Food Technology Article Excerpt

“Portraits in Color”, by Donald E. Pszczola, Senior Associate Editor, Food Technology, January 2004, pages 42-52. The following is a reprinted excerpt with permission from Food Technology.

Over the next few pages, we will be taking a colorful – albeit hypothetical – tour of a most unique gallery, the Museum of Food Colors. You won’t find a Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, or Picasso in these show rooms. Nor will you find art styles such as Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, or Cubism. What you will find, however, are portraits of the most recent developments in colors and other ingredients that can enhance the appearance of food and beverage products.

The artists responsible for these compositions may be established masters in the art of color, while others are up and coming. And, as you will see, they come from all around the world…

…There’s caramel in my soup. The title of our first offering comes from one of the several applications using caramel coloring that has been recently promoted by artist D.D. Williamson & Co., Inc., 1901 Payne St., Louisville, KY 40206 (phone 502-895-2438; fax 502-895-7381; www.caramel.com).

The use of this color can reportedly help soup manufacturers meet their visual appearance needs when formulating products with caramel colors. Liquid #203 and Powder #640 are among the caramel colors available that can help enhance the eye-appeal of ready-to-serve soups and dry soup mixes, as well as beef and chicken bouillons and brown and dark sauces. Soup, of course, is only the first entrée of a many-course meal that can benefit by the use of caramel coloring. Other potential applications for caramel color (available as liquids and powders) include beverages, baked goods, desserts, sauces, seasonings, and even pet foods for the animal begging beneath the table.

For example, caramel color may be used to improve the appearance of cooked meat, chicken, and turkey products. Slow cooking serves to retain moisture in meat products but can fail to produce an appealing roasted look that comes with high-temperature cooking. Under such circumstances, caramel color may be used to brown, reduce grayness of, or even blacken the surface of cooked meat items such as roast beef. Caramel color may also be used to improve the appearance of restructured meat items.

And for dessert applications, caramel color may be used as a cost-effective way to reduce the amount of cocoa required in the formula. A cocoa replacer consisting of powdered caramel color, flour, and a chocolate flavor is available which can reportedly replace up to 50% of the cocoa in a formula.

In addition to this broadening range of uses for caramel color, a number of innovative ingredient developments have been introduced by D.D. Williamson.

A caramelized apple juice concentrate is said to contribute a flavor to beverage and food products, but its primary use is in adjusting or adding color to drinks, flavors, jellies, and yogurts. Derived from 100% apple juice concentrate, the product provides a clear, clean apple juice color.

An oil-dispersible caramel color blend provides adhesion properties in snack and confectionery applications. While traditional caramel color is water soluble, this blend is suitable for use in applications requiring a brown color that is dispersible in oil or fat systems where the final food product is solid. Furthermore, it helps to minimize uneven color distribution in a dry or crystal mixture.

The blend can help seasonings, such as barbecue-flavored products, to adhere better to chips and other chips. The blend coats the salt in the seasoning, forming a protective layer, which provides improved adhesion to the chip. Cinnamon, which continues to be a popular flavor, can also take advantage of this system, enhancing cinnamon sugar for toppings and fillings in confectionery products. The blend coats the sugar crystals, resulting in better cinnamon adhesion and more uniform product appearance.

The company recently invested in a gas chromatograph with a mass spectrometer detector, which can separate a caramel color’s taste and flavor profiles. This testing makes possible the ability to develop a standard flavor profile for the company’s products. Furthermore, the company now has the ability to manufacture custom caramel colors, which might include a flavored caramel for soy sauce, a malt-flavored caramel for beer, a molasses-flavored caramel for baking, and a coffee-noted caramel.

Caramel color may also be combined with a variety of natural colors, providing functionality in a number of ways. Caramel color can deepen the color intensity of natural colors; it can help reduce the brightness of natural colors, making it suitable in applications such as barbecue sauce that require the lessening of the bright color of tomatoes; in combination with colors such as carmine, it can become even redder; and new colors, such as a green, can be created when a yellow-tone caramel color is combined with blue. Other innovative natural color blends can be formulated that are compatible with the customer’s product, process, and package requirements. Here are just a few examples: purple, chocolate brown, peanut butter tan, butterscotch, strawberry, cherry, and tomato.

Partners in Color. Our next composition works well as a companion piece to the previous artistic endeavor because both artists work as partners in color formulation. This portrait is by a supplier of natural color blends, colorMaker, 3309 E. Miraloma Ave., Ste. 105, Anaheim, CA 92806 (phone 714-572-0444; fax 714-572-0999; www.colormaker.com).

The company, which has more than 20 years of application experience and a strong technical background, specializes in the development of natural color blends that are compatible with product, process, and packaging requirements. It offers a full line of standardized natural color blends for coloring specific products, but its strength is its ability to develop and manufacture custom natural color blends tailored to the customer’s product requirements.

According to the company, while natural colorants are not new, the approach it takes to customizing them to meet product specifications is novel, partly because the company has an alliance with a leading manufacturer of caramel color, D.D. Williamson. Through this partnership, the company is able to offer clients superior technical strength and distribution on a global scale. Natural colorants utilized for creating blends include annatto, beet juice, beta-carotene, caramel color, carmine, chlorophyll, elderberry, grape juice, grape skin extract, lycopene, paprika, purple carrot, radish, red cabbage, saffron, titanium dioxide, and turmeric. The formulation of these blends takes into consideration a variety of factors such as pH, heat processing, packaging, shelf life, and kosher requirements.

While working with a client’s precise product formulation, a research team factors in background color, product characteristics, and chromaphore selection as part of its proven method of achieving target hue, process stability, distribution shelf life, and religious requirements. The company has the capability and the capacity to manufacture custom color blends as free-flowing powders, liquids, emulsions, or pastes, as dictated by the needs of any particular client.

Whether working online of from a desktop using a CD-ROM, clients can take advantage of colorMaker’s colorWheel, which displays more than 16 million colors. It helps clients discuss color in terms of three critical parameters of quantitative color analysis: hue, saturation, and lightness. For instance, it permits clients to select between “raspberry red” and strawberry red,” or “lemon yellow” and “egg yellow.”

In recent months, the company has highlighted some of its customized natural color blends. For example, a light-stable natural yellow color is made from turmeric, saffron, and caramel color. It may be used in food and beverage products such as baked goods and fruit juices. Natural color blends may be coated onto large sugar crystals for confectionery applications. Natural blue and green color blends have been developed which may be used in compressed tablets and limited food applications. They are available as free-flowing powders with moisture levels below 5%. The color blends are light and heat stable. However, they are generally not pH stable in solutions below 6.0.