Quote:
Originally Posted by WereBear
The only source I know is from our local health food store, where the price is like gold bars. Which I could manage, except once opened, it has to be used in two days or something, or it curdles. Nice and fresh, but I don't have a milkman bringing it to me every morning, either.
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We have a dairy just up the road from us, and they sell their farm-produced, no additives heavy cream in their store. Problem is that it's priced about the same way as the cream from your local health food store, which definitely doesn't fit into this retiree budget, especially since it doesn't keep more than a few days.
I've been buying heavy cream at Aldi for the last several years (The price at costco went far too high, considering that they sell it in quarts, and it would take too long to use that much). They occasionally change the ingredients in the Aldi cream, and the most recent pint I bought has nothing but cream and less than 0.5% gellan gum in it.
I'd never heard of gellan gum, so I had to look it up - seems that in chronic, large doses it can cause gastro distress, but less than 1/2 percent in a pint of cream, which will take a week or more to finish?
No problems so far - I get obvious gastro effects from more than a very minimal amount of cruciferous veggies, so while I'll definitely take note of the possibility, so far I'm not concerned about that little bit of gellan in the small amount of cream I use.
As a side note about reading labels -Aldi just recently changed their Plain Whole Milk Greek Yogurt too. I'm pretty sure the latest incarnation might be being made for them by Chobani - type of packaging matches (foil seal, raised clear #1 PETE plastic lid - previous version had a plastic seal, flat translucent lid), nutritional info matches, and the only ingredient in the latest version of the Aldi brand is cultured whole milk, which they clarify contains active cultures - turns out to be the exact same 5 active cultures that are in the Chobani brand. It's definitely a significantly thicker consistency than the last version they had at Aldi - far less residual whey accumulation on yogurt that remains after each serving is removed from the container. Prices can vary depending on your location, but $3.45/quart around here. The Chobani I compared it to was about $2 more, and that was on sale.
I read labels all the time, but pay particularly close attention to the list of ingredients if there's any change at all in the label (picture, colors, design configuration, etc) or packaging of a product, because any time they change anything at all about the front label or packaging, I know it's usually because they've changed something about the product itself. This was reinforced many years ago, when I bought some Classico 4-cheese pasta sauce. Previous to that slight label change, their 4-cheese sauce was my go-to, because it was made without any added sugars, and the cheese content helped reduce the overall carb content. I noticed the label had changed slightly, but didn't bother to check the ingredients (foolishly thinking it would make no sense to add sugars to a 4-cheese sauce
), and bought some anyway. As soon as I tasted it, it was obvious to me they'd added sugar to it.
Checked the ingredients, and sure enough, there it was, along with a far higher carb content than it had previously. (this was a decade or more before the nutrition labels had to show how much sugar was added to their products, so you still had to read everything to determine what was being done - back then, sometimes a slight increase in carbs was just some additional tomato paste in the ingredients to make it thicker).