Day in and day out, we live our lives not thinking about the scientist in the lab somewhere trying to find a solution to one of humanity’s greatest problems:
The squished, downtrodden hamburger bun.
The bun that lost her bounce. And when COVID-19 hit and delivery orders skyrocketed, the Squishy Bun Issue became more prevalent than ever. Have you had a burger delivered lately? How did it hold up? If it was decently bouncy, golden and rounded, it might have been a bun recently improved by the scientists at Kerry, an Ireland-based food company that makes ingredients for every corner of the food industry, from restaurants to grocery stores. Inside the bun dough is Kerry’s trademarked enzyme Biobake™, a naturally occurring protein that, when added in the perfect ratio and kept at the perfect temperature, creates a more resilient bun.
While I can’t tell you which fast-food restaurants source their buns from wholesale bakeries that develop their recipes with Kerry, I can tell you that it’s MANY.
Kerry was working on bun improvement months before the pandemic, but the timing was prescient. Restaurant delivery skyrocketed in the neverending months of lockdown. And everyone from fast food bigwigs to 40-seat sushi spots wanted their food to hold up as well as possible, whether it was traveling in a bike messenger’s backpack or an UberEats backseat. Some restaurants had teams of culinary experts and scientists behind the scenes calibrating a heartier flatbread dough, while others were crafting special packaging. Their solutions to the delivery conundrum reveal the creativity—and chemistry—behind what we usually just think of as dinner.
Take my money, Panera
This April, I ordered lunch from Panera, the healthiest fast food option. If you get a grain bowl. Instead I ordered two of their snazzy new flatbreads, aka “long pizza.” My delivery person got lost and was off by ~ 4 minutes. My flatbread, packaged in a pizza box, was a tragic 98 degrees. Ideally, it should have been at least 120, the temperature “when you think something is hot and delicious,” according to Panera’s Chief Food Innovation Officer Claes Petersson.
“If it gets colder than 120, you start to think, ‘Oh, this is a bit cold. I want to reheat it.’” Oh, this is a bit cold, I thought, I want to reheat it. I reheated my chicken-and-bacon flatbread back to life and scarfed down every bite. However, if I’d ordered it again today, the flatbread would have been packed on top of a piece of corrugated cardboard that prevents heat from escaping through the bottom of the box and keeps the long pizza 10-15 degrees warmer; a change that went into play after weeks of extensive temperature studies.
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