I Spoke Too Bloody Soon
Nothing like being all wet, not to mention just plain wrong.
I was leafing through the weekly grocery fliers when what to my wondering eye should appear but an ad for Beatrice "Chocolate Dairy Beverage".
A little googling showed me it's even been around for a while. I guess as someone who whizzes through the (liquid) dairy department, grabbing only the occasional litre of buttermilk, I managed to completely miss it.
I went out and checked the ingredients: partly skimmed milk (vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3), modified milk ingredients, sugar, reconstituted skim milk powder, cocoa, dipotassium phosphate, modified corn starch, salt, colour, carageenan, cellulose gum, guar gum, artificial flavour.
Yumm-O.*
They can't call it chocolate milk because it's no such thing. Reconstituted powdered milk, yay. Not to mention the modified milk ingredients.
Let me give you a little hint: never buy ANYTHING containing modified milk ingredients. Yes, there goes most commercial ice-cream, I know. But the more I find out about modified milk ingredients, the more disgusted and horrified I am.
The first time I really noticed them was some time early in the summer. I bought my usual brand of extra-old cheddar cheese: Presidents' Choice, or some such thing. Loblaws house-brand, anyway. It was a decent cheese for the price, very suitable for cooking with. I'd buy something better to eat plain, but as noted, it was fine used in cooked dishes.
However, this time I noticed right away that the quality had dropped considerably. It tasted downright weird, in fact. I checked the ingredients for the first time since I had first started to buy it and discovered the change: modified milk ingredients. I immediately switched to buying Pine River old cheddar. It's a dollar or two more, but it's still actual cheese.
I had not realized just how much imported dairy products have been making their way into Canadian foods over the last decade. Check out this article from CBC on ice-cream and cheese. In particular, that so-called "butteroil" is just vile.
The legal definition, as far as I can find, is as follows: "any of the following in liquid, concentrated, dry, frozen or reconstituted form, namely, calcium reduced skim milk (obtained by the ion-exchange process), casein, caseinates, cultured milk products, milk serum proteins, ultrafiltered milk, whey, whey butter, whey cream and any other component of milk the chemical state of which has been altered from that in which it is found in milk."
What a dog's breakfast that is. Some of those things sound fine - cultured milk products (yogurt? buttermilk?) whey, whey butter and whey cream - none of those strike me as problematic. The trouble is, which one is being used in the product you've picked up to examine? There is really no way to know, except it's a safe bet that most of it is nasty, ultra-processed reconstituted stuff, and not the "real food" options. I mean, if you make something with yogurt or whey butter, why wouldn't you just say so? Exactly. You would. "Modified milk ingredients" equals "cheap crappy crap" which is why anything with it on the list of ingredients is going to taste bad. And it may not even be Canadian, just as a kicker.
Conclusion: read those labels carefully. Don't buy Beatrice "Dairy" Drink. There's still decent chocolate milk out there, for example PC Organic (all I can easily find around here) contains "organic partly skimmed milk, organic sugar, organic cocoa, organic vanilla, salt, carageenan, guar gum, calcium phosphate, vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3."
You could buy Nesquik or some other chocolate syrup and make your own. (Sugar, water, cocoa, colour, salt, citric acid, potassium sorbate, vanillin, ferric orthophosphate). Well, maybe not. How about making your own syrup? I'll post a recipe this week.
*Actually, I haven't tasted this. And I'm not going to. Dipotassium phosphate? No thanks. I can picture it perfectly: sweet and gummy with a faint metallic tang to it.
I was leafing through the weekly grocery fliers when what to my wondering eye should appear but an ad for Beatrice "Chocolate Dairy Beverage".
A little googling showed me it's even been around for a while. I guess as someone who whizzes through the (liquid) dairy department, grabbing only the occasional litre of buttermilk, I managed to completely miss it.
I went out and checked the ingredients: partly skimmed milk (vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3), modified milk ingredients, sugar, reconstituted skim milk powder, cocoa, dipotassium phosphate, modified corn starch, salt, colour, carageenan, cellulose gum, guar gum, artificial flavour.
Yumm-O.*
They can't call it chocolate milk because it's no such thing. Reconstituted powdered milk, yay. Not to mention the modified milk ingredients.
Let me give you a little hint: never buy ANYTHING containing modified milk ingredients. Yes, there goes most commercial ice-cream, I know. But the more I find out about modified milk ingredients, the more disgusted and horrified I am.
The first time I really noticed them was some time early in the summer. I bought my usual brand of extra-old cheddar cheese: Presidents' Choice, or some such thing. Loblaws house-brand, anyway. It was a decent cheese for the price, very suitable for cooking with. I'd buy something better to eat plain, but as noted, it was fine used in cooked dishes.
However, this time I noticed right away that the quality had dropped considerably. It tasted downright weird, in fact. I checked the ingredients for the first time since I had first started to buy it and discovered the change: modified milk ingredients. I immediately switched to buying Pine River old cheddar. It's a dollar or two more, but it's still actual cheese.
I had not realized just how much imported dairy products have been making their way into Canadian foods over the last decade. Check out this article from CBC on ice-cream and cheese. In particular, that so-called "butteroil" is just vile.
The legal definition, as far as I can find, is as follows: "any of the following in liquid, concentrated, dry, frozen or reconstituted form, namely, calcium reduced skim milk (obtained by the ion-exchange process), casein, caseinates, cultured milk products, milk serum proteins, ultrafiltered milk, whey, whey butter, whey cream and any other component of milk the chemical state of which has been altered from that in which it is found in milk."
What a dog's breakfast that is. Some of those things sound fine - cultured milk products (yogurt? buttermilk?) whey, whey butter and whey cream - none of those strike me as problematic. The trouble is, which one is being used in the product you've picked up to examine? There is really no way to know, except it's a safe bet that most of it is nasty, ultra-processed reconstituted stuff, and not the "real food" options. I mean, if you make something with yogurt or whey butter, why wouldn't you just say so? Exactly. You would. "Modified milk ingredients" equals "cheap crappy crap" which is why anything with it on the list of ingredients is going to taste bad. And it may not even be Canadian, just as a kicker.
Conclusion: read those labels carefully. Don't buy Beatrice "Dairy" Drink. There's still decent chocolate milk out there, for example PC Organic (all I can easily find around here) contains "organic partly skimmed milk, organic sugar, organic cocoa, organic vanilla, salt, carageenan, guar gum, calcium phosphate, vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3."
You could buy Nesquik or some other chocolate syrup and make your own. (Sugar, water, cocoa, colour, salt, citric acid, potassium sorbate, vanillin, ferric orthophosphate). Well, maybe not. How about making your own syrup? I'll post a recipe this week.
*Actually, I haven't tasted this. And I'm not going to. Dipotassium phosphate? No thanks. I can picture it perfectly: sweet and gummy with a faint metallic tang to it.
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