My new favourite thing to eat is:
Marks and Spencer Fresh Fruit Jelly: Calamansi & orange flavoured jelly with fresh grapes, orange and pineapple
The ingredients are:
water (well duh)
grapes
orange
sugar
pineapple
gelling agent: carrageenan (sulphated polysaccharide from seeweed)
E508 (KCl)
Locust bean gum (a branched polysac of mannose and galactose from the Carob tree)
citric acid
E331 (one or all of the three possible sodium citrates)
“natural flavourings”
mixed carotenes
anthocyanins (from carrots)
There are two comments to make about this ingredient list:
1. Jelly can be any substance that is liquid at one temperature (or pressure) and a gel at a different one – if you care what it is made from you need to look at the ingredient list. For some reason I thought that the food product was by definition something that contained gelatin.
2. E numbers sometimes represent pretty benign compounds.
It has also made me think that it would be possible to “engineer” jelly so that it had the optimal transition temperature. Marks and Spencer’s jelly rests in the fridge (at the shop) and seems to survive the trip home. Hartley’s makes a pot of jelly that rests on the store shelf, and of course there are jelly based sweets that hold their shape for a limited period in the mouth.
And it reminded me of our lectures on differential scanning calorimetry where we discussed at length the analysis of chocolate and lipstick: two other common commodities where the melting/transition temperature is critical to the performance of the product. Chocolate is interesting in that it has a second transition at lower temperature which is irreversible making it so that it doesn’t taste the same after it has been in the fridge. I suppose that in really cold countries some trick has to be done to lower the temperature of this transition… or maybe the chocolate always tastes weird in these places…
I had to Google calamansi to figure out what it was; I wasn’t sure whether it was yet another fruit or vegetable that has a different name in the UK (e.g. zucchini/courgette, snow peas/mange tout, eggplant/aubergine…hey wait a minute, I thought y’all didn’t like the French?).
Chocolate is often problematic for those of us who live in warm climates. Throughout much of the year, a chocolate bar in a lunch bag will melt very quickly on the way into work (whether on the bike, in the car, or on foot), and so it’s necessary to chill it in an insulated bag. Most of the chocolate I eat has probably been in the fridge and gone through the transition.
In South Africa we used to have chocolate bar that was only made in “winter”. I forget what it was called, but as a family we would get one each every (almost) winter-sunday afternoon. I loved that type of ritual.
I don’t really like post-transitional chocolate. I am not sure whether it is the taste or the matt appearance of the surface that displeases me most, but I can be a fussy little creature sometimes. The only american chocolate that I like is the nut cup. There is a shop on my way home from work that sometimes sells them… yum.
American chocolate is, on the whole, inferior stuff, unless you buy specialty chocolate, such as Scharffen Berger. It’s now possible to buy a German brand, Ritter Sport, in many grocery stores in the US; I realize it’s pretty ordinary chocolate by European standards, but it’s definitely my favorite affordable
fixsource. I’ve never met a Ritter Sport variety that I didn’t like.Kristi, what about the enormous variety of organic chocolates on the shelf in places like Whole Foods these days? Some VERY yummy stuff.
What a calorific blog this is. Help!