Gluten free and plant-based: essential components of today’s inclusive menu

With more and more Australians being medically diagnosed with food intolerances and allergies than ever before, there’s a greater need than ever to cater to these dietary requirements in your customers. Add to that the growing number of consumers who are simply choosing to modify their diet, for example by going gluten free or by eating more plant-based proteins in place of meat – without any medical reason for doing so – and it’s obvious that your menu needs to contain meals which meet their preferences, or they’ll take their business elsewhere.

Expand your potential customer base

“Offering a more inclusive menu is a sound business decision as it enables you to expand your potential customer base,” says chef Adam Moore. “But we also need to bear in mind that chefs right now are trying to simplify menus to reduce prep and make life easier. Allergen management still isn’t widely taught and certainly not at a lot of key venues across this country, which is quite disconcerting – so chefs are increasing focusing on a ‘one size fits all’ solution.

“Allergen management still isn’t widely taught and certainly not at a lot of key venues across this country, which is quite disconcerting”

“No chef wants to have to cater for every allergy under the sun, so they’re sourcing products which are gluten free, but free and as free of allergens as possible. In other words, something which fits as broad and inclusive a menu as possible. Chefs are trying to simplify what they’re ordering and what they’re using, hence we’ve seen the rise of gluten free and alternatives to animal proteins. They’re asking, which products should I use as my hero ingredients, and then thinking about what else will complement that.

“For example, if your burger bun is gluten free, you then need to look at what the rest of the burger contains. I recently saw a burger where the venue had done a really good job to create a plant-based, gluten free burger but they hadn’t checked their sauce, and I know that sauce is produced on a line which also processes nuts. So they had thought about everything else, but they hadn’t gone that extra step.”

Adam emphasises that the need to make today’s more inclusive has given rise to a lot of innovation in menu creation. “Finally, instead of ratatouille stacks and grilled vegies as your only meat-free option, we’re seeing a lot more variety. People like Shannon Martinez have helped pioneer vegan and vegetarian cuisine in this country and people in foodservice are starting to realise how important allergen management is. As a result, you’re seeing a lot of really creative cuisine – things like wood fired pumpkin with coconut yoghurt sprinkled with sunflower seeds, meals which contain a lot of different textures and flavours.

“Finally, instead of ratatouille stacks and grilled vegies as your only meat-free option, we’re seeing a lot more variety”

— Chef Adam Moore

“It’s also important to bear in mind when it comes to creating choices like gluten free, you need to be aware of the dangers of cross-contamination. You might order a gluten free schnitzel from a supplier, but you then need to make sure you don’t put it into the same deep fryer as everything else. If you worked so hard to get everyone else right, don’t do the wrong thing at the end – make sure your gluten free ingredients are kept isolated in the kitchen, and not cooked in the same implements or with the same utensils you’re using for gluten containing ingredients. In other words, treat these ingredients with the respect they deserve.”

Plant-based still has a long way to go

Chef Peter Wright echoes Adam’s words regarding gluten free, adding: “Over the last decade gluten free has certainly become more entrenched into everyday menus, and that’s been helped by the availability of good quality readymade product. The big manufacturers have made all their sauce bases and grocery ingredients gluten free, which was a big stepping stone towards wider inclusion. And we’re now at the point where a lot of commercial kitchens are serving a predominantly gluten free menu, even if they’re not actively promoting the fact.

“We need to be experimenting more with the menu to try to get traction, because as more people start using plant-based products, they’ll get cheaper”

— Chef Peter Wright

“Rather than calling out food as gluten free, I prefer the term ‘made from gluten free ingredients’ – that’s the best I can offer, because if there are traces of flour in the kitchen, if you’re using same deep fryer or toaster for gluten containing and gluten free food, you can’t guarantee there’s no cross-contamination.

“Plant-based is a little different – I think this category still has a long way to go, and we’re only in the infancy of plant-based protein ingredients and menu items. It’s like pushing a big ball of concrete up the hill – when it gets to the top you can roll it down the other side, but at the moment we're still making the concrete and the road is so long. Everybody’s put plant-based on the menu but the traction’s not been great.

“I think pricepoint is critical here for customers – if you’re ordering a grilled steak or a beef dish and the equivalent plant based option is the same price or even more, why would you spend the extra? You might if you’re vegan, or very much focused on environmental sustainability, and more and more of us are in that group so we might look for more plant-based options, but for the general public it’s more likely to come down to price.

“We need to think more about how we’re selling plant-based on the menu. If you’re selling a plant-based burger alongside a beef and chicken burger, my suggestion would be make the beef and chicken burgers your heroes alongside plant- based options – that is, you can have a regular beef burger or plant-based beef burger, a regular chicken burger or a plant-based chicken burger – instead of offering the plant-based burger as a third burger type.

“We need to be experimenting more with the menu to try to get traction, because as more people start using plant-based products, they’ll get cheaper as they’re manufactured in larger amounts and the uptake will increase.

“We all know meat, poultry and fish prices are going through the roof and that’s not going to change – if you look at the past three years meat prices have gone up by 30 to 40 per cent, and in the next three years it will happen again. I was at a reasonably nice pub in Melbourne last week and it was $62 for a steak – two or three years ago you would not have believed those prices, outside of fine dining the benchmark was probably around $45. So as the cost of animal proteins escalate, the alternative is going to be plant-based menus, and it’s also important for the environment because the world can’t sustain the consumption of meat at our current levels.”

Keeping menu call-outs subtle

“I think people are eating healthier and especially in the 18-25 year old bracket, they’re more conscious and aware of what they put in their mouth – they want something that’s healthier, that’s about sustainability. So there is a push to make menus more inclusive in catering for that,” says Gary Johnson, National Executive Chef of ALH Group which operates more than 300 hotels across the country.

“The variety of the meals we prepare that are gluten free has been driven in part by our consumer research, which tells us many customers have taken it out of their diet, more often through preference than necessity. So gluten free is pretty much a must-have and in fact between 60 to 80 per cent of our menus today are gluten free – and that’s become possible because today there are so many really good gluten free base products from manufacturers. Five to ten years ago gluten free bread tasted like cardboard, but now it’s really good.

“Plant-based is about appealing to the flexitarian market, because the vegan market is just too small”

— Gary Johnson, ALH GHroup

“Having said that, our menu call-outs tend to be on the subtle side: we use icons which customers who are coeliac or otherwise require gluten free can recognise, but more generally a lot of people don’t even know or care whether what they’re eating is gluten free as long as it tastes and presents great. So it’s not something which requires a great deal of thought or effort on our part anymore – you can even get great quality gluten free batters today, so the range of gluten free product has expanded exponentially on the menu and the only foods high in gluten tend to be the breads. We even use gluten free pizza bases, which are balanced and nutritious – the quality has now reached the point where they’re indistinguishable from gluten-containing recipes, thanks to the work the manufacturers have done.

“When it comes to plant-based it’s about appealing to the flexitarian market, because the vegan market is just too small. That means making meals using plant-based ingredients which aren’t necessarily vegan, while engineering the menu so that it’s relatively easy to offer a vegan option. For example, we just did a Vegan Kale Cobb Salad on the menus here for the grill house team, and all the ingredients are vegan except for the Persian feta – and if a customer wants a vegan option for that meal, we replace the Persian feta with some vegan ricotta. We find a lot of our customers who are flexitarians are happy to have the Persian feta on top, they might even add some grilled steak or cheese – so it’s not about eliminating animal proteins in favour of plant, it’s more about cutting back or just having more variety, or they might feel it's a healthier choice. 

“I think summer is the best time of year for creating plant-based meals – I spent quite a few years in Turkey around the Aegean sea, and of course there was fantastic seafood and a lot of mezze, which in Turkey is mostly vegan apart from a big dob of thickened yoghurt. I’ve taken a lot of those dishes that I learnt in Turkey and they form the basis of much of our plant-based offerings. My son and his girlfriend who are in their early twenties have a favourite Turkish restaurant that we go to and I don’t dare tell them, but 60 to 70 per cent of that food is vegan! So it’s not about the composition of the food, it’s about the presentation and the intensity of the flavours – stuffed eggplants, sundried tomatoes, cavolo nero, cauliflower shoots, all blended through wonderful herbs and spices, with delicious aromatic flavours to deliver a satisfying meal.

“It’s not about the composition of the food, it’s about the presentation and the intensity of the flavours”

“There’s a lot of inspiration to be found in Middle Eastern and Indian cuisine, and aromatic ingredients in particular are typical – you can weave these through dishes, whether it’s street food or home cooked style meals. They tend to be high in vegetable protein thanks to ingredients like lentils and chickpeas, so these types of meals are a great way to increase the plant-based component of the menu without having to rely on readymade product.

“I’d say probably anything from five to 10 per cent of or menus is plant-based meals currently – and in most of the meals we prepare there might be one or two ingredients in there we can swap out to make them 100 per cent vegan.”