Once More, with Filling

When you have perfected your dough, the way forward is to play with fillings in order to create stunning flavor profiles, textures, and experiences for your customers. New ingredients help control the process, prolong shelf-life, and get the sought-after clean label for filled baked goods.

Filled baked goods offer a particular experience to consumers: their mix of textures creates both satiety and freshness. Fruit, chocolate, nuts, creams go well with sweet pastries, while ground meats, veggies, cheese, and herbs enrich savory pastries. Whether added before baking or after, all fillings present a suite of challenges: they can lose thickness (and the filling runs), they can favor water migration (and the dough gets soggy), or they can affect the shelf-life of the finished product (because of their higher water content). Producers have recently launched a series of functional ingredients that help with these challenges.

Fibers from Oranges

Evera, a natural ingredients company owned by citrus juice maker Citrosuco, launched at FiE 2022 two adjuvants that help bakers increase the fiber content of their filled pastries. 

Fiberfeel, a fiber with a puree texture extracted from orange, which, among many benefits, acts as a natural texturizer for fillings, has two variations: the “OP” version, which has the original orange flavor and is sweeter; and the “OF” version, which has a neutral flavor and low caloric index. The ingredient is a 100% natural, clean label, and the first to be launched in the world. The other one is Tastelift, made from orange peel, applied to enhance the flavor and natural freshness of oranges in fillings. Both ingredients can sustain a low-carbon footprint claim, as they are byproducts of the orange surplus produced by the parent company, Citrosuco.

Not So Free Water Migration

Managing free water migration is the key to ensuring a long shelf-life and keeping the appearance of both fresh and frozen baked goods. BENEO has resolved this issue of water migration in iced baked goods by combining BENEO’s alternative sugar Palatinose and sucrose in a specific ratio, which brings different components of a baked good (cake, filling, icing) to the same water migration level. Palatinose is an alternative sugar, a disaccharide manufactured by the enzymatic rearrangement of sucrose from beets, and is labeled with its generic name isomaltulose, which is a clean label name.

Lasting Creamy Texture

BENEO’s new clean label functional native rice starches, Remypure, give bakery fillings a soft and creamy texture for a long time, while being a natural and clean label ingredient. The texture is obtained due to rice starch which has smaller granules compared to other starches. In addition, it offers the baked goods a freeze-thaw functionality that adds to their shelf-life – that is, pastries can be frozen and thawed without losing texture and integrity.

“Remypure S52 P has been developed for food producers searching for an instant clean label texturizer for food preparations that can withstand harsh process conditions, whilst giving an additional creamy aspect to the texture of the end product,” says Benoit Tavernier, product manager specialty rice ingredients at BENEO. “With the now extended Remypure range of functional native rice starches, BENEO is well set to support existing and potential new customers in their development process of various new clean label products.

Label-friendly Ingredients for Body and Mouthfeel

Cargill’s newly launched Pure line contains, among sweeteners, fibers, and seaweed powders, the SimPure starches that improve the flavors and textures of everyday products and work well with bakery fillings. Made from European waxy corn (a sustainable product), the ingredient ensures cold-storage stability, clean flavors, and enables process stability. Together with UniPectine, Cargill’s label-friendly pectin that can support sugar-reduction, create body and structure and offer thickening and gelling properties, the two ingredients make it easier for bakers to develop products with bake stable fruit fillings, as well as with post bake fruit fillings.  

Textured Proteins to Fill Savory Pastries

The industry’s answer to the increased demand for plant-based products is a series of textured proteins that can fill pastries as well as they can make plant-based burger patties. GoodMills Innovation recently launched VITATEX Vegan-Snack-Mix, a premix for burgers and meatballs, as well as savory bakery and snack fillings, based on wheat proteins. 

You can read the rest of this article in the November-December of European Baker & Biscuit, which you can access by clicking here.