Wendyl Wants To Know: Less is more in wrap battle

Farrah's Premium White Wraps - $5.29 for 6. Mountain Bread Natural Wraps - $5.59 for 8. Photo / Wendyl Nissen

Aussie product with only four ingredients top pick as closest thing to real food.

I recently made my own flat bread (that is, a wrap) and was amazed at how few ingredients it took - and even if I do say so myself, they tasted wonderful.

Wraps are an easy lunch or quick dinner because you just need to fill with protein and salad and away you go.

For years now, I have found the store-bought wraps have a strange chemical smell when you take them out of the packet and even though they don't break when you roll them up, in my opinion they taste dry and not much of anything.

So I bought some to see what was in them and was very surprised. However, I also managed to find some which lacked the chemical smell when you got them out of the bag and tasted quite good.

Ingredients

Farrah's Premium White Wraps

Wheat flour
This is normal flour you would use for home baking.

Water

Vegetable oil [(with antioxidant (319)]
Not sure what this oil is but it has a preservative in it called tert-butyl-hydroquinone (319), otherwise known as TBHQ. There are many conflicting studies attached to this additive which contains petroleum-derived butane - some claiming it is carcinogenic in high doses and others saying it has the opposite effect.

Rice flour
This is flour made from rice.

Salt
You'll get 336mg of sodium per wrap, so this product isn't too high in salt.

Emulsifier (471)
This is the common emulsifier mono and diglycerides of fatty acids (471) which are usually produced from hydrogenated soya bean oil.

Raising agents (500,450,341)
These are baking soda (500), diphosphates (450) and calcium phosphate (341).

Preservatives (282,200)
These are calcium propionate (282), which occurs naturally in fermented foods and sorbic acid (200), which inhibits yeast growth in food products.

Acidity regulator (297)
This is fumaric acid (297), which occurs naturally in fruit.

Dextrose
This is a form of sugar. You'll get 4.5g or just over a teaspoon of sugar per wrap.

Stabilisers (460,415)
These are powdered cellulose (460), which is usually prepared from wood or cotton and xanthan gum (415), which is made from fermented glucose and sucrose.

Enzymes
Enzymes are increasingly used in baked goods as improvers to help with texture but also to help the product last longer.

Mountain Bread Natural Wraps

Organic wholemeal flour (70%)
This is wholemeal flour which has been grown without the use of pesticides or herbicides.

Organic wheat flour
This is organic white flour.

Filtered water
The water has been filtered to remove chemicals and minerals.

Salt
There is 112mg of sodium per wrap.

My recommendation

Although the Mountain Bread wraps come from Australia, I think they are a much better choice if you're interested in eating real food because they have four ingredients compared with the Farrah's wraps which have 17 ingredients.

I bought both these wraps on July 21 and the Farrah's ones have a best before of September 18 while the Mountain Bread ones have a best before date of August 18.

So Farrah's are going to last longer in your pantry and on the supermarket shelf but I'm happy that the Mountain Bread ones only last a month after I bought them. Real food should go off and many of the additives in Farrah's are in there to keep them fresh on the shelf.

Price-wise you get more wraps in the Mountain Bread packet (200g) but the Farrah's wraps are thicker and you get about 360g of wraps altogether. Both are yeast and dairy free.

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