For billions of people, rarely does a day go by when they don’t have bread.
In many countries around the world, it is a staple of almost every meal and, at times, a meal all by itself.
If we zoom out beyond your baguettes and sourdough sandwich loaves to rolls, buns, pastries, and more, the picture of just how important bread is becomes crystal clear.
Still, while bread is often inherently plant-based on its own, what’s bread without at least a little butter?
Spreadable dairy-free and vegan butters are nothing new; take margarine, for example, and have only improved over time.
However, when it comes to bread and baking, the role of butter becomes even more crucial and complex.
This is where the shortcomings of current plant-based butter options come into focus.
Better with Butter? – Function & Flavor
If we’re being honest with ourselves, what is the biggest compliment that someone can give an entirely plant-based pastry, cookie, etc?
You knew right away, didn’t you?
I’m guessing the first thing that came to mind was some version of, “You can’t even tell that it’s vegan!”
Why is that?
It could be the lack of eggs, maybe milk, but often it’s because of butter.
Butter is critical for providing moisture to baked goods and keeping them from drying out, but it also does so much more.
In items such as cookies, muffins, and cakes, the butter coats the starches and proteins, which can help create a more delicate crumb.
It can also be used to assist with the leavening of baked goods. When using the creaming method, grains of sugar cut through the butter, forcing air into the mixture, and when baking pastries like croissants, the liquid in the butter evaporates into steam, lifting the pastry as it bakes.
Then there is a pastry’s flaky, crispy goodness—also thanks to butter.
Developers and vegan bakers may be making amazing progress in recreating these effects with different plant-based and animal-free fats and other ingredients, but something is still missing.
Flavor.
On top of its functional utility, butter is one of the key profiles people love about bakery, making it crucial for achieving authenticity.
Falling Short
Here is where the problems compound for plant-based butter and where the current crop falls short.
One of the issues is that when baking with traditional butter, its taste profile changes. It goes from the sweet, creamy, milky notes of ambient room temperature butter to the cooked, toasty, even sweet nuttiness of browned butter. That’s even before addressing the complexity varieties like Irish, cultured, and other butter profiles can present.
This highlights what, after taste and texture, is the biggest hangup consumers and food service professionals have with plant-based dairy ingredients: their lack of cross-functionality.
For example, the plant-based spread you use on your toast might be so good that you won’t believe it’s not butter, and it might even work fine for sauteeing, but it just falls short when it comes to baking.
Either it leaves you with an oily, greasy mess, or the flavour just isn’t where it needs to be.
Yet this isn’t just a consumer and restaurant industry issue. CPGs and developers of finished bakery goods face similar problems.
Though they don’t necessarily have to rely on plant-based butter for their products, there is the question of achieving the best taste. This frequently comes down to the heat stability of a given flavour. It may hit the targets in the base, but by the time it makes it through the high-heat processing needed, the volatile aroma and flavour compounds may have flashed off entirely, leaving consumers with flakey, fluffy, flavour-lacking food.
Whether we want to admit it or not, this is a problem we, as an industry, will have to pay attention to.
And it might mean we have to get creative.
Getting Creative: Opportunities for Innovation
Progress in innovation isn’t always buttery smooth, but it is necessary. Sometimes, that means we need to build on conventional wisdom and other times, we need to think outside of the box of cake mix.
Flavored Mixes
Or maybe that is precisely where we need to think.
One potential approach for consumer-facing plant-based bakery is to find ways to incorporate authentic and delicious dairy-free flavours into the boxed mixes and ingredients themselves, avoiding the issues of using plant-based butter altogether.
Achieving such ideas may take intentional investment in innovating around existing technologies like encapsulation.
Encapsulation
Encapsulating flavours in different carriers like lipids allows the volatile flavour and aroma compounds to withstand the harshness and rigours of processing.
Though Edlong already has a wide range of impressive and authentic heat-stable flavours, meeting the current and future challenges of plant-based bakery demands continued development and innovation. Of which we are working to position ourselves as leaders on the cutting-edge of encapsulation technologies.
A Flavor Mosaic to Match
While the previous ideas may be set for future success, Edlong isn’t afraid to get creative in the here and now to help find the perfect profile.
With our understanding of the depth and complexity of butter and plant-based challenges, we can work with the inherent qualities of a product’s base to achieve the authentic taste consumers are looking for.
This could come from a combination of our many butter-typer flavours but also from places you’d never expect. For example, the subtle sweet cream and caramelic brown notes of white chocolate could be exactly what a plant-based croissant needs to make even the harshest critic say, “Sacre Bleu” in amazement.
Whatever plant-based butter challenges, reach out to our international team of R&D experts today to learn how we can help make your bread without the butter, your bread and butter.
About the Author: Emily Sheehan, Applications Manager, EMEA
Hi! I’m Emily Sheehan. I’m the Applications Manager, EMEA at Edlong, and my job is rooted in creating exciting new possibilities for our people and processes. It’s inspiring to reflect on how much Edlong has achieved and even more amazing to be involved in such thoughtful innovation. We enjoy pushing boundaries in food and flavour, and we welcome everyone in the food industry to join us. If you’re in need of expertise or inspiration, I’d love to collaborate and help you design flavour solutions that resonate with consumers!
Topics: Dairy-freeVegan
Resource Type: Article