus. When it comes to tropical flavors, mango, whether fresh, pureed, or in concentrate has been at the menu forefront of Asian and Latin cuisines. Today, other interesting flavor combinations of sweet and savory such as tamarind shrimp or sesame crusted scallops with coconut red curry can be enjoyed.
The pastry world has turned to tropical or exotic fruit purees as a way to broaden flavor options, ingredients, and opportunity to offer healthy indulgences that do not sacrifice flavor. Trend setters are featuring East-meets-West flavor pairings such as Kristy Choo, from Venice, California with her mango-basil chocolates or passion fruit and mango cake. Offering exotic flavor profiles such as prickly pear cactus fruit sauces, tamarind chocolate soft ganache, or sweet banana ginger sauce bring opportunities to chefs for their desserts to be somewhere in between the over-the-top indulgent thousand calorie and the deprivation diet desserts. To encourage pastry chefs to revisit their offerings, CIA colleagues promote the novel idea of a pastry flip, a phrase attributed to Michael Batterberry, founder of Food Arts Magazine. This simply means flipping the usual proportions of dessert so that the indulgent part—the ice cream, cheese cake, or cake—plays a minor role while healthy ingredients such as fruit, nuts, nut oils, or whole grains become the focus. This is an appealing concept that does not compromise the chef's culinary integrity or the indulgence of the dish. From a nutritional standpoint, it offers more choices and opportunity for health protective qualities of fruits while reducing the amount of higher calorie ingredients. Just the idea of not having to use low fat or reduced calorie versions, that really never satisfy, is a step ahead in helping diners make healthier choices.
Contact
Hayward Enterprises, Inc.
2700 Napa Valley Corporate Drive, Suite L
Napa, CA 94558
Telephone: (707) 261-5100 or (800) 556-3707
Fax: (707) 261-5111