Buying in the store white sweet brusochki, interspersed with powdered sugar, it is difficult to believe that this is an originally Russian delicacy. After all, the shop pastillas taste like eastern sweets - marshmallow or rahat-lukum. But, despite the Latin name (pastillus - means "cake"), invented this dessert in Kolomna, in the distant XIV century. The fact is that a Russian oven is needed to make the pastille , which has the effect of slow cooling down. Home pastil previously made with whipped sour apple sauce with the addition of various berries - cranberries, mountain ash, raspberries or currants. Honey was used to make sweets.
Since the XV century in the manufacturing process included another component - egg whites. They gave the product a beautiful cream shade and helped maintain the desired consistency during long-term storage. But the calorie content of the pastille increased. Before the revolution, three types of this dessert were known: Kolomensky - traditional, with a homogeneous structure, Rzhev - with thin cowberry or rowan interlayers - and Belevsky, in which layers of baked apples and protein bisse alternated. Russian pastil was so popular that from the XIX century it was exported.
Considering the calorie content of the pastille, you should immediately make a reservation: what kind of product do we mean - home or shop? After all, the food industry is now releasing brusochki using a simplified technology. It is clear that carefully beat the apple puree is expensive, and therefore use emulsifiers and stabilizers. Sweetness dessert gives no longer honey, but ordinary sugar. In addition, food colorings and perfume fragrances are added to it to give the product a marketable look. All this chemistry in the most deplorable way affects not only the calorie content of the pastille, increasing its nutritional value, but also on useful properties.
How to be? Proceeding from the foregoing, one can not help thinking: is it possible to make a pastille at home? Easily! Take a kilogram of berries (for example, raspberries), rinse, dry, close the container tightly with a lid and send it to a warm oven. Wipe hot berries through a sieve. Puree put on a small fire, add a glass of sweet fruit juice and boil until the volume decreases by one and a half to two times. After that, spread the pastille over the paper-strewn molds and dry in the oven at 60 ° C. The finished product roll in powdered sugar. The caloric content of the pastille produced at home should not exceed 300 kcal per 100 g.
However, you can find a quality purchase product. It costs more, but its useful properties are much higher. If agar-agar and pectin are added in the fruit and berry puree and egg whites to form a gelatinous consistency, this is a good, useful pasta. Caloric content 1 pc. So low that it does not hurt your figure. After all, 100 g of the product contains only 323 kcal. Agar-agar is gelatin obtained from algae. It is rich in iodine, calcium, iron and phosphorus. Pectin lowers cholesterol, clears the body of toxins, improves intestinal motility. Therefore, this pasta is considered a dietary product and recommended by the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences for baby food.