Roskachestvo specialists examined fish from five producers.
Herring under a fur coat is a dish that a rare New Year’s table can do without. Why, many people make this salad only once a year. The only question is in the ingredients: it’s a shame to buy a herring, which, in addition to traditional spices, also contains pathogenic microbes and harmful preservatives. Expert Center specialists decided to investigate the special salted herring sold in stores from different manufacturers and find out whose product is not only tasty, but also safe for health.
The experts’ basket includes fish of five brands: Meridian, VICI, Baltic Coast, A’More, Every Day. Each product was examined according to more than 40 quality and safety parameters: they looked for heavy metals, preservatives in the herring, assessed how the real composition corresponds to the labeling, found out how many different bacteria are in the fish, checked the taste, color and smell. And here are the results.
It turned out that the preserves of “Baltic Coast” and “A’More” are simply dangerous. In the first, the number of bacteria was four times higher than the permissible norm. And secondly, we found bacteria of the Escherichia coli group. This is possible if the production is seriously violated sanitary and epidemiological requirements. A huge amount of yeast was found in the herring “Meridian”, 12 times higher than the norm.
“Most types of yeast do not pose a danger to humans: the main thing that signals an excess of the permissible yeast content is violations of the sanitary and anti-epidemic regime in production or production technology and, therefore, the risk that one of the packages will contain products that are really dangerous for human microorganisms “, – explains Elena Menyachikhina, specialist of the expert center of the Consumer Union” Roskontrol “.
Almost all the herring had yellowed fat under the skin, except for the fish of the Meridian brand. VICI herring was also rancid. That is, spoiled.
“In oily fish, yellowing first appears in the subcutaneous layer, and this is considered acceptable for Class II herring. But for traditional herring of a special salting according to GOST, the first grade should be used, ”says Elena Menyachikhina.
Herring that is marked as fat must have a fat mass fraction of at least 12 percent. All the samples under study were marked in this way, except for the “Baltic Coast”. However, in fact, the herring from “Meridian”, VICI and, oddly enough, “Baltic Coast” turned out to be fat. In the latter, there was almost three times more fat than indicated on the label.
In addition, the herring “A’More” and “Everyday” had too little sugar. Too little – when compared with the GOST recipe. Therefore, experts doubt that the traditional recipe was followed in the manufacture of this herring.
The result turned out to be disappointing: you can safely buy only preserves “Every Day”, and even those received a not very honorable title of goods with remarks.