Nutritionally Dense Cooking Sauces with Global Flavors
By Lorrie Baumann
Mesa de Vida is a line of cooking sauces based on fruits and vegetables that are designed to inject flavor and convenience into meals prepared with the intention of catering to those concerned about maintaining their health. “My goal is to make products that make it easier for people to cook, to get to the table more often, and they don’t have to sacrifice flavor or health for a great meal,” said Kirsten Sandoval, the Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chef behind Mesa de Vida. The line currently has five sauces: Smoky Latin, Creole, Caribbean, Mediterranean and North African. The next sauce to join the line is likely to be one based on an Asian flavor profile, Sandoval said.
She started making sauces while she was working as a personal chef catering to the performance needs of professional athletes. “They needed to be eating healthier foods. My players were like little boys – they didn’t like eating their vegetables,” Sandoval said. But while the athletes didn’t necessarily want to see vegetables on their plates, they still needed the nutrition that vegetables provide, so Sandoval responded by creating flavor bases from fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices that she could add to soups and stews. Her goal was a low-sodium flavor base with no added sugar that she could conveniently add to a wide variety of dishes to create the flavors that clients preferred along with the nutrition that allowed them to perform at their best. Each client had a customized flavor base that matched the flavors he preferred. “I began altering the flavor bases with food profiles from around the world that the athletes recognized as the flavors of their homes,” she said. “If I made them a chili, it had the flavor they were looking for…. They were getting the nutrition they needed, and they weren’t looking at a pile of vegetables.”
After a day of cooking for her high-profile clients, she’d come home to her family and cook dinner for them. It didn’t take her long to figure out that she could use at home the same idea that had served her to manage the nutritional needs and personal tastes of her clients, especially since her children had their own nutritional needs and personal tastes. She tried looking for some of those flavor bases in the spice aisles of her local grocers but found that the spice blends she was seeing there often contained the salt or sugar that she didn’t want to include in her food and realized that other home cooks were faced with the same problem for which she already had a solution – a range of global gourmet recipe starters and cooking sauces that are concentrated flavor bases common in professional kitchens, but made for the home cook.
She launched her business in 2017, while she was still working as a personal chef by selling the sauces online and at small specialty shops. “I would drag my kids around to farmers markets to start getting the word out about them,” she said. “You don’t have to buy every spice under the sun to have a meal with global flavors, and you don’t have to chop a whole basket of fruits and vegetables as well.”
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She notes that each of the sauces in the line can be used to flavor a wide variety of soups, stews and slow-cooker recipes, and each represents a region with a culinary tradition of gathering around the table every day. “I really hope that these sauces can have people here have that same inspiration and help them get to the table every day,” she said.
The Mediterranean sauce is the newest in the line. Its flavor profile is characteristic of Italy and Greece rather than the northern Africa area of the Mediterranean region. “It’s a fantastic base for a simple beef stew. Beef, a jar of sauce, some chickpeas and into the slow cooker,” she said. “It’s a really rich jar, so when you open the jar, it’s like cooking from scratch. It’s like having your personal chef do most of the work for you.”
The next sauce that’s in development is a response to consumer requests for an Asian-inspired sauce that’s free from gluten and is low in sodium, Sandoval said. “From there the sky’s the limit,” she added. “I would love to start developing more obscure regional flavors that people find new and also global hot sauces. I want it to be something that customers can’t find very easily and that also have the health profile they need. That’s the mission going forward.”
Each of the sauces is packaged in a 9-ounce jar that retails for $8.99 on Mesa de Vida’s website at www.mesadevida.com, which also offers additional information.