Caramelised onions make a sensational savoury addition to many dishes. BJ Harris Trading is offering a shelf stable, all natural sautéed onion concentrate from Nikken Foods in Japan.
For BJ Harris national sales manager, Yolande Williams, Nikken Sautéed Onion Concentrate 2730 is ideal for a range of applications, which include soups, sauces, recipe bases, pasta meals, marinades, dips, salad dressings, and many other prepared foods.
According to Williams, caramelised onions add a depth of sweet flavour to foods. Breaking down and browning the natural sugars in the onion, gives a rich texture and flavour, adding an extra dimension to everything from authentic French onion soup, to fresh cheeses.
The creation of properly caramelised onions takes time: 45 minutes to up to an hour and a half. The process is difficult and expensive to reproduce in a commercial environment.
Nikken Sautéed Onion Concentrate 2730 allows manufacturers to add authentic and natural caramelised onion flavour, while eliminating the need for this costly cook-step. Nikken have slowly and carefully sautéed sweet yellow onions in vegetable oil, then concentrated it to one sixth by volume. The result is a convenient pourable and pumpable liquid format, supplied in a 20kg tin can.
“The product is unique because it’s shelf-stable, so there’s no need to refrigerate it,” explained Williams.
“Customers can buy the 20kg pack and keep it on their floor. “They also don’t have to go through the process of chopping onions, and slowly roasting them down and caramelising, as with the sauté process, saving a lot of time.
“You do, however, still get the delicious aroma and flavour of caramelised yellow onions, which is a flavour that appeals to many people.” Although the flavour is very savoury, Williams sees it as a good enhancer. The concentrate is all-natural, with nothing added, except vegetable oil, vitamin E and antioxidants.
“There’s nothing nasty added, so you can go very ‘clean label’ while providing a really rich, beautiful, complex, caramelised onion flavour.”
According to Williams, there is no other product like it on the market. “I have seen caramelised onion flavours, but this isn’t a flavour. This is real food – actual onions that have been concentrated down, and what’s been left behind is just the pulp and the fibre. If there are other people making a liquid concentrate of this type, I haven’t seen it in the marketplace.
“It’s a very pourable format. It’s the sort of product which is not so thick that you can’t work with it. Its texture is pumpable and pourable – so it’s not sticky like honey, but it is about that same thickness, making it versatile and easy to use in a factory or food manufacturing site.” Nikken Sautéed Onion Concentrate 2730 is suitable for use in wet ingredient applications only.