The Lazzaris products
We often describe the tasty and genuine flavor of the Lazzaris products, but we rarely tell about how we make them. We therefore asked Mr Alberto Lazzaris to explain the process of creating one of our products .
What distinguishes a Lazzaris product from any other jam or mostarda?
Every product we realize has particular features. For instance, the Mostarda Veneta, our historical product, is different because it comes from raw materials coming directly from our territory. To find them, we turn to Italian companies, but we also have a farm producing quinces, precisely because enhancing our lands and their products has always been essential for us.
Let’s come to the production: which role has industrial innovation played over the years?
During my first 5-6 years here at Lazzaris, I’ve played an active role in the innovation of the company’s production processes. We came to terms with some machineries that have completely changed the cooking techniques, always embracing innovation, but keeping the features of the product unchanged, the same as a hundred years ago.
Concerning the choice of producing jams too, the idea that has always accompanied us was to create a product as simple as possible, trying to move away from industrial approaches and remaining faithful to the original recipe: “jam” for us it only means sugar and fruit. We wanted to follow an ancient recipe, just using brown sugar or grape sugar as reinterpretations, without adding any pectin or thickeners, often used in industrial production.
How does the supply of raw materials take place?
We always try to work with fresh raw material and, when possible, from our own production, just as described for quinces. The same also applies to pears. In other cases, the fruits come from trusted suppliers that we know from a long time. Our request is to always receive first choice fruits, with a correct degree of ripeness, embracing the natural diversity of fruits year by year, nonetheless always valid and high quality fruits.
Can you tell us about the production phase of one of the Lazzaris products?
The manufacturing process depends on the product: we can see the example of Venetian Mostarda.
We receive the fresh fruit, we wash it, we remove the core and we cut the fruits into four parts. After that quinces are cooked in water, chopped, and cooked again, this time with the addition of sugar. Then the mixture is pasteurized, finally cooked a third time and immediately cooled. Only at the end it is mixed with candied fruit and dosed into jars.
It is a process that begins with the fresh products and ends in a jar of mostarda, all within the same day. The same applies, for example, to pears. Nothing different happens when we process a frozen raw material: we remove it from the refrigeration units, defrost it and process it immediately.
The production process is very fast: reducing the processing time and maintaining a certain consistency allows us to obtain a high quality product. Anyway, these are simple processes, which do not require the use of too complicated technologies, precisely because they reflect the preparations that anyone could make at home. The difference is that we prepare our jams, marmalades and mostarda in bigger quantities, with constant and accurate quality controls and a certain attention to the market preferences at all times.
