Sour cream is a very specific product. Without it, most of the traditional dishes are not delicious, nourishing and useful. In its composition, in addition to proteins and fats, there are minerals. Despite the fact that sour cream is very fatty, for people engaged in permanent physical labor and athletes sour cream is a very useful product with the optimum calorie content.
Contents:
- Is the correct name
- GOST or TU?
- Shelf life
- If the spoon is. ..
- Taste
- Sour-milk bacteria
But modern technology has made it possible not to add natural milk to sour cream. Instead of real milk, add a dry analog, various thickeners, vegetable fats, preservatives and soy protein. It turns out that the appearance and taste of such sour cream differs little from the natural, but in fact, such a product is devoid of useful properties, and a variety of additives make sour cream completely useless.
How can you recognize a non-natural product, and choose quality and healthy sour cream among the abundance provided by manufacturers? It is very difficult to recognize an unreal sour cream, but you can use some tricks and distinguish between natural sour cream. How can this be done? First of all, we study everything that we see on the package.
A variety of names
You should not stop choosing "sour cream", the names of which are distorted by additional prefixes, such as "Sour cream", "Smetanka", "Smetanushka".Such names distort the meaning of the dairy product and divert attention from the composition of this product.
The very word "Sour Cream" is a strictly defined standard name, which can only be applied to real sour cream. Use it for products similar to sour cream, but in fact it is not, entails a sanction for the manufacturer and even administrative liability. But to use for surrogates various variations of the name, which differ from the word "sour cream", even by one letter, the producers have every right. Therefore, the name of the product is already a certain indicator of quality.
GOST
For a product such as sour cream, GOST R 52092-2003 is distributed. If the package has the designation of this GOST, then it is likely that this sour cream contains natural cow milk, without additional impurities like vegetable fats and other additives.
And it is important to know also that GOST differs significantly from TU-technical conditions. The presence of the "TU" sign allows producers to add various additives to sour cream with different parts of natural components, since the manufacturers themselves can develop the specifications, and their requirements are almost always less stringent than for GOST.
Shelf life of the sour cream
It's not new to anyone that dairy products can not have a long shelf life. For this sour cream, the shelf life in the refrigerator is no more than two weeks.
If the package shows a longer shelf life, this indicates that there are preservatives in this product. In addition, of course, you should pay attention to whether the product has already expired in order to choose quality and fresh sour cream.
Traditional methods for testing the quality of sour cream
According to tradition, the density of sour cream was checked with a spoon, or rather, it stood exactly in a container with sour cream. But some dishonest producers use this feature in their advertising company. If a spoon in sour cream costs, it does not mean that it is good. This trick can be turned by adding a thickener, with which you can achieve that the spoon will stand even in tap water. How to choose a good sour cream, given this feature?
The simplest way to check for natural sour cream is to transfuse it from one container to another. Quality sour cream will spread out in its original layers, waves that are spread over each other. A synthetic product with a transfusion will form lumps that will not be able to unite in the total mass.
The taste of sour cream
Another important indicator when choosing sour cream is, of course, its taste. In the supermarket, you, of course, will not be allowed to break the packaging to determine the taste, but in the market it is quite realistic to try sour cream. And once you buy sour cream of a certain brand in a supermarket, you can try it out and decide whether to take such a product again.
What kind of taste should be sour cream? It should not have a sweet or neutral aftertaste. It, first of all, sour-milk product, so sour cream should be with a sourish. Sour cream should not lie on the tongue with one lump. In America and Europe, it is called a cream - because of its consistency, so sour cream should flow around the tongue, enveloping it, no matter how thick it may be.
Do not forget about the color of sour-milk products. Quality sour cream can be determined on an even white color with a light cream shade. If there are contrasting spots or blobs in the product, this indicates the presence of a variety of additives and thickeners.
Sour-milk bacteria
It is thanks to these bacteria that the sour milk product is souring and sour cream is produced. The permissible norm can be measured only with the help of a microscope, and, of course, at home it is impossible. But honest producers indicate the number of bacteria in the product. If this index is not less than 1 * 10 ^ 7 CFU / g, this indicates a good quality of sour cream.
Having chosen sour cream according to taste, color, density of fermented bacteria, made according to GOST and studied composition, it is possible to make the right choice. The brand of such a product can be safely entered in a notebook, so as not to bother with a further choice among such diversity.