Meet ‘the Million-Dollar Palate’ Behind a Flood of New Foods
I enjoyed reading this article. I learned that ms. Masoni is passionate about food since childhood because her father was a professor of food science and her grandparents ran creameries. Ms. Masoni is very creative, has a lot of imagination and devoted to her work.
It is very important that the food we eat is both healthy and tasty. Ms. Masoni has the talent and the skills to combine health and taste together. She also helps people to fulfill their culinary dreams.
I think that ms. Masoni has a very interesting job and has a big responsibility towards food companies and the consumers. We definitely need a person like ms. Masoni to improve the taste and the quality of our food.
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Hall Brands (Chedz) has had the pleasure of working with Ms. Masoni and the Food Innovation Center since we launched our product in 2013. She helped us from the ground up, assisting with nutritional labels, packaging, shelf life testing, and many other aspects of launching a food brand. She also used her “million dollar palette” to help us come up with a gluten-free line that is very close in taste to our wheat line. We are now working on a new product line, and Ms. Masoni and the FIC are once again key partners in our efforts. We are deeply grateful and forever indebted to Ms. Masoni and the Food Innovation Center for their tremendous support and service.
1
Hall Brands (Chedz) has had the pleasure of working with Ms. Masoni and the Food Innovation Center since we launched our product in 2013. She helped us from the ground up, assisting with nutritional labels, packaging, shelf life testing, and many other aspects of launching a food brand. She also used her “million dollar palette” to help us come up with a gluten free line that is very close in taste to our wheat line. We are now working on a new product line, and Ms. Masoni and the FIC are once again key partners in our effors. We are deeply grateful and forever indebted to Ms. Masoni and the Food Innovation Center for their tremendous support and service.
The article was sweet and caught my interest due to my taste in culinary topics. Although I do understand the whole skepticism that comes along with "Lab Foods" I felt that this article didn't include any references of chemical usage as some others perceived. Most ingredients of most foods we eat, are already mostly modified to better suit us, so I don't see how people are critical about modified foods whilst currently eating them. My appetite for culinary articles are only beginning.
What a nifty profile of a person I wouldn't know about otherwise. It was really interesting to learn about Ms. Masoni and her collaborative, mentoring spirit and the entire art to creating new foods. I look forward to trying Salt & Straw the next time I go to Portland.
I, for one, am happy to see news that doesn't all slant to the negative. Thank you for it.
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The Sarah Masoni I know is neither evil or genius and I'm sure she would agree. She's passionate and creative and helps develop great tasting food products which satisfy clients and their customers.
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We all need to eat more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans and nuts. They taste great
and no laboratory design required!
Laboratory design is just another way to
dress up added sugars and fats/oils (doesn’t matter if they are organic or not it’s still added calories and calorie density without micronutrients-vitamins and minerals).
Laboratory design increases profits and our
waistlines.
Our health is the loser.
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You've misread the article. Sarah helps food entrepreneurs to craft their product for shelf stability and helps them when they have a broad idea about what flavor profiles they want. She helps them understand how flavors go together and how to make their product safe. When suggesting ways for me to make my product shelf stable she suggested natural ways to reduce water or increase acidity, etc. These are things all people who want to get their product on shelves, maintain the integrity of their product taste wise and quality wise and not poison their customers should know. Sarah Masoni and the Food Innovation Center allows small food businesses like mine to access that knowledge.
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Marge Keller, please come out to the Portland area and try give these Salt & Straw flavors a try — they may surprise you with their yumminess, as they did me!
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Portland? Not Corvallis?
Yes, north end of downtown.
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Oregon State has a growing presence in Portland in addition to a growing campus in Bend and Newport. OSU is the largest university in Oregon. Go Beavs!
This is wrong. Ugh. It’s all about money. Nothing about health and nature. How can people be so ignorant?
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I am so happy to see Sarah written up in the NYT. She is absolutely amazing! She helped me take my cocoa recipes from home kitchen to market ready and has helped me go from "what if . . . " with my new flavor ideas to "This is how" Love Sarah and the Food Innovation Center.
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The word "ersatz" comes to mind!
I guess our civilization needs innovators, or what else would we do with our sawdust, thickeners, fillers, and chemicals?
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Paley bars sound good, so I ordered two boxes.
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I was the creator of Beer Chips snacks, where I figured out how to get beer into potato chips without making them soggy. Sarah helped me take that kernel of an idea and make it a reality. She is a genius and doesn’t have a bit of evil in her. Her knowledge and enthusiasm made the project a success. I am forever grateful for her efforts.
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as a specialty crop grower, i wondered what the cookbook was?
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Sarah has worked with us as an incrediable resource for developing our dog meals/toppers and treats that are human grade, USA sourced and have a clean label. As we sometimes doubted our own ability to formulate a human grade meal that was formulated for a dogs nutritional needs without a laundry list of supplements that you find on most dog related products; she calmly assured us that we should stick to our mission of using nutritious whole food ingredients. Her knowledge of local resources was invaluable and her ability to connnect manufactures and suppliers is unlimited. She truely wants you to succeed in a very competitive market.
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Fascinating! She's like a member of the Wrecking Crew (who played as the backing band for many LA recoding sessions, from TV themes to Simon and Garfunkel)—you don't know them but you consumer their work endlessly.
Giving those behind-the-scenes people a human face, and telling their stories, is a wonderful contribution to society. It sounds like Ms. Masoni is as unassuming as she has been powerful, which is always a nice combination.
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Looks like Ms. Masoni is in a different range of the food science spectrum from researchers like Dr. Howard Moskowitz who work for big corporations to create addictive junk foods through flavor optimization and fancy "psycho-mathematical" modeling. A fascinating article in the NYT Magazine from several years ago offers a glimpse into that dark corner of the food industrial complex:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of...
Good intentions notwithstanding, it's interesting how much of the research that Ms. Masoni and her colleagues put into creating presumably healthy recipe designs actually makes a difference, and how much of it is commercially driven hype?
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A charming article, I thought. I was surprised to see so many negative comments -- e.g. I don't like to eat "laboratory-grade chemicals" -- "Great: more ways to make [sic] people eat things that aren't good for them" -- calling her products "food-like substances".
I saw nothing in the article to support these insults. So I checked on-line for the actual ingredients used in the products mentioned. E.g.,
Paley's fruit-nut stuff: Ingredients: Organic Dried Figs, Hazelnuts, Organic Dried Apricots, Organic Raisins, Organic Honey, Almonds, Organic Dried Sweetened Cranberries (Organic Cranberries, Organic Cane Sugar, Organic Canola Oil), Organic Oat Bran, Organic Dried Wild Blueberries (Organic Wild Blueberries, Organic Cane Sugar, Organic Canola Oil),
Chedz cheese sticks: Chedz: Cheddar cheese (Cultured milk, salt, enzymes, annatto, rice flour, butter (cream, salt), potato starch, tapioca flour, cayenne peper, baking powder, spices, salt, garlic.
Bob’s Red-Mill oatmeal cup: organic whole grain oats, organic cane sugar, organic pineapple, organic coconut, organic flaxseeds, organic chia seeds, salt.
Etc.
What's so wrong about these ingredients? Sounds to me like food, not "food-like substances".
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I second your opinion - the anti-scientific attitude of so many commenters is embarrassing, and I'm glad that you're a voice of sanity. It's too bad that Harold McGee's Bible "On Food and Cooking", which focuses on food science, and which chefs like Jacques Pepin, Ferran Adria and David Chang continually refer to, isn't more widely read.
Just because something is made in a lab or industrially doesn't automatically make it evil: even the much maligned MSG was discovered to be the flavoring principle in many edible species of seaweed. Guanylic acid, whose sodium salt is an additive to Cheetos, occurs naturally in shiitake mushrooms and contributes to their savory flavor. http://www.theartofcooking.org/2015/01/11/ingredients-makes-food-taste-g....
If the synthetic molecule is identical to the naturally occurring molecule, it's equally safe (or unsafe).
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John’s assessment is precisely the case with our experience with Sarah in our creating Portland Pet Ffood’s dog meals and treats whose ingredients are all USDA certified, sourced and manufactured in the U.S. Simply check the 8 to 10 common ingredients in our dog meals with the lengthy, hard to understand ingredients in the typical dog food sold in America. Without Sarah, America’s dog owners would not have the choice of feeding their pets like they try to feed themselves.
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John, just because the list of ingredients looks OK, it doesn't mean that it is appetizing food. E.g., I love the Bob’s Red-Mill organic (nothing but) oatmeal but I wouldn't touch the above Bob’s Red-Mill oatmeal cup with a 10 foot pole.
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It would have been very informative how health figured into these new concoctions. Suddenly, magically-derived flavors (usually by chemical manipulation) seems to be the new hydrogenated fat or HFCS or salt—put it everywhere!!
I’ve come across at least 3 brands of butter (plain old unsalted butter!) in the past 2 years that had a second listed ingredient: natural flavor. Seriously? What’s so off with your butter that you needed some laboratory flavor added to it??
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I agree, I am totally suspect of any lab association with food.
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I can't speak to her unnamed corporation work. If you look at the local companies mentioned, check your assumptions. Bob's Red Mill: Organic. I don't see the cups' ingredient list on the website, but none of the products I have at home have preservatives/fillers/etc. Chedz: Ditto. See my other comment re Salt & Straw and Choi's.
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I marvel at the gift of taste people like Sarah Masoni are born with for they are in a unique class and rank along the lines of Mozart, Picasso, and Frank Bruni – their talents have developed into masterpieces.
I do not doubt for a moment that Ms. Masoni has a “million-dollar palate.” I just don’t know how such a sophisticated and skilled palate could even begin to put together, much less enjoy, flavors such as “pear and blue cheese, strawberry with honey-balsamic vinegar and black pepper” into ice cream, of all things. There is such a thing as “experimental flavors” and then there is “are you kidding me flavors”.
Great article, I just think some of the concoctions mentioned are way out there . . .
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I don't have an expert palate but I do make a strawberry dessert very similar to the ice cream flavor described. It involves pretty much the same ingredients except using sugar instead of honey. The macerated strawberries are delicious on shortcake, pound cake or angel food cake as they soak up the syrup that forms. It's even yummy on chocolate ice cream so I can certainly imagine it in ice cream form. Give it a go sometime.
The pear and bleu cheese is harder to imagine but fruit and cheese do go well together. Sweet and savory.
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Pear and blue cheese is a classic combination
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There's a line out the door and down the block at every Salt & Straw location, at seemingly every hour of the day, rain or shine. Tourists from the Midwest even like it.
I understand that it's not for everyone though. Fortunately, Salt & Straw also happens to serve up the best vanilla ice cream ever, too.
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The mother of manufactured food-stuff.
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I prefer to eat animals and plants, not laboratory grade chemicals.
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Applause to Ms. Masoni. This is the rise of molecular cuisine and the first step in synthesizing foods from the chemical elements in the air and minerals. Once there would be synthetic kinds of meat, fish, and vegetables, they would be difficult to ban by the Judaic, Roman Catholic, Muslim, and Jain clergy.
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She's passionate about her work and helps others achieve success - brava! Now I need to go see about ordering some Chedz...yeah, we're a cheese stick house!
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I hope she uses her knowledge to help us eat better and smarter rather to help processed food companies make us eat more of things we need to eat less of. For example, I'd love ice cream that tastes heavenly then hits my bliss point after consuming about 6 ounces.
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This is a particularly welcome report - someone who's very good at what she does, does it with a good spirit and is generous with her mind. Thank you.
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Great--more ways to make people eat things that aren't good for them. Do we really need to glorify this?
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It’s ice cream, not heroin.
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To some, Salt & Straw is akin to heroin. Have you ever tried to pass the lines clogging the sidewalks outside their locations? My 12-year-old LOVES the pear and blue cheese flavor. I’ve never been much of a fan of S&S; their flavors are for the outlier in my opinion. I have no issue with all the fancies. But that is what their ice cream always tastes like (beyond a few, mind you): very few base flavors. Think of a fancy dress with alternate laces and paillettes. I’m a Ruby Jewel person, which, I will have sparingly. Because...heroin.
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@Atwood - So many comments from so few who have actually comprehended the article's contents. A thinking person gets the feeling that many of these negative postings are as illustrative of the failures of our educational system in improving reading comprehension as they are about the general public's lack of understanding of the nature of the chemical nature of natural food sources.
So glad the Food Innovation Center is finally getting its just desserts! It WAS a well-kept secret til now, and the number of fascinating (and delicious and healthy) food products it has helped launch is gob-smacking.
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She develops new edible food-like substances.
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