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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4043 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Hate to put out the AskReddit tier question. But what did you find to be grossly overrated?

I'm a Chinese food enthusiast and shop far and wide for authentic ingredients to recreate dishes at home. Once I found out that a 'chili oil with beef 'is a thing that exists and is apparently delicious, I immediately hit the Asian grocery store and got some. It was even more enticing to me because said product is not available in North America, well I don't live in a communist country (joke) so I got my hands on some fairly easily.

It was meh. Really did not live up to the hype from the linked video. Regular chili oil with fried minced beef, that's it. Maybe the American who made the video just finds it to be better because he knows there is a forbidden quality to it and his subconscious mind does the work. Obviously, not everyone's tastes are the same. Mildly regretting driving 45 minutes each way to the Asian market for one product.

My understanding is that the couple behind the Chinese Cooking Demystified channel live in Shenzhen or Guangdong.

In any case, this is unfortunate, but also a little bit expected; you’re just recreating a commercial chilli oil sold in China and not elsewhere - it’s not really a full thing, in my opinion. They may have oversold it a bit, yes.

This thread is probably dead at this point, but here's another one.

Yeast raised donuts.

They aren't bad, but they just don't impress me. I've learned over time that many people don't share that opinion and love them.

Before Krispy Kreme was available in Canada I had a few situations where people would drive to the US to get them, bring a box back to the office, insist I try them, then get upset when I wasn't impressed. One person retorted "Well they're a lot better than Tim Horton's!" Which was certainly true, but that is a low bar.

Now I live near a fancy donut shop, so I often have to make polite excuses for not being interested.

If we're talking about Texas BBQ, non-fried pickles (usually at least cucumbers, onions, and jalapenos, sometimes other things like carrots or okra) are a normal accompaniment.

Pair it with greens like a A kebab platter that comes with fattoush, greek salad & tabbuleh.

Mustard greens or collard greens are also a typical BBQ side.

Pair it with dry wines to cut the richness like France.

Iced tea or beer are common BBQ drink pairings.

Serve with digestives like western India (kokam saar, kadi).

This is the role played by the BBQ sauce or mop sauce.

I want to try a bit of everything, but why the fuck is half-pound the minimum order size for everything ?

Because you're meant to eat it family style.

Your responses make me think you've never had Texas BBQ.

Collard Greens are simply too underwhelming for me as a critical green in the dish. In comparison, I have had Tabbuleh that still comes to me in my dreams.

Personal preference, I guess. I like both Tabbouleh and Greens. Both can be transcendent when done right.

IMO, iced tea is too sweet and beer is too heavy on the palate. A crisp beer or a minty seltzer would work here.

Unsweetened tea is always available, and the typical BBQ beer is a crisp, light lager.

BBQ sauce is too sweet too.

Not in Texas it's not. It's acidic and spicy. Primary ingredients in TX BBQ sauce are vinegar, soy sauce or Worcestershire sauce, chili powder, paprika, cumin, onion, garlic, mustard, and often coffee or espresso. Wouldn't surprise me if some variations included pickled ginger.

I remember a cookout with a keg of Belgian blonde that was just perfect for the food. 7% did make for a pretty lively party, though.

Well, depends on the beer. A light lager is anything but heavy. Don’t drink Bavarian beer with BBQ

At least for me it's vinegary and hot green beans that are must include on a bbq platter.

Most BBQ joints offer collared greens as a side, which fits your criteria.

Equally hot take: balance within a meal is vastly overrated and not at all required. There's no need to balance out something very rich in fat with something acidic (for the most part, I have found exceptions). Chefs and food authors talk it up as if it's one of the ten commandments, but it's not actually a big deal.

It very much is.

The purpose of balance in a meal isn't to please Thanos or Chefs with indefensible arbitrary notions. It's to make the meal enjoyable for the longest amount of time. So that when you integrate the time-series plot of taste, you get the largest area.

A Korean-bbq meal would be much inferior without all the banchan because after eating a few fatty slices of meat, your tongue will be coated in fat and you won't be able to taste the other meats as well. The pickles reset that so the meal is most enjoyable in its duration and not only the beginning.

It's not required for a good meal, but I'd be hard-pressed to find a great meal that lacks balance.

I understand the theory, I simply don't find meals with that balance any more enjoyable than those without. Thus, I consider it overrated and not something which is required.

As a non-American, I say American BBQ is uniquely American. And a worthy contender for its biggest culinary achievement. Definitely not overrated.

All other American foods have foreign counterparts. Fried Chicken is just about universal, So is pizza, Cajun food has a similar flavor profile African food (obviously), etc.

Most grilled meat dishes around the world are cooked using high heat and the dominant flavor profile is the char, not the smoke. Southern American BBQ is unique because it relies on slow cooking (totally different choice of meats) and smoke as the primary flavor. The closest counterpart is maybe Argentinian Asado or Brazillian Churrasco, but they are still closer to char based than smoke based.

I do agree that Southern American cuisine in general does suffer from a lack of balance. BBQ is good, mac and cheese is good, They don't need to go together. Southern BBQ should take a page from Korean BBQ which comes with 15 different kinds of pickles/pallete cleansers. Or even Brazillian Churrasco of which the salad bar is a crucial component.

I do think most other food items are not uniquely American but forms of food are. NY style pizza is I think distinctly American (it was a change to a historic method that has since gone global).

Also the cheeseburger is a rather unique American food.

I'd say the biggest American culinary achievement is the great advancement in the general art of sandwich-making, with a wide definition of sandwiches (hot dogs, burgers, sloppy joes etc. included).

I find Jewish deli food to be even more limited compared to BBQ (which has a lot of variety). Doesn’t make I don’t like a sandwich but…there isn’t that much variety in deli food and it can be heavy.

I do like the others you mention. But BBQ done right is amazing.

I tried various American foods when I was over there, generally things I've seen online & in movies and such, but never tried. The most memorably bad one was pop-tarts. Insanely dry, with a synthetic cloyingly sweet flavour. I get that it's for kids, but god damn it's bad.

For whatever reason the kinds of sweet potatoes that are actually good (i.e. the yellow variety used as a staple food for centuries by Asian farmers, not the orange ones usually relegated to a single cloyingly sweet side dish at Thanksgiving) can often be hard to find outside of international stores.

Yeah tbh pop tarts aren't great. Like you said, they are for kids who will appreciate the sugar level. They aren't too dry if you have them will a glass of water or milk, but they are very sweet and nothing can really change that.

You need to cook/toast the pop tart.

As a non American I had a great time eating around the US while I was there. But I avoided trying out foods from the movies and headed straight for yelp or eater/zagat reccomendations. I knew some of the shit from movies would be ass, it doesn't take much imagination to figure out that a twinkie is going to taste like cardboard.

I did get bamboozled with American chinese food though. That shit is literally as sweet as candy. Orange chicken, never again. There were some excellent non American chinese restaurants in NYC and Boston though.

You need to cook/toast the pop tart.

I did! It made it even drier, if anything.

Sampling the candy and processed stuff was more for the experience, not to get something that I expected to be genuinely enjoyable. The US for sure had some very good food and drinks as well; the craft beer is especially good compared to the naïve opinion of the Americans as shitty-beer drinkers.

Craft beers in the US push the boundaries on what beer can be. At the same time, it doesn’t scale all that well.

Americans shitty beer reputation is purely based on the big brands major products, which are impressively consistent, but otherwise pretty mediocre (nice to drink on sunny days at the ballpark though).

I actually find authentic Chinese food to be overrated. Particularly wheat dishes.

A lot of people I know just love Bao and dumplings, but I find them meh. And eating wet dumplings with plastic chop sticks is just not worth it.

There's certainly enough variety in Chinese food to accommodate most palates. If you don't like wheat dishes, you can try southern Chinese or Taiwanese food. There is a northeast to southwest gradient in terms of spice level (i.e. with Manchurian and Shanghainese food being the most bland and Sichuan and Cantonese food being more heavily spiced), depending on your preferences. And if you don't like soggy dumplings, try the pan-fried ones.

i.e. with Manchurian and Shanghainese food being the most bland and Sichuan and Cantonese food being more heavily spiced

Cantonese food being more heavily spiced…? I haven’t heard of this before.

On the whole I find that the inner and more northern provinces are more spiced and hearty, while the coastal and southern provinces tend to be more delicate.

I suppose I should have said "more strongly flavored." In the case of Cantonese food this is more from soy sauce, sugar, vinegar, and oyster sauce rather than chilis or powdered spices, and taken to an extreme it becomes Americanized Chinese food. I find Northeastern food to be hearty, but in a meat and cabbage soup with steamed buns sort of way quite similar to Irish or Polish cuisine.

I still think Cantonese is not really that heavily sauced in my opinion compared to the other cuisines of China. Things like steamed fish (which is steamed with only ginger and scallion, then more fresh ginger/scallion sizzled on top with hot oil and soy sauce placed on the side), steamed pork ribs (with douchi), blanched shrimp (literally just shrimp put in boiling water for a minute, no condiments until dippings) and the way Cantonese cuisine often prepares vegetables (blanching then frying with minimal sauce), for example, are really quite “bland”, in that they’re pretty sparing with the sauces and spices.

I do think there are other Chinese cuisines (Zhejiang and Huaiyang come to mind) that are similarly “bland”, but I would put Cantonese pretty up there. That’s not to say the “blander” Chinese cuisines are flavourless and second-rate; Cantonese can be very flavourful, just mostly relying on the flavors of its main ingredients.

Anecdotally, I’ve had more success getting Indian (and occasionally white) people to eat food from the inner provinces than Cantonese food, precisely because it’s more spiced and heavy-tasting.

My issue is that I actually really like westernized Chinese food. Also I can't make decent egg fried rice at home.

But fried rice and chop suey isn't considered high enough class these days so when I suggest it people insist on going for "real Chinese food".

Based and General Tso's chicken–pilled.

China is a big country so I wouldn't just blanket dismiss all "authentic Chinese food".

I am partial to Xi'an cuisine. Very beef and lamb heavy, spicy (chili and other silk route spices), and not as oily. They also tend to have the best wheat dishes. I recommend you try out 'Lamb cumin noodles'. Or try out any Xi'an "hand pulled" noodles, the texture is much much superior to the ubiquitous chowmein egg noodles noodles.

Speaking of noodles, Lanzhou lamian! Very bouncy when made well.

I had xi’an chili noodles from a hand/pulled shop once, and it was great. I remember it being oily but in a good way. Maybe I can find a decent place near me…

Kraft mac and cheese. Most processed foods aren't as good as the real thing but are still ok in their own right. Kraft is actually disgusting. It's borderline inedible, it's so bad. I have no idea how anyone actually likes the stuff.

Oh yeah, I couldn't eat that stuff even as a child. My son tried it at a friend's house and also wasn't having any of that slop.

A few years ago they changed the recipe because of some vegan blogger. The quality noticeably declined, from an ok side dish for a quick meal, to absolute trash. Barely any cheese taste, and it seemed the pasta basically turned to mush when cooked.

I switched to another brand (I think President's Choice, in Canada; though I've heard Annie's is the best). But the other day they were out, so I picked up some KD, and it was more like its old self, but I didn't notice any major changes in the ingredients. Maybe it's psychological? But the pasta doesn't turn to mush anymore, so maybe not completely psychological.

Still doesn't come anywhere close to making the stuff from scratch. But cheese prices in Canada have always sucked, so it's more of a treat.

vegan blogger

Cheese

Something isn't adding up. Don't tell me kraft mac and cheese has no diary whatsoever.

I may have been wrong about that. It looks like it was the 'Food Babe' who pushed for it, and she only claims to be (as far as google tells me) a 'vegetarian at home', though she does advocate for vegans by bullying companies to remove non-vegan ingredients (and for some reason companies seem to comply?)

With Kraft Dinner, she pushed for them to remove artificial colours. She seems to be against 'chemicals'.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/04/22/the-food-babe-says-shes-won-a-victory-over-kraft-the-science-babe-says-shes-ruining-mac-and-cheese/

Going to go totally off-topic but, On the topic of babes, I'll give it to Food Babe over SciBabe. STEM isn't sending their best to fight the important wars.

Bubble tea. Don't understand the hype at all. If given the choice between bubble tea and an iced latte I would always pick the latter.

Boba is a form of social gathering and an alternative to booze, that's where most of the love comes from.

Sure. Coffee also serves both functions, and I love coffee. Cannot say the same for bubble tea, at least the variety of it that I've consumed.

First I've heard of fruit bubble tea, I'm intrigued.

Bubble tea.

Not a big fan of sweet dairy drinks so I dodged that psyop.

It's something fun that, for the most part, I can't make at home. For a while when my wife and I were living with my parents while we were shopping for a house, we drank a lot of bubble tea from a little local place. Because it was a non alcoholic non heavily caffeinated way to get out of the house, that felt special enough to justify going without being more than a few bucks or being a whole meal. We'd each get one, get in the convertible on a nice day, and just drive and chat.

or being a whole meal

Look up the number of calories in a typical (American) serving of bubble tea and you will change your mind about that.

I second this. This was like 15 years ago, but I remember trying it and wondering what all the fuss was about. It wasn't even good, much less great enough to be worth the hype. And I normally love sweet drinks.

Bubble tea is warm, it's loaded with sugar, and it's not coded as low class.

If you put that much milk and sugar in a regular tea from a coffee shop people would make fun of you.

I like bitter rich tastes. I don't like the gross sickly sweet taste of sweetened coffee. Call it an affectation if you must, but I take my coffee black.

It definitely feels like a reaction against the Starbucks "breakfast milkshake" rather than a genuine preference much of the time.

I've been pegged incorrectly as a coffee snob several times by co-workers due to my preference for black coffee, which I find humorous since I actually am neutral at best about its taste. I've just found it the best low calorie caffeine delivery system.

Kind of like steak. Yes I order medium rare. But honestly why do we care if someone order medium well? Status only

I tried watching that channel for a while, and bounced pretty quickly for some reason. Not sure why: the methods are decent and the presentation is high quality.

I watch that channel without feeling any noticeable sense of repulsion. But if I were to choose something that bugs me on a subconscious level, it would be the presenter's dweeb voice, It's a perfect "well akkshually" voice 🤓. On another note, I don't know why is that voice so widespread on youtube. Voice is a big thing for me, I just about can't watch foodwishes because Chef John uptalks more than a 13-year-old valley girl, absolute torture for my ears.

I just about can't watch foodwishes because Chef John uptalks more than a 13-year-old valley girl, absolute torture for my ears.

Chef John has become a self-parody at this point. He's already made every dish that was worth it, so the new videos are 95% catchphrases and 5% content.

He put out too many videos, and should have rate limited his uploads a while back. There are only so many things to cook. I stopped watching a long time ago once I realized that his new recipes are starting to become combinations of his previous recipes with slight modifications.

Watched a few, it's fine (other than the way he says longyau every goddamn time). Guess it wasn't the sort of food I was interested in--they haven't done much lamb, although that one northern cumin one really helped me figure that method out.

On your original question, it sounds like you might have hyped it up a bit yourself on the hour and a half drive lol. I suffer a lot of that with curries--getting frustrated because it's good but not anything special.

What kind of curries are you struggling with Indian or Thai?

Indian. (But I'd love to try thai, since the only restaurant within a hundred miles just microwaves all their stuff.)

Think I've got it though. I'd switched from a standard slow cook that was giving wonderful roasted-flavor to the faster and easier to batch-cook base gravy method, and it wasn't nearly as good for a while.

Finally figured out the point of layering spices so you get both fresh flavour and the slow-roasted taste. The one tonight was excellent, just blew my head off a bit too much. Last things I need are that smoky flavor and a few missing whole spices.

Every time I butcher an animal now all the bones go in the pressure cooker with some old onions and veg, to make either a base gravy or a stew base (do the indians not use bones except for one-pot bone-in stuff?). 2-3 shoulders get diced & pre-cooked immediately rather than wrapped, then put in freezer portions along with the gravy.

Makes it much easier to do big batch cooking without having way too much of one curry, and keeping it flexible for flavour and heat level.

(But I'd love to try thai, since the only restaurant within a hundred miles just microwaves all their stuff.)

You must really live in the middle of nowhere. Thai restaurants are usually subsidized by Thailands government as a part of their "Gastro Diplomacy program". Which is one of the reasons that Thai food is usually more consistent in taste/quality and so numerous relative to other foreign ethnic restaurants (having accounted for population ratio).

Thai curry is much easier than Indian curry imo. Less technique is required. And if you start off with a good curry paste, coconut milk and fish sauce; you are more or less all the way there. All those things can be ordered online.

Think I've got it though. I'd switched from a standard slow cook that was giving wonderful roasted-flavor to the faster and easier to batch-cook base gravy method, and it wasn't nearly as good for a while.

The base gravy is a technique not from Indian cooking but British Indian cooking. Some Indian restaurants have also adopted it because it makes cooking restaurant food a lot easier, but it's not a necessary component to good curries.

And also all curries cooked with the base gravy taste kind of the same. In India they start every different curry from scratch, and they don't all taste the same as they often end up doing in Western Indian restaurants.

do the indians not use bones except for one-pot bone-in stuff?

Nope.

Using Meat/bones or base ingredients like onions/carrots for a baseline flavor is a Western (French) tradition. Indian cuisine mostly relies on spices and East Asian cooking on condiments/sauces.

However, Indian curries are improved using western techniques such as using stock instead of water, browning meat, etc.

Finally figured out the point of layering spices

This is the key.

You also need to fry the initial batch of spices in the pan a lot longer than you think. Usually something wet like onions or tomatoes or coconut paste is there to prevent things from burning, that gives you the roasted flavor and prevents you from ruining your curry with the overwhelming taste of raw spices.

The goal isn't for a curry to taste spicy, but balanced.

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