Sweet Revenge - Dhefs spending big bucks to replace HFCS with natural sweetners in their restaurants

[housewolf]

From the Wall Street Journal -

Sweet Revenge, Chefs Pour on the Sugar

Matt Gordon, the chef and owner of Urban Solace, a modern-American restaurant in San Diego, spent months of work and $15,000 making sure the restaurant's sodas, cocktail mixers, ice cream and sauces all contained the same ingredient: sugar.

A growing number of restaurants across the country are retooling recipes to replace ingredients containing high-fructose corn syrup with other sweeteners including honey, agave nectar, golden syrup and palm sugar.

...

For chefs and restaurateurs, ridding menus of HFCS is part of a larger effort to create a cuisine that appears more wholesome and hand-crafted. HFCS is anathema to this image. Many chefs are also convinced that HFCS is less healthy than sugar, though mainstream scientists say that HFCS and sugar have the same impact on health.

"It's so hard. It's in everything," says Gavin Stephenson, executive chef at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle, who says he was surprised to realize that even the oyster crackers the hotel bought contained HFCS. To avoid commercial products that contain HFCS, Mr. Stephenson has begun making some items, such as breakfast cereal, from scratch.

more -
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304760604576427693903949786.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLE_Video_second

[grasswire]

1. why the hell would oyster crackers have sugar?

that ticks me off.

[Retrograde]

4. Same reason peanut butter does

or ketsup, or prepared horseradish, or mayonnaise or any of hundreds of prepared foods: because someone with a farm in the Midwest is raking in the $$$$ in subsidies. Sugar's not much of an improvement.

[Phentex]

2. Well, good for them. But if you are going to doctor up your ketchup...

why not make your own in the first place?

And unless they are replacing HFCS with truly healthier alternatives, this kind of thing sounds gimmicky to me.

:shrug:

[NashVegas]

3. Great Murdoch Reporting, Here

"The trade group also petitioned the Food and Drug Administration last fall to allow manufacturers to label the ingredients as "corn sugar," a name which will not confuse consumers as much as HFCS seems to, the trade group says. An FDA decision is pending."

Okay, I know they're getting it from the horse's mouth, but couldn't they also also talk to, say, a linguist?

[Retrograde]

5. I'm not confused by HFCS

And I don't think the consumers this trade group refers to are either: they're just trying to avoid the stuff.

[housewolf]

6. I'm with you!

I think "corn sugar" is much more confusing than "high fructose corn syrup"