Across the breakfast table: do you expect orange marmalade to be made from real oranges? You're in for a surprise.(Food: marmalade)

Publication: Choice (Chippendale, Australia)

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Australian Consumers' Association

IN A NUTSHELL

* Some of the orange marmalades we looked at have more fruit than our homemade version (far right). But some have no proper oranges in them at all--they're made from reconstituted juice and orange pulp.

* Choosing 'diet' marmalade can make a big difference to your breakfast kilojoules.

Marmalade noun a jelly-like preserve with fruit (usually cirrus) suspended in small pieces. (Macquarie Dictionary) Like the compilers of the Macquarie Dictionary, we naively thought that marmalade had to be made with fruit. Now we know better.

We checked the labels of all the brands of orange marmalade we could find in supermarkets (33 in all) and were rather stunned to find three with no orange fruit in them at all--BAXTERS Fine Cut Orange, GRANDESSA (from Aldi) and IGA MAPLE GROVE Breakfast. They had orange pulp and reconstituted juice, but no actual fruit. And COTTEE'S Breakfast--100% fruit, despite its name, in fact only contains 9% (the rest is mostly fruit sugar syrup, but would you have thought that?).

WHICH HAVE THE MOST ORANGES?

When we made our own marmalade (see The homemade version, far right), carefully weighing everything we found it was 45% citrus fruit....

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