Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Talk of the Bay

She knows what's cooking

By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published May 29, 2006

Food analyst Nancy Kruse chats up top corporate chefs and combs menus at 200 restaurant chains to keep track of the latest trends being pushed by the culinary world.

Here are the most up-to-the-moment industry buzzwords she passed on to supermarket executives interested in talking the talk who gathered at the Food Marketing Institute in Chicago recently:

- Most frequently mentioned sauce flavors: BBQ, buffalo, Cajun and Caesar.

- Most frequently seen ingredients: asparagus, green beans, baguette, chimichuri (used in an Argentine steak marinade), chipolte, feta, Gorgonzola, Kalamata olives, ricotta and walnuts.

- Most often mentioned food prep techniques: braised, infused, encrusted, seared and glazed.

- Most popular ingredients name-dropped as having a healthy food halo: beans, blueberries, broccoli, oats, pumpkin, soy, spinach, tea and tomatoes.

- Most mentioned forms of cooking on menus: grilled (up 37 percent), fried (up 20 percent), baked (up 37 percent) and broiled (down 7 percent). "Broiling is so out even Burger King, which used to flame-broil its burgers, now calls it fire grilling,'' Kruse said.

Kruse singled out Publix Super Markets for using the most hip restaurant-inspired buzzwords and food glamour photos of the trendy dishes in advertising and its Web site.

"What they do with food plate presentation is just dazzling,'' she said.

[Last modified May 29, 2006, 06:17:04]