A pain but oh so good!!

( Drying in the oven is a bigger PITA, lol)

Frozen works for cherries; even better with cream and baker's chocolate. I'm pleased the cravings were likely from the extra sugar, NOT the combo.

Get this. I bought pork chops from Walmart once. Plain pork chops, no marinade. When I was unwrapping the package to cook them I noticed the nutrition label. It showed 3 grams of carbs in a 4-oz serving!!! Then I looked at the ingredient list, and sure enough, it listed pork, sugar, and a bunch of other things!

Why oh why would they mess with plain meat?

What is in vitamins is suspect these days. Not only the source of the ingredients but the strange unnecessary ingredients like rice, tapioca, Magnesium Stearate, and there is another element that I can't think of right now but the FDA had allowed levels of lead if it was under a certain amount.....

Then there is the cap that if listed as vegan is going to be made of cellulose instead of gelatin.
"Cellulose can be found on ingredient lists under a variety of names, depending on which form is used. Although cellulose has the same molecular structure regardless of the source (wood pulp, cotton, or other vegetable matter), how the molecules are bonded together and whether or not they are hydrated creates different "forms" of cellulose

I don't want that!

I've been caught out by this a few times. Quite why you'd add sugar to something that, lets face it, is already quite sweet..... I do grow a lot of my own fruit at an allotment though so can now dry my (very small!!) crop of cherries instead of risking shop bought (I actually have yet to find cherries without sugar added oddly - I'm sure there must be some though!)

Wow, another incident for me yesterday. I was putting together a "gluten-free" list of products for the cashiers at my store, because when a customer asks, they call me. I was double-checking our sauces, and lo and behold, our Kraft caesar dressing has wheat in it! (WHY?!!)

My evil thoughts are that they deliberate add wheat and sugar because:

• these are cheap bulk ingredients
• on a vast scale, it makes the product cheaper to make
• on a personal scale, THEY ARE ADDICTING
• and they know this

And since ALL business is now Run By Spreadsheet, why not? It's a dirt cheap and legal addictive substance they can add to any of their food which make people want to eat more!

My gosh, they would spend zillions in the lab to create something like this, but why bother? It's right there.

It reminds me of the "poverty stretcher tactics" where one can of tuna makes a giant noodle casserole, and every piece of meat gets an inch of breading so the portion looks bigger. Same principle; only it's not your mom stretching a paycheck so all the kids leave the dinner table full.

They are charging FOOD prices for dirt, for filler that has negative nutritional value.

Just the other day, on the DietDoctor Facebook group I think, someone was asking if it was possible to find pure heavy cream without any additives. Most people said they’d never found any. Others (primarily not in the US) said they’d never heard of additives added to heavy/whipping cream.

One person said she bought her HWC at Costco. I didn’t think they sold pure HWC there so I looked when I was at Costco last week. They sell the Land o’ Lakes brand. In addition to all the usual additives the SECOND ingredient was SKIM MILK! Skim milk as a major additive in HWC? I use HWC to make sure I avoid skim milk.

Lately though I’ve finally found two good sources for HWC with no additives, after looking for 8 1/2 years.

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.

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).

Perhaps try freezing it in portions that you normally use. It might curdle but not do to fermentation rather chemical like acid in coffee, or separation of the fats and milk.

It is very perishable, which is why milk products must be altered into a longer lasting product like creme fresh, and soft cheeses like cottage cheese. Fresh cream in its pure form was limited to fresh from a dairy..... the addatives allow for a longer shelf life.

I have been using organic cream, and it has an additive, just not the one in non-organic...... and that cream does last a week or so.

Just back from shopping at Whole Foods and I noticed two and bought one.

I got the 365 HWC.

ingredients: organic cream, organic milk

They also had Clover Sonoma ORGANIC HEAVY WHIPPING CREAM

ingredients: organic cream, milk


.

Yes! I just got cream at Aldi's, and now I think I will prefer it. Thanks!

You're welcome!



Aldi frequently amazes me. They have such a limited number of items, almost everything they sell is house brand, the prices are usually sooo much better than almost everyplace else - and yet the quality is almost always equal (and sometimes superior) to name brands.



I use a lot of their cheeses - I mostly buy the 8 oz blocks of cheese, and shred them using my Salad Shooter - the shreds keep for at least a week in a sealed rubbermaid type plastic container. Their sliced provolone has a good flavor (much better than any other store brand provolone I've tried over the years), and they also sell sell red-waxed rounds of really good Gouda cheese. They even have goat cheese!



They sell a keto-friendly bread that I keep checking to see if any of the Aldis around here have it yet, but haven't found any. The story of their keto bread is quite the saga - Supposedly, all Aldi stores are expected to have it as a regular item sometime this month. I have a low carb bread recipe I make about once a year and freeze (primarily to make LC bread crumbs to use in two recipes I make a couple of times a year), but as weird and highly processed as some of the ingredients in their keto bread sound, I think their ingredients still sound a little less questionable than some of the ingredients in the recipe I've been using, so I'm trying to locate a loaf of it to try. I don't expect to be one of the customers grabbing as many loaves as they allow each week though - One loaf will probably last me at least 6 months - I'd say it should last a year, but it sounds like their loaves are about half the size of the one I make.


Now, if they'd just stock a mayo that's made with all avocado oil. (They have some of the Hellman's made with avocado oil... but it's reduced fat , as well as mostly soy and canola) I'm getting used to the flavor of the Sir Kensington's, at least as far as using it for things like chicken salad and egg salad, but the price -OH MY! Even the sale price on the quart jar at Costco - The price on that stuff stings!

Interesting about the keto bread! They were also first out of the gate in our area with GF products: though I avoid those too, of course, because of the carb content.

In my area, Aldis is great for certain basics, their fruit must be eaten that day, and their coffee and tea barely colors water and has no taste