Button from the tube
We may introduce: Our Tasty Paste is here! The most condensed form of flavor for those who like to bring more depth (umami) to vegetarian dishes. Try it out!
Fermentation is the means of choice to bring more flavor to the plate. That was the case in the past, as shown by products such as soy sauce or miso. At that time, the preservation was also an important aspect of this technology, today the taste potential of fermented products is in the foreground. In restaurants and laboratories experiments are carried out to achieve complexity and depth, especially in “plant-based” dishes.
Vegetarian seasoning paste for cooking and refining.
Labs, experiments, fermentation… sounds complicated but the results are convincing, which is why the effort is worth it. Even in the best kitchens, however, not only are highly complex processes followed, shortcuts are also popular here, at least if the result is right. Taking a cue from Magnus Nilsson’s Tasty Paste and David Zilber’s Burger Glaze, we’ve developed a product that takes relatively little effort to make, yet offers plenty of flavor potential. Nilsson’s version is a bit more elaborate but both versions have one crucial thing in common: fresh yeast.
Don’t be afraid of good taste
So basically it’s a yeast extract. Yeast extract, isn’t that… exactly it’s about glutamate. There is much discussion about such – naturally occurring – ingredients, read more in our interview with Prof. Dr. Thomas Vilgis.
For our Tasty Paste we use celery, carrots, garlic, smoked garlic, shallots, vinegar, yeast, water, mushrooms, vegetable oil and butter. We carefully clean and chop each vegetable. We peel the black and smoked garlic from the brown fermented peel. We chop the two types of garlic and the vegetables in a kitchen mixer with water, oil, vinegar and yeast. We fill the resulting intensely smelling vegetable and yeast porridge into a large saucepan. We cover the surface with cling film. We leave the pot prepared in this way for 3 days at room temperature – to ferment. We can observe that some liquid settles down and the vegetable pulp begins to ferment upwards through the yeast. The smell is intense and pungent and it smells of shallots, vinegar and yeast. The smell becomes stronger, more intense and soon unbearable.
It doesn’t sound appetizing, but it’s not that surprising. Garum, the fish sauce of the Romans, has refined many dishes, but the production sites were usually located on the outskirts of cities, because the smell of fish fermenting in the heat was unbearable. So we’re on a good path….
Tasty Tubes from our Food Lab
After three days of fermentation, we boil the vegetable puree once completely and then let it boil over low heat for 5 hours. After the 5 hours we cool the already visibly boiled down porridge. For the next two days we cook the porridge for 5 hours a day. On the third day we cool the porridge down completely and put it in the refrigerator at 4 degrees. Here the porridge matures / ferments for another day. We heat up some butter and mix it into our Tasty Paste. Fat tastes good – so the butter enhances our taste booster, but the paste would certainly also be very tasty purely vegan.
We then run the paste in a kitchen blender for about 10 minutes and then strain it through a fine sieve. Then cool our Tasty Paste on a baking sheet. The cold mixture is mixed again before we fill it into tubes with the help of a piping bag. Packed in this way, the product matures for another 4 weeks.
Our Tasty Paste is vegetarian and has it all in terms of taste!
