Nowadays, many plants and workshops are working to produce foodstuff such as tomato paste. Naturally, all products may not have a high quality. If you attach importance to the wholesome food which you eat, you need to be aware of features of high-quality tomato paste to select the best tomato paste.
In bad quality and nonstandard tomato paste which is produced and sold as homemade tomato paste in small workshops, two toxic matters, Sodium benzoate, and ultramid are found. Not cooking nonstandard homemade tomato pastes under vacuum conditions results in the creation of ultramid. When nonstandard homemade tomato paste is produced, Sodium benzoate is added to the paste as an additive.
Using low quality and nonstandard tomato paste can cause gastrointestinal diseases. For this reason, we study some features of high-quality tomato paste which you should consider when purchasing it.
One of the features of high-quality tomato paste is that it reflects low light. Most of the low-quality tomato paste contains starch to reduce production expenses. This causes a strong light reflection from the tomato paste. Therefore, if you see that there is a strong light reflection from the tomato paste, you should know that starch has been used in this tomato paste and the tomato paste has poor quality.
Of the features of high-quality tomato paste are to homogenize the tomato paste and not use other vegetables in the production process which can be found with simple methods. One of the simple methods to recognize it is to taste the tomato paste. The high-quality tomato paste will melt like chocolate without residue remain. But if vegetables and other additives are used in the production of tomato paste, some amount of these contents will remain in your mouth after melting. Another method is to cook tomato paste in oil. If there remain some black spots or granules of the tomato paste, the tomato paste will contain impurities such as starch, squash, and other vegetable elements.
It is impossible to determine the high purity of the tomato paste without using laboratory equipment. One of the features of high-quality tomato paste is that if its brix ranges from 27 to 30%, the content of lycopene should be more than 40mg/100g.
The maximum salt used in tomato paste has been defined in the standard as 1.5% of which 0.5% relates to the natural salt of the tomato itself. To produce the standard tomato paste, the minimum salt has been used. A high-quality tomato paste also should lack any preserver and the additive which is not generally recognized as safe. Of course, it is not possible to study these cases but in the laboratory.
To produce ChinChin tomato paste, no preserver and the additive which is not generally recognized as safe is used and this is evidenced by samplings done by the concerned organizations at country level, according to which quality of ChinChin tomato paste has been confirmed.
