I was permanently banned from the Reddit sub without recourse for posting this despite not breaking any rules. I’m slowly making the migration over thanks to such encouragement.
I was permanently banned from the Reddit sub without recourse for posting this despite not breaking any rules. I’m slowly making the migration over thanks to such encouragement.
They say on the bottle that it’s a blend so I don’t think this is that infuriating. Though if I saw “Texas Honey Blend” I’d assume it’s cut with crude oil.
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It’s a blend of honey and high fructose corn syrup, what in the ever living fuck is high fructose corn syrup doing in honey? Oh, making more profits by cutting it.
Death to high fructose corn syrup
I can see it being useful if you’re making candy. Different sugars crystallize differently, so it’s not uncommon to mix corn syrup and sugar to get the right ratio.
But they’re also making “pancake syrup” that is corn syrup dyed and flavored to approximate maple syrup which is a crime against nature.
If you’re mixing things up in the kitchen, typically you try to be somewhat precise with ratios.
The difference in this case being that because the actual ratio of the blend is unknown, you don’t actually know how it would crystallize. Technically they could even change up the ratio week to week based on the price of high-fructose corn syrup so you wouldn’t even get consistency from it.
Hmm. I was a professional chef for ~15 years and your right and wrong at the same time
Baking is precise. Bakers are wholly different kinds of people compared to those on a line. Baking is exact amounts, humidity percentages, controlled environments. Cooking is eyeballing everything and adjusting by taste.
I make recipe by ratio. Sometimes, a lot of the times, the ratio isn’t even conscious, I just know it needs more of this and this to get the taste and textures I want.
So yes; ratios. But no; no measuring. A cup is about a handful. If you got the spatial chops that should be just about all you need to make everything in the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) manual, which, if you’re gonna buy a cook book, just bite the bullet and spend the $100 on it
Yes but no. Humidity and environment will change how the bread turns out, but even in large industrial bakeries where they chemically analyse the flour and have influence over microbiomes they know that the slightest, uncontrollable, variation can throw things off so you still have people listening to how the dough sounds in the kneader, how sproingy it is after proofing, and make calls about whether the dough needs some more or less work or time.
It might be possible to fully automate things by killing the flour (by default it contains lots of microorganisms), use yeast only (while you can get pure-strain sourdough it’s still a more fickle beast than straight yeast), but then you probably need to be American to still call the final product bread.
By contrast if you’re a baker’s apprentice in Germany for the first year you’ll be forbidden to touch the kneader, you need to have heard lots of doughs and observed many a decision the master makes on the fly about what exactly to do to the dough and why until you have the necessary intuition to start making calls on your own. The first thing you learn is dough tension and how to knead two loaves at the same time, messing up there is not a biggie you just gotta have to start over. Not exactly German but here’s a good video about dough tension. It’s important for every elastic dough and baguettes are particularly finicky so it’s a good example.
I think the reason you hear the “baking is a science” trope: People can’t actually bake. Sure, using exact amounts will get you a better result if you don’t know anything about dough but once you do you’ll be adjusting things on the fly to account for things like initial water content in the flour and the phase of the moon. Baking is alchemy.
Even brands like log cabin who claim to use “no high fructose corn syrup” are just corn syrup and sugar. There are people who go their entire lives eating pancake syrup and table syrup on their pancakes, and die never having tasted actual maple syrup.
Nobody making candy would every use this pre-blended product; they’d want to combine the two different sugars themselves so they could control the ratio.
Yeah, I was commenting on the notion of mixing honey with corn syrup generally, not this shit.
Though I’m sure there’s a bunch of old ladies in Texas who have recipes on old, yellowed card stock that call for this.
Isn’t that what the cheap syrup has always been? IHOP basically built their whole company on it.
Hot take, but it’s not a bad technology. It’s just heavily overused because US farm subsidies.
Eh, too much fructose and your body stops processing it. Fructose doesn’t actually trigger your body to use it, and if you don’t have enough other sugars present, it causes problems. Not an issue in moderation, but high-fructose syrup is used in so many things that it’s a real concern.
TIL. It sounds like there’s some debate about the severity of that, from what I can see, but it is a thing.
Yeah, just about any diet will have enough other carbs to work, but if all you eat is white bread and pepsi, that will be another issue with your diet.
What in the hell? You think this is ok? A honey blend implies a blend of…wait for it… different HONEY.
Not a blend of super cheap and super unhealthy syrup.
It seems not to be as well known as I thought, but most commercial honey sold in the US is not actually honey:
There were a bunch of stories about this several years ago after a minor controversy, but it didn’t stay in the news long, so I guess it fell out of public consciousness.
If you want real honey, you’ll want to buy from small, local dealers.
If it was a bunch of different honeys they would have listed the types on the front of the bottle, I’m sure. The word “Texas” heavily implies that it’s made out of something terrible.
I have news for you if you think there is a health difference between a teaspoon of corn syrup and a teaspoon of honey. They are both packed full of sugar
You are being downvoted but HFCS and honey are almost exactly chemically identical. They have to inspect honey farms to make sure it comes from bees since looking at the final product you can’t tell the difference.
Yeah they are both concentrated sugar extracts. Just because one is made by bees doesn’t make it suddenly not a heaping tablespoon of sugar you’ve just ingested. I eat plenty of honey and molasses but I don’t lie to myself and claim that they are any healthier than corn syrup or simple syrup. They are all just super concentrated fructose and glucose solutions.
I thought the “benefits” to honey were kinda more for kids >1 so they can be exposed to different types of pollen. I dunno if it actually helps with immunity to allergies in the same way, but iirc it’s similar with peanuts. Kids exposed to them young are much less likely to develop allergies to them
That makes sense at first glance, but it’s not true when you think about it for a bit. People have allergic reactto grasses and trees that broadcast spawn their pollen all over the place. Bees collect nectar from flowering plants and spread pollen around that way. Plants only choose one over the other since they are both very resource intensive mating strategies. No one is allergic to lillac, but plenty of people are allergic to ragweed.
I liked when the US National Honey Board funded a study that compared honey, cane sugar, and HFCS and found they’re all about the same (and all raised a key blood fat, a marker for heart disease).
Of course, the truth is that sugar’s sugar and you should have limited amounts of it, but when it’s as cheap as HFCS is in the States, they can stick it in everything.
There is a health difference though https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/the-sweet-science-behind-honey.html
Trace amounts of proteins and antioxidants, but it’s still an added sugar.
But honey is natural, corn syrup has chemicals in it!
I prefer honey cause I’m no goddamn liberal hippie, so it’s important to me that animals were killed for my food.
Maybe just me personally, but if they’re gonna put “blend” on the bottle I’d be more inclined to assume it’s intended as a selling point rather than a begrudging legal requirement.
Many thanks.
If they’re gonna put “blend” on the bottle I’d assume it was honey from different kinds of flowers mixed together, not honey mixed with something else!
Plus, it says “made with real honey”. That plus it being a blend should have raised an eyebrow to investigate further.