Know What You’re Cooking With

TL;DR: New ingredients are reaching kitchens faster than most of us can keep up with, and the rules around them keep changing. Removing an additive doesn’t automatically make a dish safer, approvals can be withdrawn, and your supplier’s rep won’t always know the full story. Read your spec sheets, ask better questions and make sure you can explain every ingredient on your menu.

A rep comes in on a Tuesday with a box of samples. There’s a “dairy-free” cream that whips like the real thing, a smoke concentrate that saves you firing up the smoker, and a mushroom-based mince he swears your vegans will love. He leaves a price list and a few spec sheets, and you put them on the office desk with everything else.

Most of us have been there. But it’s worth thinking about what you’ve just been handed, because some of the new products coming through the back door aren’t what they look like.

A paper published this month by Renald Blundell at the University of Malta looks at how food law is trying to keep up with food technology. It’s written for regulators, not cooks, but the message underneath applies to anyone running a kitchen. Where a food comes from, how it’s made and what ends up on the plate aren’t always the same story any more. And when a guest asks what’s in their dinner, the person who has to answer is you.

Here’s what that means on the pass.

Taking something out isn’t the same as making it safer.

“Clean label” sells. Guests like hearing “no preservatives”, “no additives” and “nothing artificial”, and there’s pressure to strip things out.

But preservatives are there for a reason. Nitrite in a cure isn’t just for colour; it’s one of the things standing between you and botulism. Take it out of your bacon or your terrine, and you’ve removed part of your safety system.

That doesn’t mean you can’t make changes. It means that if you take one control out, you have to put another one in and prove it works. Time, temperature, acidity, salt, and water activity. Write it down and test it. If you can’t show why the new version is safe, you’ve made the dish riskier.

And be wary of “natural” swaps. Some “nitrite-free” cures use celery powder, which contains nitrate that turns into nitrite in the meat anyway. The label reads better, but the chemistry is much the same.

What was allowed last year might not be allowed now.

We tend to treat an ingredient as fine once it’s been approved and on the shelf for years. That isn’t always true.

Titanium dioxide, the whitener known as E171 that appeared in some sugar decorations, coatings and sweets, was banned as a food additive in the EU in 2022 after the safety evidence was reviewed. Many liquid smoke flavourings have since lost their EU approval too, with the last uses being phased out by 2029.

Nobody was cutting corners. The science moved on, and the rules followed. But if your dry store has an old tub of decorating powder or a smoke concentrate you bought three years ago, it’s worth checking what’s in it.

If you cook in Great Britain rather than the EU, the rules have diverged since Brexit, and some things banned in Europe are still permitted in the UK. Check which rules apply to you rather than assuming.

Treat your spec sheets like your fridge temperatures. Check them regularly. Once a year, go through what’s in your stores and ask your suppliers whether anything has changed.

Your rep will start offering you things you’ve never cooked with.

This is where it gets interesting. Over the next few years you’ll be offered:

• Dairy proteins made by microbes rather than cows
• Proteins from fungi, algae and insects
• Meat grown from animal cells
• Ingredients made from what used to be waste, such as spent grain or fruit pulp

Some of these are already approved and on sale. Some are approved in other countries but not here. Some are still waiting. Just because it’s legal in America doesn’t mean it’s legal where you’re cooking.

Before anything new goes on your menu, ask the rep three questions:

1. Is it approved where I’m cooking? Not “Is it safe?” or “Is it legal somewhere?” Is it approved here for this use?
2. What exactly is it? The product name isn’t enough. “Mushroom protein” could be one of a dozen things, and that matters for allergens and for your menu description.
3. How was it made? You don’t need the full science. You need enough to answer a guest honestly.

If the rep can’t answer, ask for the spec sheet. If the spec sheet doesn’t answer it, don’t buy it yet.

If you can’t explain it, don’t serve it.

This is the part that matters most in a restaurant.

A guest asks whether the cream is dairy. A server asks whether the mince contains anything a coeliac should worry about. Somebody at table six wants to know why the “smoked” salmon has never been near a smoker.

You don’t need to write an essay on the menu, but you do need to be honest and able to back it up. “Animal-free dairy protein” is honest. “Plant-based cream” when it isn’t plant-based is not. Blundell makes a useful distinction here: whether a product is safe, what it’s made of and how it was made are three different questions. Something can be perfectly safe and still need explaining.

Your front of house needs to know the answers too. If they’re guessing, you have a problem.

Monday morning checklist

• Spec sheets: get one for every bought-in product and keep them somewhere your team can find them
• Annual check: once a year, ask suppliers whether anything in your regular order has changed recipe or status
• Allergen matrix: update it every time a new product comes in, not when you get round to it
• Clean label changes: if you take something out, write down what control replaces it and test it
• New products: ask the three questions before they go on the menu
• Menu wording: describe what it is, not what it’s pretending to be
• Front of house briefing: make sure the people talking to guests know what’s in the food

None of this is complicated. It’s the same discipline you already apply to temperatures, dates and allergens, extended to the ingredients themselves.

Source: Blundell, R. (2026). Keeping food law ahead of food technology. Trends in Food Science & Technology, 178, 106099. Read the paper