Making Preserved Food Actually Taste Good
Mixing Mash Food scientist Candice Lin pushes potatoes through a ricer before sterilizing at 250°F. Cody PickensPreserving food isn't hard--the challenge is in the flavor (or lack thereof, or disgustingness thereof) Barb Stuckey hands me a plastic tray of mashed potatoes sealed with an opaque layer of film. "We packaged these up over a year ago," she says. The United States Potato Board has asked Stuckey and her colleagues at Mattson, a commercial food lab in Foster City, California, to devise a way to put fresh, ready-to-eat mashed potatoes into a package that can sit unrefrigerated on a supermarket shelf for months. Just open, warm, and serve. The scientists at Mattson have developed some 2,000 successful products, including frozen dinners, bottled salad dressings, powdered cake mixes and jarred salsas. "Shelf-stable" meals of the kind Mattson is working on represent the highly imperfect state of the art in convenience foods. Frozen dinners need...