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Wasabi or not Wasabe - read the label

by Martin Field

Wine lovers will probably know that under Australian labelling laws a wine can be called by the name of a single grape varietal, for example, cabernet sauvignon, if the bottle contains at least 85 percent cabernet sauvignon.

I was reminded of this legal requirement whilst reading the ingredients listed on a bottle of S&B Wasabi Sauce I purchased recently. It contained not 85 percent of Wasabi (or Wasabe), not 33 percent, not 5 percent, but a miniscule 0.1 percent!

The ingredients, in order of descending proportion, were: water, rapeseed oil (contains antioxidant 306 - tocopherols concentrate, mixed), sugar, tapioca starch, horseradish (4.5 percent), salt, corn starch, vinegar, egg yolk, emulsifier (475 - polyglycerol esters of fatty acids), flavour, thickener (415 - xanthan gum), wasabi (0.1percent), spices, acid (330 – citric acid), flavour enhancers (621 - monosodium L-glutamate, 635 - disodium 5' -ribonucleotides), colours (102 - tartrazine, 133 – brilliant blue FCF).

NB. In case you were wondering, I have translated the mystifying number codes into the names – in italics - of the mystifying chemicals they represent.

How can this be? Don’t ask. But I expected, naively perhaps, that I was buying wasabi sauce and that it would contain a significant amount of that ingredient. I would have been similarly annoyed if I’d bought a bottle labelled tomato sauce and found that it contained only 0.1 percent tomatoes.

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Posted by Martin Field on Thursday 24 August 2006 at 12:03