the food rant thread

[menthel]

They put couscous in Um Bongo? 

I blame Heston.

[ian]

They put couscous in Um Bongo? 

I blame Heston.

Whoo, 'serving suggestion'.

The entire 'serving suggestion' thing seems to be falling out of favour, which is disappointing. I don't even know what to do with food without some easy to follow instructions. I like the surety of a nice visual explanation. For instance, if I'm going to eat a tin of sweetcorn, I should probably put it in a bowl and get a big green bloke to guard it. That's what the label tells and let me tell you, no one has nicked my salad-crisp sweetcorn yet.

Before serving suggestions came along, who knew that soup needed to be served in bowls. The history of soup is messily decorated with plating mishaps. Possibly it's the lack of serving suggestions that had led us down the path towards a plateless society where food must be consumed out of old lamps, shoes, duffel bags, and driftwood. If only burgers came with a serving suggestion depicting them nestling between two halves of a bun sat firmly and proudly on a plate.

A quick perusal of my larder cupboard indicates that cereal should be served in bowls (and not apparently scooped directly out of the packet and into your mouth, but hey, the bowl is only a suggestion, ask yourself What Would Heston Do?) Couscous is very mysterious, full of Arabian intrigue, just a little glimpse through a window in the packet. No hint that I shouldn't just spill it all over the floor. Fortunately, my jar of pasta sauce clearly shows it's to be served on pasta. Just a suggestion now, if you want to use it as a cheesecake topping, well What Would Heston Do? I think we all know.

[hellymedic]

I'm sure some Kellogg's packet in the dim and distant past is responsible for my being unable to eat cornflakes without fresh strawberries.

Mum tells me cornflakes aren't 'food' anyway.

She has a point.

[Jurek]

Helly, your Mum is correct.
Breakfast cereals (whatever they are) are marketed at 4 to 10 yo, who are, apparently, responsible for which breakfast cereals end up in the weekly supermarket trolley....

[Mr Larrington]

Cornflakes are, as any fule kno, made from the little curly wood shavings that come out of pencil sharpeners.

Willy Wonka was very clear about this.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Breakfast cereals are, apparently, related to 'the practices of the Seventh Day Adventists'!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellogg%27s#History

[perpetual dan]

Indeed, I was under the impression corn flakes were invented as a cure for masturbation. Can't say I find my "community trade marked shape" wheat biscuits and muesli that erotic either, but maybe I should add it to the try anything once list?

[Bledlow]

... the fact that most apples are now secretly brown in the middle ....

You're getting apples from the wrong shops. I've not had one that was brown in the middle for a couple of years, at least, & that was a one-off.

Mrs B & I often take pot luck, buying supermarket budget apples. They're occasionally lacking in flavour, but all those undersized, or slightly misshapen, or not-well-known-varieties apples usually taste perfectly OK, & sometimes very good. And just one brown in the middle one in years.

[Bledlow]

What do the BRITONS have against decent bread, especially in pubs?  So many meals, some very nice, have been let down by a poor excuse for bread.  It has come to the point I generally avoid meals which include bread, but I slipped in today's visit to my local for some grub.   The cheeseburger was as good as I anticipated (this same pub tries to pass of pita as naan, and in East London!) but the bun was horrid.  And they appear to have run out of plates and served my meal on a cutting board.

Dunno, but it's bloody annoying.

There's been a sausage stand in Broad Street, in Reading, for years. I once bought a sausage in bread from it. The sausage wasn't bad, but the bread was ghastly. It wasn't that it tasted bad. For that, it would have to have had some kind of flavour. The really, really bad thing about it was the texture. The almost non-existent, but not quite, sensation as I bit into it was - unpleasant. Not strongly, but enough. The bread was a buffer between the perfectly acceptable sausage & my mouth, muffling the sensation of biting into it, & coating my taste buds so I couldn't enjoy the sausage properly.

[Mrs Pingu]

This is why I started baking my own bread, the supermarket bought loaves were bloody disgusting, like eating cotton wool, and that was supposedly multi grain wholemeal ones to boot!

[ian]

Hmm, I had a horrible moment today when I bit into a strawberry. Now we all know that most strawberries taste of disappointment, like they've been hydroponically grown on tears. These tasted unaccountably nice. There's going to be some kind of fruity payback.

[menthel]

After all that effort flouring and frying in butter of alaska's finest pollack, what do I end up with? A fishy bap remarkably reminiscent of a fillet o fish. It was a delicious dinner but the resemblance was enough to tarnish it for me.

Perhaps we need a food disappointment thread...

[hellymedic]

Hmm, I had a horrible moment today when I bit into a strawberry. Now we all know that most strawberries taste of disappointment, like they've been hydroponically grown on tears. These tasted unaccountably nice. There's going to be some kind of fruity payback.

Quite often the 'budget' or 'Basics' strawberries have Flavour, rather than Appearance. The 'Taste the Difference' range disappoints more frequently.

Helly-the-Cheapskate.

[jsabine]

What do the BRITONS have against decent bread, especially in pubs?  So many meals, some very nice, have been let down by a poor excuse for bread.  It has come to the point I generally avoid meals which include bread, but I slipped in today's visit to my local for some grub.   The cheeseburger was as good as I anticipated (this same pub tries to pass of pita as naan, and in East London!) but the bun was horrid.  And they appear to have run out of plates and served my meal on a cutting board.

Dunno, but it's bloody annoying.

There's been a sausage stand in Broad Street, in Reading, for years. I once bought a sausage in bread from it. The sausage wasn't bad, but the bread was ghastly. It wasn't that it tasted bad. For that, it would have to have had some kind of flavour. The really, really bad thing about it was the texture. The almost non-existent, but not quite, sensation as I bit into it was - unpleasant. Not strongly, but enough. The bread was a buffer between the perfectly acceptable sausage & my mouth, muffling the sensation of biting into it, & coating my taste buds so I couldn't enjoy the sausage properly.

This, while unacceptable and wrong for a sausage sandwich, is quite the reverse for a bacon one, the twin essences of which should be good bacon and bad bread.

I've had some good, indeed very good, bacon sarnies made with wholemeal or granary or sourdough or seeded (in other words interesting) bread, and they've been very nice indeed. But true greatness comes only between rounds of white sliced, the blander the better. (And, of course, a dollop of HP sauce.)

[ian]

Hmm, I had a horrible moment today when I bit into a strawberry. Now we all know that most strawberries taste of disappointment, like they've been hydroponically grown on tears. These tasted unaccountably nice. There's going to be some kind of fruity payback.

Quite often the 'budget' or 'Basics' strawberries have Flavour, rather than Appearance. The 'Taste the Difference' range disappoints more frequently.

The strawbs (the remainder of which I'm stuffing in my mouth right now) were Waitrose Essentials, which is kind of thing middle class people buy to share the pain of the poor people who have to shop at Lidl, not to mention Elsanta (the Swindon of strawberries), and from Bucks. In May. They should, according to all the known rules of the universe, taste awful. Any hint of strawberry homeopathically reduced to a sad, lonely singular atom.

Bread. Bread. Bread. A couple of things make me angry about bread.

Firstly, where the fuck is it? I go to a restaurant in Foreignlandia and they plonk a basket of bread in front of me. I eat it all and they bring more. Free bread is one of the bricks from which civilisation is built. I go to a restaurant in Britain and the table stays empty. My bread? I was once told they didn't even have bread. In a restaurant. Do you have food? Have you misunderstood the entire premise of a restaurant? Or they offer to charge me about £4 for a few measly offcuts of wooden, day-old baguette that looks like it's been chewed on by a Frenchman and discarded. Also once, on espying the bread on another table, I asked for mine. 'Oh we only serve bread to tables of four or more.' Yes, well, most of my friends are invisible and imaginary and they're here with me. Bring our fucking bread.

As JSabine says, don't fuck with the bacon butty. Bland, white bread is essential to properly cosset your bacon. Don't give me bacon on an artisan roll. No sourdough, no beetle bread itching with pumpkin seeds and god-knows-what they found on the bakery floor. And if comes on brioche I'm going to murder you. Then have you bought back so I can do it again. Fucking brioche. It's not bread, it's cake. Muffins too. Cake! Bacon cake? Fuckity fuck.

[Feanor]

Aye, a bacon roll is a finely-balanced thing.

It needs to be on white bread, but a nice crusty white bread roll is good.  It may cut the roof of your mouth with crispy sharpness, but that's OK.

Artisan breads are wrong, and the further they diverge from white bread, the worse they are.
Wholemeal rolls totally miss the point.

The Bacon / Bread ratio is critical, too.
There is a Goldilocks zone.

And the Bacon itself: not to lean; it requires the correct fat ratio.
But cooked till it's slightly crisp, not soggy, and not like USAin breakfast bacon that you break your teeth on.

And mustard.
A smear of Colemans adds the finishing touch.

[ian]

Bacon should be slightly crispy and smoked. That's all that needs to be said on the subject. Where is all the proper bacon in the US? I mean proper bacon must exist unless they have mutant bacon-free pigs. Perhaps they grow pork in giant vats, alchemically transforming hormones and additives into readily sliceable tubes of pork-derived product  Ah, they'll say, after I've laid out my porcine predicament in the manner of every Englishman ever to visit the colonies, you mean 'canadian bacon.' No I don't. That's just smoked ham. My girlfriend in Boston once was really pleased to present me with 'irish bacon'* which she was under the misapprehension solved my predicament. You know what Irish bacon is? Slices of smoked ham. I don't know what they taught her at MIT, but that's not bacon. It's the sort of thing that ought to be covered in Baconology 101. It's Kevin Bacon not Kevin Ham. They're not interchangeable.

Oh, and fuckers who serve burgers in croissants or doughnuts. You're fucked come food judgement day too.

*I'm not sure what this says about our relationship.

[Mr Larrington]

USAnian BACON is to the real thing as the poppadum is to, er, something that doesn't shatter at the merest hint of a fork and fly across the room blinding your fellow diners.  They have something they call "Canadian BACON" too.  I've never managed to work out what it is but if it's Canadian then it's probably:

• very cold, and/or
• drowned in maple syrup

I am planning to visit bits of Canada in September, so I shall try to find out.

[menthel]

The Australians have the same bacon problem. Given their recent split from the motherland you would think they could remember what bacon should be.

As for a bacon buttie, unsmoked, fat a little crispy on white bloomer, butter and brown sauce. Oh yes. Served with tea of the builders sort, coffee just doesn't work.

[ian]

Canadian bacon is just smoked ham. Usually minus the fat and pre-cooked. Australian bacon appears to be similar. I'm genuinely curious as to where all the normal bacon goes in these countries? Do they grind it up and turn into reformed pork meat derivatives that they can pump down the gullet of their little foie gras children? In the future Americans will win wars by bowling those bloated pork-stuffed schoolchildren through the massed ranks of the terrorists, sending them spinning into oblivion, thus combining their wholesome US love of food, bowling, and war into one healthy activity for all the family. It's called Project Pork Bun. Bless you CIA, bless you.

Smokey bacon in sandwiches though. That's one of my disappointments in this country, I can't get a good fry up or bacon butty with smoked bacon.

And don't get me going on beef bacon. I'm in Dubai and as such I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel of shitty places, don't make it worse. At least signpost the infidel counter.

[Cudzoziemiec]

In the future Americans will win wars by bowling those bloated pork-stuffed schoolchildren through the massed ranks of the terrorists, sending them spinning into oblivion, thus combining their wholesome US love of food, bowling, and war into one healthy activity for all the family. It's called Project Pork Bun. Bless you CIA, bless you.

[Mrs Pingu]

And mustard.
A smear of Colemans adds the finishing touch.

Heretic! Brown sauce FTW!



Also, I actually like my bacon limp and flaccid but then I'm weird like that. I don't like toast that shatters when you bite either.

[menthel]

And mustard.
A smear of Colemans adds the finishing touch.

Heretic! Brown sauce FTW!



Also, I actually like my bacon limp and flaccid but then I'm weird like that. I don't like toast that shatters when you bite either.

Floppy bacon, agreed! I like a little colour on the fat but otherwise floppy!

[Mr Larrington]

Is Project Pork Bun in any way related to that pork barrel thingy that the USAnian government keeps its money in?  Since no-one has needed to keep pork in barrels since the invention of the refrigerator, you'd think it would have been replaced with something a bit more 20th century by now.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Might the slush fund not also be updated to the reconstituted mechanically-recovered burger-meat fund?