"Melba's Jammin'" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote:

"TBI" wrote in message
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"Melba's Jammin'" wrote in message
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I agree with you totaly, but citric acid sounds chemically - and
so does dextrose. I know what they are and where they come from
- I've no problem coz I understand food, but to the uninitiated
they don't look natural. It's more of a branding thing. It gives
people a warm fuzzy feeling.

Mat

In a word, pishtosh! You're talking about a "branding thing" and
giving people a warm fuzzy feeling. Kewl. So your labels say,
"Ingredients: Sugar, vinegar, peppers, fruit pectin (mixed with
dextrose [a natural sugar], and citric acid (to brighten the
flavor and assist in the gelling process). BTW, citric acid
sounds no more chemical than ascorbic acid, er-r-r-r vitamin C.

I totally agree with you... but folks don't get that - same as they
don't see the 'no added sugar' thing. It's a culture and education
thing I guess.



I hate to burst your bubble but if you slap the term "Natural" on
jelly you are breaking the law.

I'm not sure he's in the USA, Ted. He's using a UK-based mail address.
(snippage)

That I overlooked.

The other major variable is the ripeness of the fruit. The large
commercial houses make jam in such large batches that they have to
take the fruit in whatever shape they get it.

That'd be frozen, Ted. In the small-batch operation I am casually
familiar with, the fruit is frozen -- the producer produces the products
as needed and fresh fruit of a quality that will produce the same
results using the same recipe isn't reliably available when it's needed
for production. Producers find suppliers who meet their needs and their
budgets. When the Gedney folks were first fine-tuning my peach
raspberry jam recipe for commercial production and distribution they
were using peaches that were unidentifiable after cooking -- I think it
may have been a 1/4" dice. Not satisfactory. So they changed their
supply order to 1/2" dice. Who knew? If that's how a small batch
(maybe 400 jars?) operation does it, I cannot believe that Kraft and
Smucker's are using fresh fruit for their HUGE batches of soft spreads.
I doubt that anyone even thinks about whether or not the fruit is made
from fresh or frozen.


Well, you see this is why the food scientists at those places get paid
the big bucks.

There isn't a raw fruit/vegetable supplier in the world who can deliver
a consistent product year after year. Crops just don't grow that way.
That is why people make such a big deal about ranking the "year"
that a wine is bottled - the wine producers have figured out how to
take normal product variation and turn it into a selling point - but the
same variation exists in all food products. It is just that people have
been led (or misled) by the food producers to believe that the taste
of something like grape juice is going to be exactly the same every
year but wine from the same locality will vary every year.

At those large producers you have a food scientist that is picking
apart the raw material to see what has varied - they likely can tell
you exactly how much sugar is present in each batch that comes in -
and so they do what they can to adjust the recipies used to get as
close to a consistent product as they can - but there's always variation.

As for use of frozen fruit, my only comment to that would be to
look at it from a price perspective. It costs more to store a warehouse
full of frozen fruit than a warehouse full of canned jam. That is after
all why canning was invented. I'm not surprised by stories of small
batches using frozen fruit - not that it really makes much of a difference
to the final taste - since the economics are completely different. You
have limited retail outlets that dispose of a slow-moving product in a
limited
area (do people buy as much jam over the summer as over the
winter? I could think of many reasons why they might not) and a
pretty fixed, high, price. By contrast with the large producers they have
built up nationwide brands that the grocers have no choice but to
stock (can you imagine a grocery store surviving that refused to
stock Skippy peanut butter, or Coca Cola, I can't) and they adjust
the prices with coupon promotions. The logical thing for a large
producer is to make as much product as possible when the raw
material is in season and most cheaply available, then warehouse it,
and adjust the drawdown rate of the inventory over the year in the
warehouse by adjusting prices. You also have economies of scale
that come into play, since you just build one factory that can pump
out a thousand tons of the stuff in a week, and this month it does all
the strawberry production, next month it does all the peach production,
etc. etc.

Certainly, the meat canning industry works this way (think, canned
tuna) since there's only a limited window that the harvest is available.

There was a really interesting article in the Wall Street Journal
earlier this week that discussed the rise of the new Nationalism.
Seems that for many countries the free trade thing hasn't been
all it was cracked up to be, one of the most sore points
has been over the issue of food production. There is a rapidly
growing number of governments that are scared to death that
food will be used as a weapon, and in every country there is
a growing interest to discourage food imports and make doubly
damn sure the country can feed itself, and not be dependent on
food imports.

I suspect in another 20 years the days of shipping anything other
than luxury foods thousands of miles from other countries, (so we
can have fresh banannas in the winter) will be gone. Well, jam is
probably a luxury item I would guess, maybe it won't be affected.

There's a local operation "up north" that makes spreads from Minnesota's
wild fruits. They make what they can when they can get the stuff fresh
-- and if it's a bad year for chokecherries, they don't make as much
chokecherry jelly as in a better year. But they sell in a very small
market, I believe.


Fruit that is on the green side of ripeness makes one kind of taste
and fruit that is well advanced in ripeness makes an entirely
different taste.

And consistency.


If your goal is to be successful in selling small batches you will
need to focus on a particular flavor that is different than the large
jam makers.

And taste the same way and have the same consistency each time.

Correct, I had intended that to be implied, however.

The FDA
in the USA has very specific standards for what can be called jam,
jelly, or preserves -- brix level, pH, etc. There are no such standards
for "all-fruit" or "spreadable fruit" products. One reason those
all-fruit products aren't huge sellers is because they often don't look
especially appetizing. Sugar helps preserve the color.

The other reason is simply that, lacking the large amount of sugar,
they don't taste as good to most people. This is one area where
more than a few food manufacturers have fallen for the lip service
people give to "natural healthy" foods (think about what happened
to Gardenburger) and ignored what they actually spend their money
on - the garbage.

The red fruits
get to looking brown after a while on the supermarket shelf. The
apricot stuff may not look appealing to start with if the aps are
unsulfured. :-)


You want to talk unappealing - look at some of the most popular
childrens candies - vomit, woms-n-mud, snot, you name it. All
almost 100% sugar, all very popular. It seems to be pretty easy
to program the general populace into eating something, just load
it down with sugar AKA HFCS.

Ted