LAZ wrote:nr706 wrote:I guess it raises the issue “what is quality?” I know that if I see strawberries in the store that have mold growing on them, they’re not quality strawberries. But are guar gum, pectins, carageenan, vanillin and polysorbate 80 automatically low quality ingredients, and/or is any food product that contains them automatically a low-quality product?
Not "any food product," necessarily, no. Most of the additives you describe are meant to extend shelf life and protect consistency in commercial products. Vanillin is artificial vanilla, fine for some uses, less good in others, including ice cream.
But most ice-cream experts (something I do not claim to be) would say that ice cream that contains those ingredients is of less quality than those that contain only milk, cream, sugar, natural flavoring and (optionally) eggs.
I would also disagree with your definition of quality in strawberries. Moldy strawberries are merely past their prime. They may or may not have started out as a high-quality product. Poor quality strawberries may be quite fresh -- but they may be mealy, sour, hard, buggy, flavorless or otherwise faulty.
However, it's very wise of you not to train up your nephews to have expensive tastes.
Okay, I know this is veering horribly off-topic from ice cream places ... but I feel engaged in the conversation. I'll take up the various points in purely random order:
1) the strawberry example. If I find strawberries with mold, I think they're low quality strawberries. That's not to say they weren't high quality strawberries at one time, but if molds form on them, they either haven't been handled properly or have been away from the soil too long, and have crossed over to the dark side. And I agree that some can start out as low quality strawberries. But no matter how they started out, if they have mold on them now, in my mind they’re now low-quality products. (Although I have to add that the strawberries coming out of my garden now are incredibly intensely flavored - to do anything but eat them straight off the plant would be to defile them).
2) functionality of guar gum, pectins, carageenan, and polysorbate 80. They are not used to extend shelf life – that‘s not much of an issue with frozen products that have an average turn rate in the low numbers of weeks. They do improve texture, particularly in high overrun products (and I can tell some horror stories about one commercial ice cream producer who didn’t use them and tried to ship product from a plant on the West Coast to the Midwest – going over the Rockies, with the lower air pressure, caused all those little air bubbles in the ice cream to inflate, then collapse as they got back closer to sea level. Can you say “both gummy and sandy?”)
3) vanillin. I can’t tell you how many fights I had over this stuff. Blind ice cream taste tests would regularly rate products with a mix of vanillin and natural vanilla as having a better vanilla flavor than something flavored with pure vanilla alone. But an ice cream that uses the mix has to be labeled “vanilla-flavored” according to the FDA (and “artificially flavored” if it uses vanillin alone.) My point of view was that in signature products, only pure vanilla should be used – the negative perceptions based on “vanilla-flavored” on the label would outweigh the generally preferred vanilla-vanillin-mix taste profile. I won a few and lost a few on that one. And, of course, in the strictest sense, vanillin is not necessarily artificial vanilla, although that’s usually what’s available on the market. But given that vanillin is naturally the predominant flavor component in vanilla, there are some sources of natural vanillin derived from vanilla beans.
4) ice cream experts. I don’t claim to be one. But I have worked for a number of ice cream producers (names you’d recognize), have spent time in probably at least 20 different commercial ice cream plants, have advised others (including flavor and ingredient suppliers to the ice cream industry), and have spent a lot of time in R&D labs working on various ice cream formulations (in all cases, I was “the marketing guy”). And yes, there are some in the industry who would categorize the 5-quart pails as low quality ice cream, but just as many, if not more, would tell you that they can be very high in quality
for what they're designed to be – a cold, cheap, wet product that makes kids smile. If you’re citing “ice cream experts” who are outside the industry, I have no comprehensive sources to confirm or deny what they might think.
So, that’s a wordy, geeky way of saying I stand by my original point of view – if it’s designed to be cheap cold and wet, it can do a quality job at that. And then, by definition, it’s a quality product
for what it’s designed to be.