Flavor Trends, Strategies and Solutions for Menu Development

Pick Your Palette Flatbreads offer huge versatility—find your “native” flatbread and top it with your ingredients from the season

Bar Garcia in Los Angeles serves Socca, a garbanzo flatbread, with crispy okra, guacamole and Thai chile sauce.
PHOTO CREDIT: Bar Garcia

Flatbreads’ popularity has been trending in every type of cuisine imaginable due to its convenience, its ability to morph from season to season, fast pick-up time, and shareability.

The ability to create an item on masa, injera, naan, pizza dough, lavash, pita, scallion pancake, etc., makes it so universal, while supplying numerous palettes for chefs to create on.

Flatbreads are a great platform for specials and seasonal menus. Think about it, you’re a Latin American restaurant: You roll out masa and make a huarache, then top it with leftover duck confit from the night before, with Oaxacan cheese, poblano mole and toasted pumpkin seeds. The next night it could be topped with salsa verde, Cotija and carnitas with fresh cilantro and onions.

This versatility applies to all cuisines—find your “native” flatbread and top it with your ingredients from the season.


Flatbread’s Rise – the boom in Eastern Med and communal dining makes flatbreads one of our top 10 flavor trends for 2019.


From the Jan/Feb 2019 Top 10 Trends issue of Flavor & the Menu magazine. Read the full issue online or check if you qualify for a free print subscription.

 

 

About The Author

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Katie Sutton is VP of Culinary Innovation at Food & Drink Resources in Denver. She has worked for Relais & Châteaux Hotels including Meadowood Resort in Napa, Calif., and the Crescent Court Hotel in Dallas. She has also worked as an executive chef of a winery, owner of a catering company, corporate chef of a large chain, and in R&D with a manufacturer selling products to Costco and Trader Joe’s. She is a certified Level One Sommelier and holds degrees from the French Culinary Institute in New York and Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich.