Condensed Milk is often an ingredient in ice creams and cheesecakes. I don’t ever buy it because it’s way too full of sugar, and the wrong sort of sugar too. By the wrong sort, I mean high fructose corn syrup.

Most big food companies have replaced normal sugar with this insidious ingredient.  It is cheap, 25% sweeter than sugar (but they didn’t reduce the amount) and is highly addictive.
High Fructose Corn Syrup or HFCS is made by using enzymes to convert the glucose in corn syrup into fructose.

Fructose is absorbed and used differently to sucrose, or regular sugar, in the body. Without the fibre and pulp from fruit (where fructose is normally found) to balance out the sugar content, fructose heads straight to the liver and triggers a process known as lipogenesis – the production of lipids, or fats. This makes it a major cause of liver problems such as fatty liver and worse. It also spikes blood sugar and can lead to overproduction of insulin. This constant increase can lead to insulin resistance, obesity and Type II Diabetes. If you would like to learn more, watch “The Men Who Made Us Fat” on ABC on Thursdays. It runs for three nights over three weeks, but I believe it will be available on iView for a while.

Here’s my recipe:

Place into Thermomix bowl and cook on 100/speed 3/60 minutes. Then repeat for a further 100/10 min/speed 4.

Transfer to a bowl or jar to cool. Makes around 300g.

Enjoy!