Nutella uses a lot of palm oil from memory so other oils may not give the same mouth feel as well. Not at all suggesting you use palm oil either, just noting that there may always exist a difference.
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I didnât add any sugar,cocoa, milk not palm oil
You could try coconut oil instead to see if it works. They both have similar melting points (25-30°C) which means the final product consistency may be similar. Palm oil however is smoother/creamier on the palate.
May be next time. I only use coconut oil for body products and polishing the sinks âŠ
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I should state from the start that I am not distinguishing between directly named products, eg Coles brand, products that are house brands that have another name and cheaper competitors that are not specifically made for the house. My reason for that is that none (or almost none) of the supposed house products are actually made by the house, they are made by another party and badged for the house. These I distinguish from name brands; Kelloggs cereals, San Remo pasta, Uncle Tobyâs oats etc.
The various no-name pasta products that are available are just the same as the name brands but half the price or less, the same wheat, same taste and texture. Or rolled oats, identical to name brands and one third the price. How about tinned tomatoes or tomato paste? Just the same as the ones that are much more expensive. Nobody can distinguish nobrand cornflakes from Kelloggâs except by the price.
There is a nasty rumour about that some house brand products come off the same production line as big name but go into different packs. Anybody from the industry care to comment? How many possible ways are there to cook oat kernels, flatten them and dry them?
I donât think all house brand products are good but if you are not buying house brand for some of these products you are spending money for no good reason.
I am reminded of a very elderly relative who always buys Dairy Farmers milk. I asked why, could he taste the difference? He said he had never compared the taste because he never bought anything else. The reason? Because that is what his long dead sainted mother bought and so it must be the best.
Which illustrates where I started, we are actually talking about the relationship between brand name and price point much of the time not the relationship between quality and price.
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I donât see that. If there is any difference in cooking time it is a minute or two at most and that much energy is not going to cost you the difference in price. It is very hard to make any assumptions about pasta cooking time as the thickness is not standard, your nominal spaghetti (or any other shape) may vary in diameter from one brand to another regardless of price or name.
What could that possibly be? I think if they add sawdust it has to be listed 
.None that I can see list any ingredient other than durum wheat. The content is very much the same in protein, energy and carbohydrate. Different brands do have different amounts of salt but the cook should always deal with that as they do for variations in cooking time.
I didnât understand, it looked like it was following on from pasta. So what is the story with noname pasta? Why does it take longer to cook, or do I have that wrong too?
It is one small cost difference. I recollect another reason was the difference in the marketing and costs to promote a well known brand vs the limited to none for the lesser.
Consider also!
I discovered a massive rabbit hole looking at making pasta whether fresh, hard dried or factory. For fresh home made pasta the only consistent recommendation is to not use self raising flour.
For Italy dried pasta must be made from flour produced from a selected portion of the endosperm (semolina) of durum wheat. Only the harder (higher protein portion) of the endosperm is selected. The rejected grindings from the endosperm are used to produce durum wheat flour.
When reading from an epicurean article or high profile brand press release pasta making appears a magic art that imparts both measurable and implied perfection. Hence product and brand recognition, and facts reimagined where appropriate, IMO.
However, a food scientist might not be so likely to split hairs or assign special properties to the type of metal alloy used in the dies for forming machine made pasta.
Of note is the obsession with chefs making their own pasta (hand made and fresh) which is also traditionally how pasta (noodles) are made in Asia. Apologies again to Italy and any notion if it is not made in Italy itâs not pasta. A reality is hand made pasta and dry factory pasta are not the same product. Another reality is in Italy the two different pastas are not interchangeable. IE each variation in pasta product fresh or dry is paired with a particular dish/sauce and often with regional preference.
As to the choice of durum wheat and the portion of the semolina selected during milling. It is all about the gluten, high protein content of the selected portion that imparts the desired properties of plasticity, elasticity to the end product. Durum wheat grew well in northern Italy and produced high gluten (hard grained) wheat leading to recognition of it for pasta making.
Is there potential for difference between two dried pastas of the same type? Substitution of the sourced flour with other wheat flours or grains is possible, subject to labelling requirements. Whether the product is inferior in practice or imagination is open to consideration. There is also scope in how selective the producer is in the fraction of the endosperm taken in the milling process. The less of a fraction selected the more expensive the semolina flour. Whether any difference is likely to be significant is also for consideration.
There is a recurring observation concerning quality dried pasta worth considering. Good quality pasta is more resistant to over-cooking due to the quality of the semolina used. Worthy of a future cook off in the Choice kitchen of the various products from the supermarket shelves including fresh and hand made?
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Having worked for a large food company (think processed food). The things I learned were, they make no name goods on the same production line using the same ingredients but in different ratios. Ie cheaper means a bit more flour compared to premium. The cost of ring pull cans and their attendant foibles can constitute much more than 50% of the cost of the item. Even standard canning methods the cost of the ingredient is cheaper than the packaging.
While most peoples perception of cost of packaging is that even no name items now use full colour (i.e. expensive print runs) the reason premium labels cost more is because of the cost of consistent colour matching. Their perception is that the customer expects the quality of everything to be exactly the same no matter when it was purchased. So if you purchase a tin of say evaporated milk and the red portion is not exactly the same as the red on the tin in your store cupboard, you the customer are inclined to think that one or other of the tins may be compromised on quality and therefore may stray from repurchasing the item next time you are in need of it. No name items whilst in lots of cases are not inferior may not contain as much salt, seasoning, flavouring and cheaper ingredients still must have the main item (say baked beans for instance) of a standard that would still pass muster to a visual inspection for being fit for purpose. Whether you like the flavour of the sauce that the beans come with is a different thing to quality and price.
If you want to save money when shopping I highly recommend using a food delivery service for just one week. It arrives in a box which would easily balance on a chair or stool. Now compare that to what most families bring home in the boot of the car. And maybe adjust your food wastage by following suit.
I know I usually have three full carrier bags full one of which is milk so say two actual full bags of food. Thereâs only one of me! Plus a dog.
My grocery spend can be between $80 to $150 a week depending on the specials down the centre aisle in Aldi. Visiting Colesworth I spent $24 on 3 litres of milk 1kg of yoghurt and a pack of toilet rolls. I was horrified considering the same thing at Aldi would have cost me about $15. No difference in taste of milk or yoghurt and toilet rolls at $1 each v 50c or less. If I was on a tight budget which I have been, I buy cheapest veggies (in season) pasta, bread, tinned beans, and fruit. Itâs a hard habit to get out of, why pay 75c more for a tin of tomatoes? Open the can with a tin opener donât buy the ring pull version you are paying for the bit you throw away(recycle actually). Try to buy in bags or boxes without inner bags, again you will be paying for the bit you throw away! Donât buy prepackaged veggies again you are paying for someone to pack it and the materials, plus a portion will end up in compost because thereâs too much.
Advertising and quality control are a huge portion of everything we buy today. Think twice.
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You use your own inadequate taste buds as proof that there is no difference between name brands and no-name brands.
This is particularly telling, to me, in the context of the milk example you give.
I was part of a testing panel back in the 1970s when the federal government was attempting to justify its decision to give Canberrans no choice in the milk they drank, introducing a government monopoly offering a single milk. I had no trouble identifying each of the three anonymous samples, the Dairy Farmers milk, the Bega milk, and the government milk, much to the frustration of the bureaucrats in charge.
I also have no trouble distinguishing nobrand cornflakes from Kelloggâs in a blind taste test, even though I wouldnât choose to eat either, just as I have no trouble distinguishing poor-quality rolled oats from better-quality ones when I am making my own muesli. A lot of this comes from the quality of the original grain â you should be eating the really cheap oats that are deemed fit only for stockfeed, as clearly you wouldnât notice the difference.
This is also the reason why no-name pasta will be easily picked out in a blind test from San Remo etc, at least by those of us whose taste buds have not been desensitised by ideology â even if San Remo themselves are making the no-name pasta, they are making it with poorer quality ingredients and with cheaper production methods, hence the inferior results (and perhaps the longer time to cook observed by Gaby, something I have also noticed when giving a new house brand a go).
Likewise tinned tomatoes and tomato paste â more of the borderline-rotten tomatoes (and the green ones and the infested ones) will go to the production line producing the house brand, even in production facilities owned and used by name brands, because thatâs how you get the costs down to make the lower selling price possible.
There is also the issue of consistency in quality. Many decades ago there used to be a house brand of tinned sardines in independent supermarkets that my wife and I thought superior to any of the (much more expensive) name brands, until we opened one that was truly terrible. We kept buying the generic one in the hope that the bad tin would be just a one-off, but five or six excellent tins later we had another really bad one, and a few excellent tins after that another terrible one, so we switched back to King Oscar (or whatever) even though as a matter of economics we were still financially better off throwing out one in five of the cheaper tins.
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That may be doing the industry a dis-service. How grains are graded and classified for use is well established within the industry, and by regulation. Oats graded for milling are determined by the varietal and condition of the load or stock. Itâs a simple pass/fail assessment.
The differences in handling, processing and packaging costs for oats differ by a minimal value whether a premium grain or other.
The Aussie farm delivered into depot prices of raw oats and competitive prices of imports vary seasonally. In crude terms $500 per tonne or $0.50 per kg is a useful assumption about the nominal relative value of food graded oats. At $2 per kg Woolies brand rolled oats is adding $1.50/kg of value to the product.
For the big brand Uncle Tobyâs at Woolies marked down $5.00 per kg shelf price itâs difficult to see in comparison where the extra $3.00/kg of added value has come from. Some, likely a 50% ($0.25) premium may go to the grain grower, a few cents to losses in milling with the rejects going to waste (stock feed) and some extra cents for the cardboard box. How many are really tasting the mind trickery of the other $2.50/kg on the plate?
P.S.
Iâm a more one for porridge and oats in cooking. Itâs what is added to a muesli that makes the flavour, for my preferences.
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This remark is not very constructive. Firstly, the concept of proof in relation to questions depending on empirical data is rather doubtful, science is about determining the best explanation available at the time - not certainty. Proof is for mathematics or philosophy.
Secondly you provide no objective evidence, such as data demonstrating that shoppers can tell the difference between cheap and expensive foods or that price is correlated with quality. All you are doing is claiming you know better - exactly what you say I have done.
Ideology? What ideology is that? You must mean my faith in His Noodliness. It isnât so, when my Holey Colander is on my head I speak truly and negative thoughts cannot enter. Forever and ever, Ramen.
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Touché.
(Although I do have the evidence of my blind taste test of those three brands of milk â well, two brands and one no-brand! Sadly, that little experiment was not written up and peer-reviewed for a prestigious scientific journalâŠ)
And there are objective standards for the quality of ingredients that go into manufactured foods â and indeed for the quality of primary produce, like oats.
Of course, the history of commerce is littered with examples of rapacious capitalists passing off foodstuffs made from poor quality ingredients as luxury goods, or at least as worthy of a higher price than their budget nature should dictate. Dick Smith springs to mind!
Not to mention those delicious experiments with wine buffs tasting cheap wine from bottles with expensive labels!!
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Norco sell the same milk to Coles as they bottle under their brand. Different bottle, different price, but exactly the same milk. Nestle often supply generics in dairy lines, no different to their brands but sold at a lower cost and ensures Nestle stay well entrenched in the market.
Sugar regardless of packaging is sugar. I often find generic branded salmon is the same if not better than named brands and at substantially less cost. Pepper and salt again both equal products.
Ice cream particularly Aldi brands are great products and again cheaper than branded.
Oats are definitely food grade, perhaps some slight difference in the milling with some genetics (not sure which cereals are GMO or not), cooking them makes them equal in taste and quality of texture.
I have noted some pasta are a bit softer than others when cooked over identical times but this occurs over both branded and non branded. Each batch needs to be tested when cooking to ensure good results.
Having worked in meat works that produced generic and branded meat products, the results are often just different packaging and a price determined by contract not ingredients. A guaranteed price and amount of sales is often what industries will take, and so accept a lower price for that certainty.
Often we are guided by our expectations of brands, now Woolworths and Coles are creating their own brands, marketed slightly different to more generic lines, still the same products but often will a higher price.
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You make some excellent points about the âmind trickery of the other $2.50/kg on the plateâ, made all the more telling by the numbers you deploy.
And itâs certainly true that the nuts and seeds and dried fruits make a bigger difference to the taste of any muesli than the quality of the rolled grains.
I was, but of course, speaking tongue-in-cheek when I recommended oats that failed to pass assessment as fit for human consumption as fit for the palate of poor syncretic! 
There are many ways in which better-quality rolled oats reveal themselves â I mentioned the amount of âdustâ in the packet in my post above (although I accept this will not be as much of an issue for porridge makers like syncretic as it is for muesli makers like me), but that dust also hides poor quality control in the form of contaminants. If your taste buds work even slightly better than syncreticâs, you should dip a finger into that dust and see what else you can taste.
Then there is the size of the rolled grain (always relative to how thick they have been rolled, and again, as I noted above, thicker is better for muesli but possibly worse for porridge) â the bigger the flake, the fatter the original grain, and fatter will almost always mean more flavoursome and more nutritious (and, for muesli makers, having a better texture).
Then there is colour, a more problematic indicator since it varies with variety as well as with the health of the original grain, but connoisseurs of rolled grains (rolled barley, rolled triticale etc as well as rolled oats) will insist they can tell a better tasting grain from its colour.
And then there is how the grain smells, how it feels etc, which often reflect the care that has been taken in storage of the original ingredients as much as in the production line and in the handling of the finished product.
I may be doing the industry a further dis-service, but I have always understood that generic products offer an opportunity to dispose of inferior product that did not pass quality control for the brand name. And house brands are often only generic-quality products in prettier packaging.
For that we have John West to thank and their many decades of one memorable premium product slogan.
For just as long we have been more than satisfied with the Coles brand at half the price. Woolies offer a similar priced product. Both are Pacific Coast Red Salmon by species and product of Alaska USA. The only discernible difference is out of the tin John West product from the same fishery presents slightly better.
That is exactly the message that the holders of name brands would like us all to absorb and repeat. A name can be worth a great deal of money. Look at Cocacola and how much they spend a year on legal action making sure that nobody else can call their sugar-water anything like their name. Is coke demonstrably superior? Does it matter?
Quite obviously some noname products are inferior but the controllers of names want us to accept that it is all.
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Iâve been enjoying house brand for so long I couldnât say objectively. Packets of a single substance such as sugar, oats, flour do not seem inferior. One exception is yogurt - I prefer Greek Yogurt - not Greek style yogurt, itâs thicker, and tastier, I add my own seasonal fruit. I donât know what the difference is otherwise,
I donât buy much processed food as cooking a large batch to eat, share, and freeze is more economical and I think nutritious as I prefer a to eat a large variety of veg: soups, curries, pasta sauces. Buying fresh produce from a farmers market or local fruit and vegetable shop is often better as they usually have seconds quality and best quality to choose from.
Baked goods: cakes, biscuits, scones, are also much nicer homemade as no preservatives and I use (house brand) butter not margarine, and add nuts or seeds, and fruit.
With so many step by step tutorials it doesnât take long to learn to cook a few great meals. The satisfaction of this far outweighs the initial time to learn. After a few months - accepting hit and misses, most people have a good repertoire of meals they can prepare efficiently. 
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Sugar is a classic example. White sugar would be one of the most chemically pure foods that you can buy, something like than 99.5% or better. It is the same stuff no matter what is on the label. So why pay 14c per 100g instead of 11c, ie 27% more? Branding counts.
Red salmon is another product for which I have sampled many generic brands without ever coming across one that looked as good or tasted as good as the name brands (of which John West is just one).
Although I am as suggestible as the next man (if heâs the gullible type!) so I must confess my taste experience is highly likely influenced by appearance (and by the look and feel of the tin if Iâm the one opening it). Iâm sure this is especially true with salmon, where a lifetime of distinguishing Pink Salmon as inferior to Red Salmon makes its colour critical.
I would have to enter the same caveat before mentioning that I have a single-blind test of a generic Red Salmon â this was a decade ago so I have long forgotten whether it was Colesâ, Wooliesâ, Aldiâs, or an independentâs. The unintended tester was my mother, to whom I served the salmon as part of a cold lunch with salads partly made with vegetables from my organic vegetable garden.
Without ever having seen the tin, she immediately asked if I was so reduced in economic circumstances as to be buying Home Brand tinned salmon (and Home Brand â actually Wooliesâ generic label back in the day â was her catchall for generics generally).
She was not averse to many generics, particularly some Aldi products â their almond finger biscuits spring to mind â and she would certainly agree with all those on these boards who have said that generic white sugar is indistinguishable from CSR. And she could go through a lot of sugar during the jam-making season for excess fruit from our garden (and a more modest amount for Fowlers Vacola bottling, and for chutneys and pickles).
As it happened, she taught me all I know about shopping economically. Indeed, one of my earliest memories is of Mum spreading the Wednesday Canberra Times out on the livingroom floor of our guvvie to the double-page advertisements for the supermarketsâ specials for the week, and making up the shopping list. Long before I could read or count I knew whether a product we normally bought was at a good price or not!
