Peter, Biz, or for anyone that is interested,
A lady specialist called me from Domino’s Specialty Ingredients. She explained all about molasses to me, and how you can’t really get a sweeter taste with using a lot of molasses in a product. She said there is a thing such as “Fancy Molasses”, but that is only sold to a Canadian business, and is made special for them. She said it isn’t really much sweeter than the Homemaid product. She said the “Fancy Molasses” is only 65-75% sucrose. The Homemaid molasses is about 70% sucrose. She told me the difference in how sweet molasses tastes is by the ash content in molasses. The more ash in molasses the sweeter the product is. More ash improves the flavor of molasses. She told me basically Grandma’s Original molasses is almost exactly like Homemaid molasses. She said the Homemaid molasses has the highest sucrose level of Domino’s molasses products sold in the US. The ash in the Homemaid product is about 3 ½ %. She told me the other percent in molasses is water. She also said the lighter the molasses is the sweeter it will taste. She said more impurities equal more flavor in molasses.
I told the specialist what we were trying to achieve and what kind of pizza we were trying to clone. She had never heard about MM’s, but was interested. I told her what we had tried so far, and how we had trouble with getting the crust to taste sweeter. She said the only thing to do was to add some kind of sweetener to the molasses. She said even if we used a really high percent of molasses in the dough, the crust wouldn’t get that much sweeter. I told the specialist that MM’s claims to use no regular refined sugar in their dough, but doesn’t claim not to use refined sugars. She said I could try Evaporated Cane Juice (ECJ) in either liquid or crystallized form.
http://www.dominospecialtyingredients.com/?pageId=1090&rowId=11197 She said the crystallized form is the best to use. I asked her if I also could get samples of the ECJ. She said yes, and all I had to do was send her an email with my request, my name, business name, address, phone number and email. She gave me her email to send the request. She said she would send me the technical information.
At the end of our talking she wanted to know where MM’s had operations, and I told her there was one in Washington, D.C. that just opened. She said she is going to be in Washington, D.C. this weekend and is going to go there and try their pizzas. I did give her the MM’s website for her to look at in the email.
In the end, I now wonder just how healthy a MM’s pizza is if that much sucrose is in their pizza dough.
Norma
