The main ingredient of fruit-flavored mooncakes is actually winter melon! These people cannot eat sugar-free mooncakes
Appreciating the moon and tasting mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival are traditional customs in my country. Modern people are becoming more and more meticulous in developing the flavor of mooncakes, and many unique mooncakes have emerged. In fact, fruit mooncakes and fruit-flavored mooncakes are not the same thing, and sugar-free mooncakes are not really sugar-free. What about mooncakes with health ingredients added to them?
Mooncakes have different flavors and ingredients and must follow corresponding production standards. Even mooncakes have strict "national standards".
Moon cake is a kind of food defined in this way: using wheat flour and other cereal flour or plant flour, oil, sugar, etc. as the main raw materials to make a cake crust, wrapping various fillings, and processing. It is a traditional traditional food mainly eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Holiday food.
According to national standards, the addition of lotus seeds does not mean that it can be called lotus seed mooncake. It has strict regulations on the proportion of ingredients. For example, the content of lotus seeds in lotus seed mooncakes should not be less than 60%, and only those with 100% lotus seed content can be called pure lotus seed paste mooncakes; the chestnut content in the fillings of chestnut paste mooncakes should not be less than 60%; Only when ham, sausage and other meat products are added, and the content must not be less than 5%, can it be called meat-filled mooncakes.
There are many mango, strawberry, and cantaloupe-flavored mooncakes on the market. In fact, they cannot be called fruit mooncakes, but can only be called fruit-flavored mooncakes. Only those with a pulp content of more than 25% can be called fruit mooncakes. As for fruit-flavored mooncakes, the main ingredient is not fruit. It is actually made of winter melon and food flavors. If you look carefully at the ingredient list, you will find that many fruit-flavored mooncakes have winter melon at the front. In the ingredient list, the higher a certain ingredient is arranged, the greater its proportion.
Not only fruit-flavored mooncakes, winter melon is also found in ingredients such as cloud-legged mooncakes, five-nut mooncakes, and flower mooncakes. Mainly because winter melon is cheaper, better preserved than fruits, has high fiber content, good taste, is colorless and tasteless and easy to shape, so it is often used in pastries.
At present, people are paying more and more attention to healthy eating, and sugar-free mooncakes, low-fat mooncakes, etc. are also introduced in mooncake production. So, do sugar-free mooncakes really contain no sugar?
In many pastries, including mooncakes, sugar accounts for a large proportion of the ingredient, ranging from 20% to 50%. Adding sugar not only adds sweetness but also changes the texture of the dough, making baked pastries softer or crispier. Fan Zhihong, associate professor at the School of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering at China Agricultural University, pointed out that sugar-free mooncakes are not really sugar-free, they just do not contain traditional sucrose. For example, if you switch to other syrup ingredients such as maltose syrup and fructose syrup, it still contains the same calories as sucrose and will increase blood sugar.
A company in Beijing is rushing to make Mid-Autumn moon cakes.
There are also some sugar-free mooncakes that have neither sucrose nor syrup added, but are mostly replaced with sugar alcohol sweeteners. According to my country's food nutrition labeling regulations, products with a sugar content of less than 0.5% can be legally labeled as "sugar-free products." The amount of sugar added in traditional mooncakes is very large. For example, a traditional mooncake recipe requires 30 grams of sugar. If you use a sweetener that is 200 times sweeter than white sugar, you only need to add 0.2 grams of white sugar. 29.8 grams of sugar. The weight gap is replaced by sweeteners such as sugar alcohols.
It should be noted that sugar alcohol sweeteners are not easily absorbed in the small intestine, so they are low in calories and raise less sugar. However, after entering the large intestine, they will increase the osmotic pressure in the intestine, promote intestinal movement, and easily cause diarrhea and abdominal pain. Everyone has different tolerances to sugar alcohols, and most people may have diarrhea if they consume more than 20 grams at a time. Some countries such as the United States stipulate that the words "excessive consumption may cause laxatives" must be marked on the labels of sugar alcohol foods to remind consumers.
Experts remind people with weak digestive functions and patients with irritable bowel syndrome to read the ingredient list on food labels and strictly limit mooncakes containing sugar alcohols.
Nowadays, more and more ingredients are joining the mooncake family. In addition to meat, fish, crayfish, chocolate and other ingredients, some mooncakes also contain health ingredients such as bird's nest, sea cucumber, abalone, and spirulina.
In Fan Zhihong's view, most health-care ingredients are only added in small amounts, while mooncakes are seasonal foods that are eaten occasionally, and the functions these ingredients can play are relatively limited. Consumers can try it, but there is no need to be superstitious about its health care functions. Even if the filling ingredients themselves may have certain nutritional and health-care value, it is doubtful whether they can play a health-care role when added to mooncakes with high sugar, high fat and high calories.
This year, Shanghai Dexing Pavilion collaborated with the time-honored Guangdong brand "Guanghe Fermented Bean Curd" for the first time to create a new trendy flavor - Nanru Fresh Meat Mooncake. Photo by Haishal.
Experts remind patients with chronic diseases to pay due attention to the composition of ingredients when choosing mooncakes. Patients with hyperlipidemia and coronary heart disease are not suitable to eat custard mooncakes and ham mooncakes with too much saturated fat and sugar; people with gallstones and cholecystitis are not suitable to eat egg yolk and lotus paste mooncakes; people with high uric acid problems Try not to choose mooncakes containing seafood; people who are allergic to nuts should also be careful to choose mooncakes containing nuts.
Due to the high carbohydrate content in moon cakes, it can be used to replace staple foods and sweets when eating, and correspondingly reduce staple foods such as rice and steamed buns. In addition, mooncakes can also be eaten with light tea to relieve fatigue and be healthier.
Every Mid-Autumn Festival, a mooncake with a special flavor often triggers discussion. Some people like it, but others find it unpalatable, just like coriander among vegetables and durian among fruits. It is Wuren mooncake. What do botanists think of five-nut mooncakes?
According to the new "national standard" for mooncakes released in 2015: the mass fraction of nut content in the filling should not be less than 20%, which is processed using five main raw materials such as walnut kernels, almonds, olive kernels, melon seeds and sesame seeds. Filled mooncakes can be called five-nut mooncakes. The "five kernels" contained in it are relatively healthy ingredients.
Five-nut mooncake is probably one of the most controversial mooncakes.
Botanist Dr. Shi Jun believes that the highlight of five-nut mooncakes is sesame oil, which can increase its aroma when placed in the mooncakes. The olive kernel is a special existence, and it is not directly related to the olive oil on the market. Olive oil comes from Olea europaea, a crop native to the Mediterranean region. The main source of oil is their pulp. The olive kernels come from olives and olives native to my country. After eating the olive flesh and breaking open the date pit-like olive pit, the olive kernels are hidden inside. Olive kernels are high in fat and taste crunchy and delicious.
In Shi Jun's view, the reason why five-nut mooncakes have become the most criticized mooncakes is related to some of the ingredients. After the green and red silk is added to the five-nut mooncake, it becomes a "dark dish". The raw material of Qinghongsi is citrus peel or unripe papaya. However, during the processing process, the smell of the citrus peel itself will change greatly, and finally it will have a complex aroma and special taste. Another example is winter melon candy. It doesn't taste like candy, let alone winter melon, but like fat meat full of oil. Many people’s five-nut mooncakes taste “fatty”, probably because of the winter melon sugar.
