Cheese
Cheese is a high-fat product made from natural dairy ingredients, which are expensive. Natural cheese (and not fake substitutes) cannot cost less than 400 rubles per kilogram. And even this price is the absolute minimum. If you do not take into account various promotions and special offers, then you should pay attention to cheeses, the cost of which starts from 600 rubles per kilogram.
Anything that is cheaper will most likely turn out to be a fake – a fake made with the addition of vegetable or, even worse, animal fats. This means that you will not get either pleasure or benefit. Just spend the money.
Olive oil
The production technology of high-quality vegetable oil, including olive oil, is rather complicated and requires certain costs. The most expensive olive oil is generally made using purely mechanical production. With other production methods, the efficiency is higher, but the beneficial properties of the oil are no longer the same. A separate issue is raw materials. Oil is made from both the fruit and the cake left after the first pressing. Of course, in the first case, both the price and the quality are higher.
And that’s not all the differences. Like cheese, olive oil is often falsified. For example, it is diluted with rapeseed, which is fundamentally cheaper. In general, be honest with yourself – and remember, good olive oil cannot cost the same as sunflower oil.
Confectionery
It is difficult to call baked goods, various cakes and cakes healthy food, and if they are made from cheap ingredients, they even turn into something dangerous to health. Good baked goods contain milk and butter (or at least margarine, but also of high quality). This is all quite expensive, so the final cost of the product can be quite high.
In an effort to optimize price and increase profits, manufacturers add palm oil spreads, milk powder, low grade flour, and so on to products. In such products, the amount of trans fats can go off scale, and the taste will not please the buyer. So we can advise sweet lovers to eat one expensive cake a week instead of seven cheap ones. And for the figure and for the stomach it will be much better.
Semi-finished goods
Cutlets, dumplings, pancakes and other semi-finished products are designed to save our time, but many believe that you can also save on these products. This is not true. A processed product cannot be worth less than an unprocessed product, because it takes labor, time and money. The low price can only be due to the use of cheap raw materials, especially since it is easy to disguise it in complex dishes. As a result, there is more dough in dumplings than fillings, and there is no cottage cheese in curd cakes. Alas, savings are inappropriate here too.
Sausages and sausages
The same principle applies here as in the previous paragraph. If you want sausage with meat – pay. Otherwise, get sausages from pork skin, cartilage and soy. By the way, modern legislation allows the production of sausages, in which there is almost no meat. There are as many as 5 quality categories. In products of category “A” muscle tissue (that is, meat) must be at least 80%. Category B provides that in sausage from 60 to 80% of meat, C – from 40 to 60%, D – from 20 to 40% and, finally, in sausage of category D, meat content from 5 to 20% is permissible. So, before buying, study the labeling carefully, especially if the product costs suspiciously little. Perhaps you are not being deceived, it’s just a category “D” sausage in front of you.
What besides beef can be found in beef sausages? Information straight from the laboratory.