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Shopping for Fructose and Dextrose Kate Capek © 2004 |
| Now
that you know that Fructose and Dextrose do wonderful things for your
henna paste, where can you buy them? There always ways to look for ingredients that seem a bit out of the norm. The first thing to keep in mind is NAMES -- you can't find it if you don't know how it's labeled. The food industry in the United States has to list the ingredients in DECREASING order on the "label statement" or "label declaration". While this won't tell you the proportion of the given components, it give you an idea. "Check the dec" every time that you but a product. So long as the label is accurate, a company can change ingredients at will. The most common reason for this is "Least Costing" . That is usually NOT touted on the advertising, but if someone it trying to push "Low cal" or "reduced carbs", there will probably be some advertising claiming the change as an advantage. Always look to see if the ingredient that you want is one of the first couple of ingredients. "Glucose" & "Dextrose" are different words for the same thing. Dextrose can often be found in either the bakery section of a grocery store or in a health food type shop. You can also find it as an ingredient in other goods as it is used as CARRIER in number of powdered items -- Sweet & Low being the most famous (it's 97% dextrose). "Fructose" can also be listed "fruit sugar" and it can also often be found in either the grocery or the health food store. The easiest place to find it as an ingredient is in the "sport drink" type product. A great many of these are heavily cut with fructose, but they have table sugar in them too. "Crystal Light" is one example of such a product. If you mix up the lemonade and use that instead of lemon juice and sugar, you will have a combination of acid, fructose and sucrose -- just about what you're looking for. If you don't feel like going on a hunting expedition, but still want the advantages of the monosaccharide sugars, you can break the bond in the table sugar (sucrose) and make a solution of acid, dextrose and fructose. That bond can be broken either by use of enzymes (not practical for home use) or by a combination of heat and acid. Pour a bottle of lemon juice into a stainless steel or enamel pot, dump in some plain table sugar (or brown sugar if you like), and some whole cloves if you like the scent. Turn the fire on LOW -- don't try to speed it up with rapid boiling -- and let it simmer until the level in the pot has reduced by about a third. Let it cool, strain the cloves out and bottle it (same bottle that the juice can in works fine -- just mark it so that your housemates don't chunk it into their iced tea). The syrup will last indefinitely in the fridge. There are other ingredients that would be interesting to experiment with: Corn Syrup Solids -- these mostly dextrose and maltose High fructose corn syrup -- mostly dextrose and fructose Maltodextrins -- hybrid compounds at varying points between corn starch and dextrose Back to Saccharides and Henna Paste Index Can't find what you're looking for? Try: The Henna Page Main Index http://www.hennapage.com/henna/mainindex.html *"Henna,
the
Joyous Body Art"
the Encyclopedia of Henna Catherine Cartwright-Jones © 2000 registered with the US Library of Congress TXu 952-968 |