Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets. Joanna Blythman

the food manufacturer’s ingredient store, you get a further insight into why processed convenience foods don’t taste convincingly like their home-cooked equivalent. In the same way that you will never see a stray onion skin lying around a ready meals factory, you’re extremely unlikely to see an eggshell either. Eggs are supplied to food manufacturers in many forms, but almost never in their original packaging. Instead, they come in powders, with added sugar, for instance, or as albumen-only special ‘high gel’ products for whipping. Liquid eggs will be pasteurised, yolk only, whites only, frozen or chilled, or with ‘extended shelf life’ (one month), whatever is easiest. They may be liquid, concentrated, dried, crystallised, frozen, quick frozen or coagulated. Manufacturers can also buy in handy pre-cooked, ready-shelled eggs for manufacturing products like Scotch eggs and egg mayonnaise, or eggs pre-formed into 300-gram cylinders or tubes, so that each egg slice is identical and there are no rounded ends. These hardboiled, tubular eggs are snapped up by companies that make sandwiches. Manufacturers can also take their pick from bespoke egg mixes, ready to use in everything from quiches and croissants to glossy golden pastry glazes and voluminous meringues. And there is always the cheaper option of using ‘egg replacers’ made from fractionated whey proteins (from milk). No hurry to use them up either; they have a shelf-life of 18 months.

      Some ingredients used by food manufacturers are recognisable to home cooks: products such as aseptic tomato paste, a cooked tomato liquid, aren’t so different from cartons of passata you might keep at home, for example. True, they come in shuddering foil packs with the dimensions of a clothes dryer in a launderette, yet the contents aren’t dissimilar. But alongside these scaled-up items is a collection of ingredients that you won’t find in any domestic larder. Instead, you’ll find products designed for particular factory purposes. If, for instance, you needed to make a batter at home, you would most likely start with flour and eggs, but manufacturers turn to ready-to-mix batters, or ‘reliable coating systems’ as they are known in the trade, specially formulated to produce identikit results in factory-scale production; everything from ‘pre-dusts’ and ‘adhesion batters’ to fritter mixes with a ‘cake-like interface’ and ‘ovenable systems’ designed for reheating in the microwave.

      Why not just mix a fresh batter from scratch? As one supplier of batters explains:

      Meats, poultry, vegetables and other organic substrates can vary widely in moisture level, fat and protein content. The degree of denaturisation, surface irregularities and variations in the expansion and type of protein may also come into play. The appropriate batters can help offset the effects of processing variables such as line speed, age and brand of processing machinery, water quality, set-up time, the method of reconstitution used and the amount of breading pick-up.

      Strip away the characteristically industrial language of food manufacturing here, and what this means is that whether you are talking about the batter on your haddock goujons, chicken dippers or onion rings, a pre-mix guarantees uniform results, day in, day out.

      Where a home cook would use breadcrumbs, manufacturers use lots of specially devised breadcrumb-like products, a necessary component of many ready meals and other convenience foods, everything from the crunchy topping on your cauliflower cheese meal-for-one through fish fingers to chicken Kievs. Indeed, they have their pick of a whole range of breadcrumb-like coatings that come in a variety of hues (due to natural or artificial colours), with different textures (from light and crispy to hard and crunchy), and in different crumb sizes. No need ever to bother with a loaf of bread.

      Rather than making potato gnocchi from freshly boiled potatoes, flour and egg, the way your Italian nonna used to do (what a hassle!), food manufacturers can just add an egg and water solution to a tub of pre-seasoned, roller-dried potato flakes, designed especially for this purpose, in a mix that already contains added emulsifiers, stabilisers, citric acid, antioxidants – all to oil the wheels of the industrial process – and carrot extract, the latter to give the beige-grey dough a more wholesome colour.

      Of course, any well-stocked home cook’s kitchen has a store cupboard of ingredients that add additional flavour dimensions to food. Salt and pepper, naturally, and then things like soy sauce, spices, sesame oil, mustard and vinegar, but manufacturers can call on a number of shortcut ingredients, available only to the trade, to do the job. You will see the odd tub of ground spices in the ready meals factory, but in food processing, few ingredients are that simple. Instead there are glazes, seasoning mixes, coaters, rubs and marinades. To an optimist, these might sound quite normal, but they are far from it. They are what’s called in the business ‘flavour technology systems’ or ‘flavour delivery systems’: products specially formulated to encapsulate the aroma and taste of natural food in a handy, ready-to-use form, either dry, or in liquid form as part of a ‘liquid flavour system’.

      From a food manufacturer’s perspective, why mix together several different seasonings, aromatics and condiments when you can buy one customised product that will give your basic ingredients exactly the twist you want? Barbecue glazes, for instance, come Cajun, honey roast, smoky, hot and spicy, or Deep South-style. Pre-cooked, water-injected, defrosted chicken can be ‘marinated’ or ‘rubbed’ with a whole list of them – Chinese, Moroccan, Tandoori, Thai, Mexican, Italian, Creole and more – to imbue the same bland meat with a veritable United Nations of food manufacturing personality.

      While a home cook would need to marinate meat for several hours, or even overnight, with an off-the-peg marinade, manufacturers can achieve that just marinated look in minutes.

      Forget the faff of grinding spices, or pulverising aromatics. Food manufacturers prefer to buy in ready-made ‘cuisine pastes’ from companies who understand ‘the total requirements of manufacturers of savoury foods, providing complete, tailored solutions for a wide range of applications’. As the marketing blurb for one such company expresses it, ‘our chef quality range of savoury ingredients deliver premium taste profiles and are dry blended to make your production process easier’.

      A tub of ready-made pepper coating can be used to create an attractive crust, like that on a well-seasoned steak, or jerked chicken, as a flavouring for couscous and pasta salad, or to smarten up a flabby, defrosted salmon steak. Pass pallid poultry pieces through a machine that sprays on caramel before you cook it, and it will take on the Miami beach lifeguard bronze of a home-roast joint. A touch of liquid ham and cheese flavouring, incorporated into other liquid ingredients, will make your spaghetti carbonara smell particularly savoury. A hint of fish flavouring will reintroduce the memory of taste into the anodyne prawn in the middle of your sushi roll.

      The composition of the products manufacturers use to flavour and lend personality to ready meals and other convenience foods varies but, in a nutshell, they bear only the most distant notional similarity to those traditionally available to the home cook, not least because they are often multi-ingredient items in their own right. Whatever their name and supposed ethnic identity, the master key recipe for these prêt-à-porter flavouring shortcuts doesn’t vary that much either. Whether wet or dry, it is hard to escape the same old roll call of starches, gums, sweeteners and salt, along with synthesised flavourings and colourings. In one typical supermarket Chinese-style pork rib ready meal, the glaze alone contains 17 ingredients: sugar, salt, cornflour, dried glucose syrup, tomato, garlic and beetroot powders, spices, guar gum, vegetable oil, and more.

      But to food manufacturers, this custom-made shopping list makes total business sense. Why, for instance, would you shell out for butter when you can instead dose your recipe with 0.02 per cent butter extract that will, as one flavour company promises, give your products a ‘characteristic butter flavour … [that] works well with bakeries, confectionery, candies, ice cream, popcorn, cereals, dressings [and] combines well with vanilla and cocoa flavour’? Or, there is always the option of using butter powder. Described by one company that makes it as ‘a powdery, homogeneous and free-flowing cream to yellow powder’, it is manufactured by spray-drying a mixture of butter, maltodextrins (starch) and milk proteins; a real boon to manufacturers who want an up-market ‘made with butter’ promise on their product label, but who don’t want to fork out for the real thing. Butter is an expensive ingredient as far as food manufacturers are concerned. When you are churning out hundreds of tonnes of product a day, even a small reduction in the quantity you use can reduce ingredient costs