Couldn’t give a fig? Perhaps you should. Date potential: natural colour and sweet solutions.
As consumers become more label conscious and wary of artificial additives we are seeing a move to sweetening products such as drinks, desserts and energy bars, with date syrup, figs and honey. Companies such as Crescent Dates in California, The Premium Date Co of Iran and Tehran based, The Peaceful World, all offer date syrup and date liquid sweetener. These concentrated liquid sweeteners are important to today’s clean label aware consumers, as they offer a completely natural and easily understood sweetening solution.
The Al Barakah Company for instance, offers date syrup, date paste and chopped dates using the slogan ‘the new secret ingredient’. In the Middle East, date milk has been drunk for centuries and this is a flavour that can easily translate into premium milkshakes and milk protein drinks for West and East Europe. Zanjabila, for example, is one company already manufacturing date milk in tall clear, embossed PET bottles.
Generally, dates offer a brown or golden tone to the foodstuffs with which they are being blended. One company in Tehran, The Nooshineh Agro-Industrial Company offers de- coloured date concentrate under the Golshan brand name for companies looking for a lighter colour tone.
Dates are a moderate source of vitamin A with inherent antioxidant properties and are also high in potassium, so helping to control heart rate and blood pressure. They are rich in calcium, copper and magnesium and, of course, contain simple sugars such as fructose and dextrose. However, a few dates contain enough nutrition and energy giving sugars to keep a nomad alive in the dessert for a day and their high calorific value means they should not be regarded in the realms of many other fruits but used in moderation.
Another new move in using dates is to create organic date balsamic vinegar. The companies already producing vinegars with a date base include Date Lady, Tirooj and Bateel.
Figs (Ficus Carica) also contain a wide variety of minerals, and when used in spreads, jams and vinaigrettes make a healthy dietary addition, especially in aiding digestion, but again only when used in moderation. In fact, figs are an inverted fruit, and the flower of this fruit blooms inside. When we bite into a fig we are in fact eating multiple fruits. Some of the more unusual foods being made using figs include Te Mata – Drunken figs, Go Figa Superfood Powder, Lyo Coconut porridge with figs, Ginger fig tea from Gyro and a wide variety of fig energy bars. This naturally sweet fruit is increasingly being used to sweeten manufactured products which would otherwise have a sharp taste. Fika – the rhubarb and fig preserve is just one such example.
As today’s consumers look for products that are completely natural date and fig syrup is being used more frequently for its intense sweetening capabilities and natural credentials. The question is: will the price rise or fall as more agricultural growers cotton on to this clean label trend?
By Claire Phoenix, First published on Food Matters Live, June 2018.