Many people shake their heads when they see blended foods, but there is actually nothing wrong with blending.

Shan Shouqing

Blended foods are easily misunderstood and thus unpopular. This is not uncommon in supermarkets. Customers take a bottle of wine, vinegar, beverage or seasoning and read the instructions: "It's blended, forget it!" Then they put it back. From the perspective of food science, we cannot just "forget it" and it is necessary to talk about the rights and wrongs of blended foods.

Take wine as an example. Once the word “blending” is added to it, it becomes “blended wine” - people mistakenly believe it is “a blend of alcohol and water” and equate it with “fake wine” and “low-quality wine”, so they “cannot drink” or “dare not drink” it, have strong aversion to it, and stay away from it. This kind of cognition is one-sided and wrong.

Winemaking masters and nutrition experts have a consensus: in the process of liquor production, the aroma is generated by fermentation, the aroma is enhanced by distillation, and the final product is formed by blending. They found the earliest statement about "blended liquor" in "Zhou Li": "Ang Qi Ling Zhuo (shuì) Zhuo (zhuó), all liquors are finely blended." More than 3,000 years ago, "blending" had become a very important and indispensable process in liquor production.

Wines with different flavors, different production times, and different alcohol content can only achieve specific aromas, alcohol content, flavors, and characteristics after being mixed together through certain processes. Wine is brewed and blended. There is an ancient cellar in Sichuan with a history of 600 years, which has been used since the Ming Dynasty. Thanks to the blending process, it has a miraculous effect on the basic wine, strengthening its foundation, supporting its weaknesses, promoting its advantages, and overcoming its shortcomings. The wine tastes rich and comprehensive, presenting a comprehensive aesthetic. Today, the wine industry has a consistent statement about "blending": the properties of blending, a special technical term for wine production; the definition of blending, a process of wine production; the types of blending, the technological methods of wine production.

As a food technology, there is nothing wrong with scientific blending. Scientific blending can make up for the shortcomings of a single original wine (which can also be extended to raw materials). With blending, it is more delicious. Therefore, the blending process has long been more than just a "patent" of the wine industry.

In the past, when it comes to "blending", many people first think of wine - blended wine. In fact, more and more blended foods have already appeared in supermarkets, kitchens, and dining tables: blended vinegar, blended soy sauce, blended noodle soup, blended soybean milk, blended lemonade, blended plum soup, blended hot pot base... Faced with a dazzling array of blended foods, the public is eager to know what they "may" contain? What exactly do they contain? What is the nutritional status?

Song Qing, a researcher at the Institute of Food Industry of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, told the media reporters who came to interview: For example, in products such as concentrated soup, the raw materials such as chicken meal and fish meal are not fresh ingredients. Although the soup made from them has a sense of "freshness", it cannot compare with the nutrition of soup made from natural ingredients. For another example, the sauced meat products should be red, but industrial production cannot reach the color of handmade ones, so pigments are used to make it red, and consumers cannot tell how it is "red".
Song Qing also pointed out based on the national standard of "Classification of Condiments" that the nutritional value of "compound condiments" is not sufficient, but this does not mean that blended foods using "compound condiments" are nutritious. It mainly depends on the type of food and the nutritional value of the raw materials. His conclusion is: the nutrition of blended foods depends on the blending raw materials.

When a food website selected the "Top Ten Candidate Vocabularies for the Food Industry in 2023" through four stages of netizen recommendation, online voting, netizen comments, and announcement and summary, "blended vinegar" was on the list. The right and wrong of blending food has become a prominent issue related to food safety.

We should neither turn a blind eye nor be "half sober and half drunk" about this. Instead, we should start from the source of high-quality food raw materials, make up for the deficiencies of single raw materials through blending technology, and improve food quality and taste. This requires multiple measures and joint management to respond to the right and wrong of blended food: what raw materials to use for blending, how to blend, and how to popularize the science of blended food.
If you are a producer of blended food, how should you blend it? If you are a consumer of blended food, how should you deal with it?

(The author is the chairman of the Food Science Creation Professional Committee of the China Science Writers Association and a master of Chinese catering culture)