Published: March 7, 2007
MATTHEW REICH is a baker dedicated to natural ingredients. He prefers
butter in the cookies and brioche he turns out at Tom Cat Bakery in
Long Island City, Queens, and like many professional cooks he applauds
the public health effort to get artificial trans fat out of food.
But, in a twist of science, the law and what some call trans-fat
hysteria, Mr. Reich and other wholesale bakers are being forced to
substitute processed fats like palm oil and margarine for good
old-fashioned butter because of the small amounts of natural trans fat
butter contains.
Some researchers believe that the trans fat
that occurs naturally in butter, meat, milk and cheese might actually
be healthy. But to satisfy companies that want to call their foods
completely free of trans fats, bakers like Mr. Reich are altering
serving sizes, cutting back on butter and in some cases using
ingredients like trans fat-free margarine.
Mr. Reich still uses
butter for many of his clients, but he has had to adjust what he bakes
for almost 500 Starbucks stores from Philadelphia to Hartford.
....
“For us, it’s easier for the customer to walk in and see zero grams
trans fat than zero grams artificially created trans fat,” said Brandon
Borman, a company spokesman.
.....
“We’ve gone back and replaced all of the nice, good butter with
supposedly trans fat-free margarine,” said Rick Doyle, the Schwartz
regional manager. “The hardest one for us was the croissant. We
replaced butter with palm oil. From my perspective it’s not a croissant
any more. It’s lost all its lamination and flavor.”
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