A squeeze is all you need to create bold, authentic flavors

Sponsored by MegaMex Foods, LLC

Noncommercial foodservice operators proved long ago that their cafeterias and catering departments are the equal of many great casual restaurants. Raising the bar that high, however, created the challenge of maintaining such innovative and high-quality food on such a grand scale.

That’s the average workday trial for Kurt Kwiatkowski, senior executive chef over residential dining and culinary services at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, Michigan. On an ideal day, his staff of 4,000 is present to feed the university’s 50,000 students and 12,000 faculty and support staff. But even as the COVID-19 pandemic wanes, he’s regularly short 25% of that optimal number of employees, which has led him to rely increasingly on speed-scratch food items to accomplish his goals.

“The labor savings and time savings you get from those are great, but they also solve other problems,” Kwiatkowski says. “What really helps is having more consistent products. We really pride ourselves on great food, and consistency is a big part of that.”

Unlike most college cafeterias of earlier generations, Kwiatkowski’s menus feature dishes from cuisines across the globe. Bouillabaisse, tacos al pastor, pork shoulder pernil, mariscada and various curries circulate regularly, and students and faculty love the variety.

But like any chef eager to innovate, Kwiatkowski likes adding his own accents to those classics, and that’s where he turns again to speed scratch items like TRES COCINAS™ Authentic Pepper Pastes. These pepper pastes, stored in 7-ounce pouches, can be squeezed into casseroles, soups, marinades, sauces, mayonnaise, salsas—even desserts—to add bold or subtle hints of roasted or smoked peppers.

“Believe it or not, the students are looking for authenticity when it comes to dishes like bouillabaisse and al pastor,” Kwiatkowski says. He constructs those global dishes on traditional flavor foundations before taking a nontraditional tack with TRES COCINAS™ Authentic Pepper Pastes. “We use those pepper pastes as background notes to add new flavor profiles and roundness and depth.”

The TRES COCINAS™ product lineup includes three pepper profiles:

Creating fusion dishes

While each can be used to enhance traditional Mexican dishes like birria beef tacos or a chicken torta, they’re also great for building flavor fusions in familiar recipes such as guajillo-glazed pork ribs or a chipotle chicken flatbread. Use them to add one-step flavor boosters to a salad dressing, condiment or sauce, pasta salads and baked casseroles of nearly any stripe. Just a touch of the Chipotle paste, for example, adds dark but subtle pepper and smoke notes to chocolate desserts.

Such bold flavors, Kwiatkowski says, can be added at most any step in a recipe.

“When we’re making Puerto Rican pernil, we add a pepper paste to the cooking liquid to build flavor as it cooks down,” Kwiatkowski says. “Sometimes we’re adding it right to a dish on the mac and cheese bar. Instead of ordinary pulled pork, we add those pastes to create other flavor profiles that customers might not have expected.”

When making gorditas or tamales, he adds a pepper paste into the liquid used to make those doughs. A quick squeeze of pepper paste gives an otherwise ordinary vegan tamale a broader and deeper flavor profile.

“Just by adding some paste—which is about as simple a step as you can get—you really expand the flavors the customer is getting,” he says. “I’m just taking masa and adding liquid with the paste to the recipe. That’s minimal effort that makes a great change.”

Kwiatkowski recalled making Mexican pepper pastes from scratch; he admitted that the results weren’t always optimal.

“Starting with dried peppers means we had to hydrate them, which takes time, and naturally you also have to spend time pulling out the seeds,” he says. “If they were fresh, we had to blister them, and that wasn’t always done correctly or perfectly or consistently. Of course, the heat levels of the recipes weren’t always the same either. … The TRES COCINAS™ pastes eliminate that.”

Kwiatkowski says the more his crew uses the TRES COCINAS™ Authentic Pepper Pastes, the more opportunities they see for using them. Anything they think could benefit from a dash of bold or subtle complexity is up for consideration.

“We’re diving deeper into it all the time and asking, ‘Why not add a pepper paste to that?’” he says. “We have an entrée with a cilantro-lime dressing that we added pepper paste to. I know we’re just scratching the surface right now.”

Easy to use and endless versatility make TRES COCINAS™ Authentic Pepper Pastes a must-have for any restaurant kitchen. For menu ideas and TRES COCINAS™ Authentic Pepper Pastes samples, visit www.megamexfoodservice.com/brand/tres-cocinas