Choice taste test: the best Australian supermarket Christmas ham is also ‘one of the cheapest’
Consumer advocacy group Choice has found when it comes to supermarket Christmas hams, pork price is not necessarily an indicator of quality.In a blind taste test of 12 Christmas hams from Aldi, Coles, IGA and Woolworths, the best and worst-ranked pork products retail at almost identical prices.The best-scoring product was the Coles Christmas Beechwood Smoked Half Leg Ham, with a price per unit of $8/kg.Judges awarded it a score of 80% and described it as a “good overall ham” for its “mild but pleasant” aroma with “a nice balance between sweet and smoky flavours”.The worst-performing product, the Aldi Festive Selection Australian Half Leg Ham On-The-Bone, is similarly priced at $7.
99/kg.Judges remarked on its “pale, dry and uneven” appearance, “mild” flavour and “powdery, unpleasant” texture, and gave it a score of 61%.“The winning Coles ham was also one of the cheapest hams in our taste test … revealing that price doesn’t always indicate quality,” the Choice editorial director, Mark Serrels, said.The second-best product was Woolworths Mountain Ash Wood Double Smoked Half Leg Ham, which scored 75% and costs $13/kg, followed in third place by Woolworths Bone In Half Leg Ham with a score of 70%, which retails for $8/kg.By comparison, Choice says the most expensive ham, Aldi Specially Selected Premium Free Range Boneless Ham, cost $21.
99/kg and scored only 68%, placing it in fifth place.The panel of three judges sampled the hams cold and assessed them for their taste and texture, as well as appearance and aroma.“First and foremost you don’t want the ham to be overcooked … overcooked hams can be stringy and dry,” said judge David Stössel of Sydney butcher Feather and Bone.He said most of the tested hams were overcooked, but the first and second-best scoring products were cooked well and had a “lovely moisture”.Fellow judge and food consultant Brigid Treloar said the winning ham was good value for money.
“It was very well priced.And for a family trying to put something special on the table at Christmas time, that’s terrific.”Choice said when it comes to buying Christmas hams, consumers should consider buying Australian pork, as indicated by the “Australian Pork” logo or country of origin labelling.Eleven of the 12 tested hams claimed to use Australian pork.Additionally, Choice advises consumers to buy sow stall-free hams.
According to the RSPCA, a standard sow stall is a 2-metre by 60cm crate used to house a female pig during part of her pregnancy – the sow can stand and take a step backward or forward but cannot turn around.These conditions are more likely to result in higher stress and insufficient rest and sleep for the sows and, according to Choice, a poorer-quality ham.Three of the taste-test hams claimed to use sow stall-free pork but Choice did not verify these claims.If consumers inadvertently buy a bad-tasting ham, Stössel said it can be rescued by adding a simple marmalade glaze.Carefully remove the skin from the ham while keeping the fat on, then gently warm some marmalade in a saucepan and brush it over the ham fat.
Then warm the ham in the oven to caramelise the glaze.“If someone tastes the ham and thinks, ‘oh this isn’t so good’, that’s what I would do.”
BP to scrap paid rest breaks and most bank holiday bonuses for forecourt staff
BP is ditching paid rest breaks and most bank holiday bonuses for 5,400 workers in its petrol forecourts as it attempts to offset a planned rise in the independent living wage.The company has told workers in its 310 company-run forecourts that it will be changing their benefits in February. Workers at a further 850 BP-branded forecourts run by partners are on different pay deals.BP is an accredited member of the Living Wage Foundation’s fair pay scheme, under which employers commit to pay staff an annually set wage to meet living costs.Hourly pay for BP’s affected workers will rise to a minimum of £13
Cloudflare outage hits major web services including X, LinkedIn and Zoom – business live
Technical problems at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare today have taken a host of websites offline this morning.Cloudflare said shortly after 9am UK time that it “is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs [application programming interfaces – used when apps exchange data with each other].Cloudflare has also reported it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is monitoring the results.But the outage has affected a number of websites and platforms, with reports of problems accessing LinkedIn, X, Canva – and even the DownDetector site used to monitor online service issues.Last month, an outage at Cloudflare made many websites inaccessible for about three hours
I spent hours listening to Sabrina Carpenter this year. So why do I have a Spotify ‘listening age’ of 86?
Many users of the app were shocked, this week, by this addition to the Spotify Wrapped roundup – especially twentysomethings who were judged to be 100“Age is just a number. So don’t take this personally.” Those words were the first inkling I had that I was about to receive some very bad news.I woke up on Wednesday with a mild hangover after celebrating my 44th birthday. Unfortunately for me, this was the day Spotify released “Spotify Wrapped”, its analysis of (in my case) the 4,863 minutes I had spent listening to music on its platform over the past year
Elon Musk’s X fined €120m by EU in first clash under new digital laws
Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has been fined €120m (£105m) after it was found in breach of new EU digital laws, in a ruling likely to put the European Commission on a collision course with the US billionaire and potentially Donald Trump.The breaches, under consideration for two years, included what the EU said was a “deceptive” blue tick verification badge given to users and the lack of transparency of the platform’s advertising.The commission rules require tech companies to provide a public list of advertisers to ensure the company’s structures guard against illegal scams, fake advertisements and coordinated campaigns in the context of political elections.In a third breach, the EU also concluded that X had failed to provide the required access to public data available to researchers, who typically keep tabs on contentious issues such as political content.The ruling by the European Commission brings to a close part of an investigation that started two years ago
McLaren will use team orders in quest for F1 world drivers’ title in Abu Dhabi
Zak Brown has said McLaren will use team orders for Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri if required to ensure the team secure the Formula One drivers’ championship in the season finale at Abu Dhabi on Sunday.With Red Bull’s Max Verstappen trailing Norris by 10 points, the Dutchman still has a good shot at taking the title from McLaren’s grasp. Piastri is a further six points back. Having spent all season allowing their drivers to race and attempting to be scrupulously fair to both, Brown announced at the Yas Marina circuit that if circumstances rendered it necessary, they would use orders.“Yes, of course
‘We’re all human’: Joe Root defends England over costly dropped catches on day two
Joe Root has insisted that human error rather than poor preparation lay behind a string of dropped catches during a day of toil in the field for England. Travis Head, Alex Carey – twice – Josh Inglis and Michael Neser all got lifelines as Australia ended day two of the second Test on 378 for six, a lead of 44.“We worked as hard as we could in the lead-up to this, we had five days of prep and we did a huge amount of catching,” Root said. “We made sure we utilised those two [training] sessions under lights well. You can’t replicate that surface, the bounce, the way the nicks come
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