dabs: not at all :O

GS: he ate quite a bit

sotong: you cook la ar

Notty Gurl: Yeah i Love their house brand chocolate powder. Thanks

frostier: prego spaghetti sauce, spaghetti. cook.

sharon: heh me too, but sometimes if i’m buying stuff, i’d get house brands. e.g. dishwashing liquid. but detergent for washing clothes must be dynamo.

wingz: really? terrornyer

ST: there was a time when i bought tesco house brand stuff, and the expiry dates were frightfully near. imported la i guess.

dean: fusion mah. got ikan bilis some more

simon: ya i forced it down their sorry throats

joe: nokia n95!! cos you wouldn’t be free, and it was random anyway

Grant S: they didn’t have san remo, and i can’t be arsed to learn how to make fresh spaghetti

spongefox: NEVAR!

Dree was complaining the whole night about overeating and threaten never to have spaghetti ever again.

And Suan, when will you ever stop linking me to spongefox ? = X

Extractfrom an on-line article:

But why do these noodles work so well? One reason is obvious once you look closely
enough: The surface of the raw artisanal noodles are rough, rather than smooth. This is true
in varying degrees; the Latini noodles were by far the roughest, almost to the point of being grainy.

After the starches have swelled during cooking, the difference isn’t so obvious. But it’s still
enough to allow the spaghetti to hold more sauce, amplifying its flavor.

Dried pastas have had their ups and downs. For a period in the 1980s, they were scoffed at
by foodies as inferior to fresh. That is over. Since the ’90s, exports of Italian dried pasta,
already high to begin with, have continually increased.

It’s important to recognize that dried pastas are not fresh pastas that have been dehydrated. Except for dried egg noodles, which are a very small part of the market, dried pastas are made from different ingredients, in a different way. Fresh pastas are made from eggs and soft wheat flour ground from the seeds of the wheat variety Triticum vulgare and are rolled out.
Dried pastas are made from water and hard semolina flour ground from Triticum durum and are extruded–or pressed through dies.

In fact, by Italian statute, dried pastas can contain nothing but semolina and water. With
many Italian firms opening factories in the United States to manufacture the noodles, one way
to tell if it’s the real thing is to read the ingredient labels. If they contain additions such as
niacin, iron or folic acid, they were probably made in America, not Italy, even if the label
reads “Italy’s No. 1 Pasta.”

Of course, there’s nothing inherently superior about Italian-made pastas. In fact, many of
them have their roots in America. Though Italy is the world’s leading producer of durum wheat,
it cannot grow enough to keep up with the world’s hunger for Italian noodles. This year Italy
will import about 650,000 tons of durum wheat from the U.S.–more than half of what is grown in
the country.

The secret to great pasta isn’t just the material it’s made from, it’s also the way it is made. That
is a process that has been refined over hundreds of years and is still being refined today.

First, the flour and the water are kneaded together. If you have ever tried to do this at home, especially using gluten-rich semolina flour, you know how difficult it can be.

This, perhaps predictably, went nowhere. More successful was a water-powered
kneading machine introduced in Naples at about the same time that used a series of
paddles mounted on rods.

Once the dough is formed, it must be pressed through dies and cut into shapes. Originally, the
dies were cut out of wood, then bronze. Teflon dies, which were introduced in the ’70s,
were considered a major advance because they were much easier to clean and, because of
the reduced friction, kept the dough cooler.

After the noodles have been cut into shapes, they must be dried. This is not nearly as simple
as it seems. Moisture evaporates only from the surface, and once the surface of a noodle
has dried out it hardens, preventing the moisture from the interior from evaporating. Left to its
own devices in a stable climate, pasta would form a dry crust around the outside and leave
the interior wet, prone to acidification and hospitable to unfriendly bugs.

It takes a combination of drying & moistening for pasta to dry thoroughly. With industrialization, pasta makers began to use two closed rooms, one hot and dry and one cooler and more humid. Today’s factories have streamlined that process with climate controlled drying chambers that operate much faster.

Technologies used in cutting and drying pasta are at the heart of the differences between
artisanal and mass-market spaghetti today.

The rough surface of the artisanal pastas, which help to make them so friendly to sauces, are created by the old-fashioned bronze dies. The new Teflon ones may speed production, but they also make a noodle that is too slippery to grip sauce in the same intimate way.

Less well-known is the difference in drying technology. While modern methods can dry pastas
in less than four hours using temperatures around 185 degrees, most artisanal makers favor an old-fashioned process that takes nearly two days to dry the pasta at between 105 and 115 degrees.

The debate between the two factions is quite heated itself. The new ways, the Latinis say, result in “nonexistent flavors and aromas and a standardized ‘plasticized’ pasta.”, however, the industrialists slap back, saying, “the use of low temperatures in drying pasta … not only has no sense at all, but is an absurdity from the productive point of view.”

But yeah some things you are better off skipping if there’s only house brand, pop to your local kedai runcit and pick up whatever over-priced nonsense they have.

Notty Gurl, have you ever tried the Tesco cream crackers? They are yummy! Check the packaging, and you will realize that they are produced by Hwa Tai! (Batu Pahat ftwww! :D)

Everyone knows that the better local biscuits are produced by Hwa Tai / Munchy :D

Hmm, maybe we can all share our experience in here as to local house brands. Can save money, summore can know which is good, and which arent!

I vote for Tesco cream crackers, and Tesco ice cream potong. (Jagung rocks!)