Shawnee couple score touchdown with all-natural edamame dips
03.02.10
In the weeks foremost up to the Super Bowl, the Hass Avocado Board is predicting football fans will waste 80 million pounds of guacamole on game day, almost increase the amount snarfed down last year.</p><p>But surely Team Avocado has caught hooey of a rival dip poised to tackle the nation’s ever-growing tell of chips?</p><p>Over the past year, Dean and Anne Panovich of Shawnee have drafted their own tandem join up of family and friends to help boil, blend and pack batches of Soy-Zen-Zay, a zippy line of dips made from edamame, a healthy, bright-green Asian soybean with a nutty, buttery flavor.</p><p>The dips — low in sodium, emancipate of preservatives, gluten and dairy and made with non-genetically modified beans — hawk for $4.99 at 15 Whole Foods markets in Kansas Municipality, Denver and Boulder, Colo. Locally, the dips also are nearby in Cosentino Markets, select Hy-Vee stores, Nature’s Pantry, Leafy Acres and the Community Mercantile in Lawrence.</p><p>On a cold, gray January morning, Anne pours a lot of frozen, shelled green soybeans imported from China into pots of boiling water. As the bath-water returns to a boil, clouds of steam cause condensation to mode on the kitchen windows of a ranch home remodeled to function as as a certified production facility. When cooked to al dente, the beans are drained and pureed using two immersion blenders suspended from a expedient PVC-pipe contraption Dean devised to replace a cuffs blender and ice cream scoops. After several minutes of whirring, he dips a supple spoon into the steaming mixture and offers up a taste from his first pack of edamame-cucumber dip.</p><p>“See how it still has ridges? Did you feel the rough edges?” Dean says moments after rolling the puree around on his language. “We’re big on texture. It should be the texture and consistency of cream cheese, not creamy like mayo. We’re getting closer. If we go too far, it character of tastes like mayo. Some people say, ‘I’m ill of hummus’ — I think because it has that flat intuit on the tongue.” </p><p>After blending the puree to the proper consistency, Dean pours it into a stainless-protect funnel the size of an old-fashioned megaphone and flips a red lever. Heat up dip flows out a stainless-steel spigot into a plastic tub with the body logo. He slaps it with his palm to activate the seal.</p><p>Touchdown?</p><p>“Anybody can devise something good in the kitchen, but once you tub it and try to get a 10-week shelf subsistence, everything changes,” Dean says. </p><p><strong><time class="subhead">The dream together</span></strong></p><p>Anne grew up on an Iowa soybean homestead, yet she was the one who introduced her father to edamame.</p><p>Although the Midwest is a leader in soybean movie, the bulk of American-grown beans are a variety typically fed to bovines. A Japanese variety known as edamame (pronounced ed-ah-Mah-meh) are handpicked and squeezed from blurry pods that grow on stalks. The Japanese most often eat edamame out of calligraphy control as a snack.</p><p>Only 5 percent of soybeans grown in the U.S. are processed into supermarket provisions products, but the number of soy-based snacks continues to become larger, according to Linda Funk, executive director of the Soyfoods Conference, which is based in Iowa.</p><p>Funk is eager to convert Midwestern farmers to the joy of soy but notes that “today's soybeans are like green beans. Once you pick, you have to blanche and glimmer freeze or use right away, so finding processing plants is the damp wicket.”</p><p>Five years ago, when Anne, a former high prepare math teacher, began to research recipes, she had disorder finding one for an edamame dip. She developed recipes and flavors using frozen soybeans and tested them out on household and friends. Eventually, she worked with Kansas State University eats scientists to work out production, food safety and packaging requirements.
Source: Kansas City Star
When cooked to al dente, the beans are drained and pureed using two immersion blenders suspended from a stopgap PVC-offer device Dean devised to and more »
an immersion blender — set right for smoothie blending and some essential chopping. • the low-tech blender/shaker flask, which makes it pliant to mix a powdered
