Three Great Ways To Use Juice Concentrates In Your Commercial Kitchen
When it comes to ensuring full flavor in your dishes, every commercial kitchen can benefit from some flavor shortcuts and tricks. One of the ingredients that many head cooks and line cooks overlook is juice concentrate, but this is an ingredient that can really help you pack a lot of flavor without a whole lot of time investment. Here are a few ways that you can use juice concentrate in your kitchen to make dishes that really stand out.
Marinades
Juice concentrate is a great additive to marinade recipes. It packs a lot of flavor without needing a lot of the ingredient, which is ideal when you're trying to highlight something like orange or pineapple in meat. It can make the difference between needing a dozen oranges to get the desired flavor versus one can of juice concentrate.
In addition, the concentrated flavor also means a more concentrated acidity level, so your marinade will tenderize the meat far more effectively. This will allow you to produce tender, juicy meat dishes that are full of flavor.
Sauces And Glazes
When you make a sauce or glaze, part of getting the concentrated flavor requires cooking the sauce down for quite some time to cook the excess liquid out of it. If you use a juice concentrate as the base for your sauce or glaze, you can eliminate some of this cooking process, allowing you to produce your final sauces much faster than you otherwise would. Since time is of the essence in a commercial kitchen, this is well worth the investment.
You can use juice concentrate in place of any fruit juice that you'd typically use in a sauce with good results. For dishes such as Polynesian pork, pineapple, orange, and apricot juice concentrates can help you quickly form the base of the glaze and give you tons of flavor without the time investment of cooking all of those juices down.
Dressings
Salads are often a staple of most restaurant menus, but the dressing options usually leave variety lacking. There are typically the same basic dressings offered from restaurant to restaurant. If you want to set your restaurant apart, you can create a variety of fruit-based vinaigrette dressings using juice concentrates as a base.
The concentrate will have enough sugar content to help tame the acidity of the vinegar without overpowering the dressing. And with so many different options available, you can create all sorts of different dressing flavors that will make salads a go-to on your menu instead of just an afterthought. Find a local juice concentrate supplier to get started.
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