Do you only use homemade preserves or do you also buy jams? As with all foods, also with jams, be careful about what they contain.
Popular jams
Preserves of all possible flavors, aromas and colors are a sweet delicacy that belongs not only on a piece of good pastry with butter, but also in sweets. How to know about marmalades, and which ones you’d rather not buy?
In this post from the Katka My Irish Life YouTube channel, you can learn from the author how to make delicious rosehip marmalade at home. You will see that it is quite easy and requires only a few ingredients to prepare.
Source: Youtube
Fruit and sugar are enough!
Only a few ingredients are needed for each homemade marmalade. The fruit is partially dehydrated and preserved with a high sugar content. Thanks to this, the marmalades do not spoil and the fruit jam prepared in this way will last indefinitely.
Of course, various gelling or stiffening ingredients are added to marmalades, which ensure that the product will be vibrant and thick rather than liquid and thin. However, that’s all. Fruit, sugar, jelly sugar or pectin are the basic ingredients of every marmalade. If you would like to improve the product even more and bring it to perfection, you can also add various spices. So why is the list of ingredients on jams so long and what do the different numbers mean?
What can be in marmalade?
First of all, it should be mentioned that under the name “marmalade” we should always find a mixture of citrus fruits. However, this is a regulation that may not be of much interest to a normal store buyer, so we will easily mistake jams for marmalades or preserves and vice versa.
In order for it to be apparent at first glance how high-quality a product we are proud of, it is necessary to state the proportion of fruit in grams per 1000 g of product on the label. For ordinary products, it should be at least 350 g, for those marked as “extra or selected” even 450 g per kilo of product.
The “fruit spread” category does not have a specified required proportion of fruit. However, there are a few exceptions to this rule. For example, jams from sea buckthorn, quince, rose hips or currants and rowanberries may contain a lower proportion of fruit, as well as from ginger or passion fruit.
The so-called refractometric dry matter or the content of natural sweeteners refers to sugars and organic acids that may come from the fruit or are added. The proportion of refractometric dry matter is also important, and the higher the quality of the product, the less it should contain. Ordinary products can contain 60 percent or more of refractometric dry matter, “extra” labeled as less sweet 52 to 59 percent, extra choice and special jams a maximum of 40 percent dry matter.
What may surprise you in marmalade
Since it is not possible to add chemical preservatives or synthetic dyes to the marmalades, apart from the natural dyes from beetroot, citric acid and pectin, it might seem that the content of the marmalades is relatively well captured.
Ideally, this is true, but in practice you may come across all kinds of products. Here, too, the rule is that the shorter the list of ingredients, the better. Choose products without thickeners and stabilizers such as guar gum or anthan.
It is also good to know that glucose-fructose syrup is generally no better than regular sugar. On the contrary, experts associate it much more often with obesity and the development of diabetes than ordinary sugar. It is a cheaper substitute, which is why you can find it in all kinds of processed foods today.
What else might surprise you? For example, the proportion of apples in various other jams. Apples, with their pleasant and unobtrusive taste, are not only a substitute for other fruits, but above all they contain pectin, which contributes to thickening. Of course, if you are buying expensive marmalade made from, for example, exotic or unusual fruits, you probably want the unique taste of non-traditional fruits, and not flavored apple jam.
Sources: tn.nova.cz, heureka.cz
