Okay, it’s time to try to collect a list of the hidden soy in restaurants. There are so many items that you wouldn’t even expect to contain soy. We tend to rattle off this list when we visit a restaurant for the first time — especially when a restaurant says “We don’t use soy”. Which loosely translates to “we don’t offer soybeans on the menu, and we’ve never really looked at our labels”.
- Margarine – not only is margarine just a lump of hydrogenated soybean oil, it’s also considered “butter” by most restaurant employees. This one is the most time consuming because you have to make sure that it’s really, really, butter when they say “butter”. We’ve had many occasions where a restaurant that says they use butter ends up actually using margarine, because, well, it’s yellow and looks like butter.
- Mayonnaise – Since soy-free mayonnaise is almost impossible to find, if they use mayo, they’re using soy.
- Salad Dressings – almost all salad dressings contain soybean oil, you’re only hope is a homemade vinegar and oil.
- Vegetable Oil – pretty much a code word for soybean oil. Go ahead, look at every bottle of vegetable oil at your grocery store. Most of them will simply be 100% soybean oil, and the ones that aren’t 100% will still have soybean in them.
- Fried Foods – almost all restaurants fry in soybean oil (and don’t list it as soy) if the frying oil isn’t soy, you still need to check the breading, as a lot of breading (onion rings, cheese sticks, fried chicken) have soy in the breading mixture.
- Sauces and Dips – most of these contain mayo as one of the ingredients (see above!)
- Chocolate – the classic cocoa butter has been replaced by the much cheaper soy lecithin. Even the really expensive chocolate uses some soy lecithin.
- Bread – unlike your home baked recipes, pretty much every commercial loaf of bread has soybean oil in it (with the exception of Carrabba’s home made bread — and they actually make their own butter, too)
- Citrus Drinks – Mountain Dew, Orange Faygo, Country Time Lemonade, pretty much any citrus flavored drink is going to have brominated vegetable oil in it to keep the citrus flavor from separating and floating to the top. And since pretty much all “vegetable oil” is soybean oil, mark those off your list.
- Processed cheese – almost all real cheese is soy-free, but any time you have a processed cheese, you run the risk of soy. Amazingly, Kraft Singles are soy-free.
- Soybean Oil – What?!?!? Soybean oil is made out of soy?
Martin’s Butter Bread is soy free.
Some American cheese has soy in it now. It seems this past year many foods have changed to soybean oil
My favorite candy bar, the Cadbury crunchie, is made without soy lethinin if I get the one made for the UK specifically. The emulsifier they use is E442. It’s something I already have to order online because they don’t distribute these in the US. It’s also an amazing candy bar I’ve loved for years and it was so exciting to learn I didn’t have to give this one up. Just don’t order the Australian version.
I did just discover they use a jet of oil, kind not specified, to cut up the toffee pieces, so that does worry me some. I’m fortunate that my allergys don’t put me in the hospital, just make me feel like crap.
Since Hershey’s bought Cadbury, (boo HISS!) all their chocolate has some kind of soy in it. So bummed. My fav since I was a kid. I do miss the Crunchie bars from when I lived there and family would send them.