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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.

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).