Pasta sauce with flavor

The point of a pasta sauce is to improve the flavor of starchy noodles, not emulate it. But the demands of current food processing can play havoc with the sauce’s flavor.

To start with, product designers need to add stabilizers and texturizers to improve pasta-sauce performance - ingredients that not only contribute to the way flavors are perceived by altering texture and mouth feel, but may actually result in chemical interactions that bind flavor volatiles. The relationships between stabilizers and flavor chemicals could be complex - different stabilizers can have a different effect on the same flavor compounds and vice versa. Other elements of the sauce, such as fat content, can also affect flavor release. Often, a pasty or floury sauce is the result of over-determined attempts at stabilization.