Pure Dairy Free Sunflower Spread
Friday, May 14, 2010 at 09:29AM 
PURE DAIRY FREE SUNFLOWER SPREAD
Key points
- · Free from hydrogenated oils, artificial & GM ingredients but does contain Palm Oil
- · Suitable for cooking and baking
- · Suitable for vegetarians and vegans
- · Available in all big supermarkets and health food shops
Taste
I have a real issue with dairy free butter replacements: amongst many other things, their main down side tends taste. With most dairy free spreads you are left with a slightly chemical, bitter aftertaste in your mouth and the falsity of its flavour can outweigh the benefit of using a butter substitute at all. This especially applies to cooking with a butter replacement when both the taste and texture of the dairy free spread can appear totally false, and gives whatever you are making a very unnatural and unpleasant quality that immediately marks it out as ‘free from’ cooking. Pure Sunflower Spread is the only product on the market that comes close replicating the taste and texture of real butter; it has a creamy, neutral flavour that tastes natural rather than synthetic and so really lends itself to being for both sweet and savoury, just like the real thing. Sunflower oil itself is a very neutral tasting product and this seems to have translated to its spread form, it has a similar flavour to unsalted butter but has a much more intense yellow colour to it. A combination of sunflower and palm oil seems to lend a balance to the spread that means you aren’t so aware of its lack of dairy.
Texture
You can tell the quality of the Pure Sunflower spread by its creamy texture and the fact that it doesn’t split when heated. Instead it bubbles and froths as butter would and so is ideal to use as both a spread for toast, sandwiches, baked potatoes and the like, but also as a like for like butter substitute in baking.
Cookability
Pure sunflower spread is very versatile. I use it for everything from spreading on freshly baked bread, as the basis for making cakes and pastry, to making it into a herb or spice butter to rub in to chicken or meats before roasting. On all occasions the sunflower spread does just what it ought to, you don’t get any of the splitting or strange oily texture and flavour that I have found when cooking with other dairy free butter replacements, and so it makes it an ideal product to use in an allergy kitchen. So much so that I always keep two tubs of it in my fridge: one for using as a butter to spread and another for using in baking and cooking
Ingredients
Sunflower Oil (40%), Water, Vegetable Oils, Salt (0.75%), Emulsifier (Mono and Diglycerides of Vegetable Fatty Acids), Vitamin E, Vitamin A, Colour (Natural Carotenes), Vitamin D2, Vitamin B12
This is perhaps the products main downside. The inclusion of palm oil in its ingredients (masked under the title of ‘Vegetable Oils’) seems to a necessity in most dairy free replacements, despite it being totally unbeneficial to a person’s health. I avoid palm oil in nearly all its forms but I have to admit to ignoring its presence in Pure Sunflower Spread. The flavour and texture is so superior to any other butter replacement product on the market that the benefits far outweigh my issue with palm oil, but I feel that it’s inclusion in the product is worth mentioning.
Availability
You can buy a variety of Pure products in nearly every big supermarket and I am yet to be in a health food store that doesn’t stock it. It is also available at a number of online stores at a reasonable price, and making it a truly accessible product to source. You can find it at the following locations:
http://www.hollandandbarrett.co.uk
www.co-operative.co.uk/en/food
Reader Comments (3)
Pure Dairy Free is made on equipment shared with Soy.
I have a dairy intolerance but still have a bad reaction from this butter, has anyone else had the same problem?
This is not a healthy nor is it a cruelty free product. Orangutangs natural habitat is destroyed to plant palms for the oil and the Orangs are just left starving and homeless. When they go to villages to find food they are tied up and macheted to death. the babies ripped from dead mothers and kept as pets. Google a film called Green about palm ouil production. And do not believe the 'greenwash' from RPOS about 'sustainable' P oil. it does not exist.