This is my personal blog about the words “freshest ingredients”. It seems every manufacturer of cakes or other food products, advertise that they use nothing but fresh or “the freshest” ingredients.
What a load of hogwash…
See the truth is that most if not all cakes require certain artificial ingredients, “helpers”, to make sure that they remain stable for a period of time. Don’t get me wrong you can make delicious cakes with all raw ingredients, the difference is, is that it wont taste the same on the second day and probably taste bad by the third.
The bigger cake manufacturers usually make cakes in the hundreds or thousands at a time and freeze them in special blast freezers, these products require certain stabilizers and emulsifiers so their structure doesn’t change during the freezing process and so they can remain stable once thawed. The problem with most frozen cakes is that they lack true flavour, almost all frozen cakes are flavoured by essences and artificial flavours which act as an enhancer of flavour, this doesn’t always leave a nice taste in your mouth once you’ve finished.
Other cake manufacturers structure their product range around shelf stable ingredients, to stretch the shelf life of their products. This always results in very plain flavoured cakes, in most cases your left with a chemical after taste in your mouth.
There are some good cake manufactures around, ones that create cakes to order, yes, they sometimes use imitation creams, but lets face it you can’t give a 5 day shelf life on a product with fresh uncooked cream. Most good manufacturers of cakes an other product use the minimum artificial ingredients in their products to try and maintain natural flavours.
We at Epicurean Kitchen use the best ingredients, this ranges from real neufchatel cream cheese, fresh cream, real fruit not canned, we don’t use ready made cake mixes in a bag, all our cakes start with flour, sugar (sometimes caster sugar or brown sugar) and we build from there, flavours enhancers are usually flavoured alcohols, oils(orange oils, lemon oils, lime oils) or even extract flavours (we keep right away from flavoured essences). We use couveture chocolate both dark and white, but we also use basic compound chocolate for a couple lines, this is a good base for when you need chocolate for structure but not as the main flavour. We also use imitation cream mixed with either a caramel sauce or chocolate ganache for a couple lines so their shelf life can be stretched to 5 days.
To sum up my blog, when someone says it’s fresh, well, taste it, you be the judge…….
