Reveal Your Uncool Culinary Beliefs Here

ok now hold up

request thread title change to “Reveal your UNCOOLINARY Beliefs Here”

as you were

well made tiki drinks are amazing

white bread is generally better than whole wheat

pomegranates are better as juice

pomegranate molasses >>>>>>>>>> pomegranate juice

everyone likes tiki drinks

I confess that I will totally eat soup out of a bread bowl, then I will fucking eat all the bread that used to be a bowl.

its a waste if you dont!

Like, I would totally bust a move on a Panera French onion soup in a bread bowl right now. #sorrynotsorry

Damn

french onion soup is gross there i said it

soggy bread is a crime against nature

it's ok. it's never very good bread.

I will choose almost anything edible over creamy soups or western cream sauces.

i dunno if i love anything as much as i love a ballpark brand boiled hotdog

Church's Fried Chicken (which I haven't had in 20 years) was real good, precisely because it tasted exactly like the old Swanson's TV Dinners.

Have realised that I and my wife have the culinary tastes of people in their 90s (we are both 43) - sweet sherry, cream liquers, wafer biscuits, rum baba, pork scratchings. even our kids have picked up our taste for Brussels sprouts and haggis.
but now I realise that this isn't about tastes, it's beliefs, hold on, got some of those too.

Best, most neglected flavours for things: mint, pear. I will find French import shops to buy mint cordial every summer, and will always get a pear ice lolly if it's ever available

Ok, thought of one. Every chain restaurant/bakery in the UK is bad. including bakeries because Greggs, there is nothing good in there, nothing. Their pizza is an absolute crime. I honestly don't know why nobody seems to have noticed.
Since moving back to the UK in 2016 I have tried every chain restaurant, think the worst is Itzu, but all were some shade of bad.

Itsu, it's called, sorry.

I used to like the Itsu brand udon noodle pots when they had chunkier noodles, but then they decided to change what didn't need changing. Their seaweed thins are nice though, but too expensive.

if I were to pin down what I don't like about it:

* UK Asian fusion restaurants are always bad, putting very different kinds of food together in clumsy, insulting ways
* "Heathy" focus means piling up dishes with cold edamame beans and uncooked carrot, and not adding any salt or msg, nothing tastes of anything at all.

Ok, thought of one. Every chain restaurant/bakery in the UK is bad. including bakeries because Greggs, there is nothing good in there, nothing. Their pizza is an absolute crime. I honestly don't know why nobody seems to have noticed.

they've noticed but they like it. ppl fetishise bad food here.

most of the things i make with garlic are just as good with garlic i can keep in my fridge. i have tried it both ways (fresh/jar) and this is the way that works for me if i want to actually make my own food, which i do. no one has ever complained about it either.

depending on what type of garlic you have, (I am obv biased but Californian is generally better than Chinese imports) refrigerated garlic is great, and is what I use. I generally get CR crushed, but if I was doing more cooking, I'd have a jar of crushed and a jar of minced for different things.

Church's Fried Chicken (which I haven't had in 20 years) was real good, precisely because it tasted exactly like the old Swanson's TV Dinners.

― Hideous Lump, Thursday, March 23, 2023 10:48 PM (yesterday)

I drive by a Church's Chicken regularly and it smells great in an uncool way

Italian food is fake.

https://www.ft.com/content/6ac009d5-dbfd-4a86-839e-28bb44b2b64c

Small plates is just how it goes in a lot of parts of the world that don't have the starter/main/dessert structure of European food (not an uncool opinion, just following up on this).

Actual uncool opinion: Pret's stuff is fine as long as you're not in a situation where you have to eat there on the reg.

Bag salads are good.

French food in general is highly overrated (and completely futile if you don't eat meat). Talking about restaurants here, maybe French family meals are culinary delights.

I want to get a coke spoon necklace and fill it with white pepper for emergencies

around 2000 whenever I took a trip to London I actually looked forward to eating at Pret, I would have the coronation chicken sandwich, it had decent not-half-frozen bread, well-seasoned chicken, raisins, mayonnaise and nothing else. now if I go in there they have nothing I want to eat, all the sandwiches are half-frozen clammy slivers of bread with layers of salad leaves and no condiments to be found anywhere inside, just like everywhere else in London with their sad fridges full of sad sandwiches. I will say that their delivery service seems to be a little better for some reason.

Going to town and buying a Pret sandwich for lunch felt super sophisticated when I was 16. Sadly now I am 45.

Steak is bad and one-note. No combination of flavors, seasonings, or textures, just dumb beef flavor. And when cooked 'properly', the texture is kinda gross too. So not worth the price of the ecological impact.

An open faced peanut butter sandwich is superior to a flip over or one made of two pieces of bread.

i dunno if i love anything as much as i love a ballpark brand boiled hotdog

lol I ate this exact thing far too often in high school (1980s). Also ate loads of Steak-umm sandwiches.

Trying to think of a contribution though, this is kinda hard.

Every once in a while I will eat a food that I loved when I was a kid, and it's just unpalatably bad.

In about 1986 my mother got a job that had her commuting home too late to cook dinner, so we were all on our own. We ate Steak-Umms, Chicken Rondeles, freezer food. I have fond memories of that time but I can't really reconnect with the food.

Like, au gratin potatoes from a box used to be a treat. I made them last year, for nostalgia, and almost gagged. Chunky sirloin burger soup has these hilarious tiny burgers - with grill marks! - but is actually terrible.

1980s processed food felt like a miracle at the time, but compared to the many many things we can make now - with fresh ingredients - just as fast? No comparison.

Like, it doesn't take any longer to make an actual stir-fry or pasta than it does to microwave a TV dinner. I can make a real soup in the same time it takes to heat up a canned soup.

I hated guacamole as a kid, thought it tasted like diarrhea.

in my mid-20s, I realized I liked it. in my 30s, I fell in love with it.

last year, I brought a mediocre brand of it to a party and did not care for it at all. since then I haven't enjoyed it once - even when getting good, quality guacamole.

I know palettes change over time but idk if it's that or if that one off brand classically conditioned me, but wtf, it wasn't that long ago I was munching on a $13 gigantic guac appetizer in San Juan nightly on my company's dime and being addicted to it.

YMP - yr right that it's not so much a convenience thing anymore. but hitting a few buttons on a box still 'feels' more convenient i think.

lol at Chicken Rondeles, I forgot about those.

i'm kind of worried about getting stomach cancer due to all of the processed foods I've eaten over the years. so trying to be more mindful.

We used to eat mini pizzas and all sorts of crap when I was a teenager and my parents also worked terrible hours, and now I can put veggie noodles on the table in almost the same time and they have fresh (well, frozen) proper vegetables in them. I'd rather eat beans on toast for my dinner than a lot of the more highly processed options. Speaking of which, I get very annoyed when I hear people dissing UK/Irish food because they think it's weird we eat beans on toast. I don't understand how beans on toast is any weirder than a bean burrito. It's beans and bread. Either it's all weird, or none of it is.

Re: guac., the year-round availability of fresh ingredients is salient here. Give me a ripe avocado and in two minutes I will serve a better guacamole than anything that comes in a package.

That said, I acknowledge that there are huge environmental and social costs involved in making it so that I can casually stroll down to the corner store and grab a ripe avocado in the middle of February. I'm well aware that I'm here in the DC area and half of the abundant produce in my basket comes from Chile or Ecuador or some such.

We live in a world that reeks of privilege, and we should be cognizant of that. But it's really hard to pass up those gorgeous nectarines or whatever.

I try to be a seasonal eater and a locavore and shit, but I just don't have the moral strength to be all "Little House on the Prairie" and live on preserved boiled yams or whatev.

Let me eat Peruvian blueberries while the world dies, thxbye

guacamole is only good after it's been sitting around for a while and the ingredients muddle

eating slices of Kraft American cheese singles one at a time is awesome

― hootenanny-soundtracking clusterfucks about milking cows (Neanderthal), Friday, 24 March 2023 02:22 (twelve hours ago) link

Yeah they are good, and sometimes they taste better on burgers/melt sandwiches than "good" cheese

Also I think Costco Pizza should be considered its own style of pizza, and it's good

Here's one -- almost all delivery food is bad by the time it makes it to you, and people shouldn't do order delivery if they can help it.

The only way it's good is if you put the pizza back in the often (and probably add some extra seasoning, let's be honest) or heat up Thai food properly on the stove, in which case you still have the same amount of dishes to do. I get that it's a timesaver for people with kids who may not even be able to go get takeout (in which case you can usually time it so it's a bit fresher), but I also know a lot of lazy people who aren't above getting Taco Bell or a sub delivered, which just blows my mind. You absolutely could have just made food in the time it takes to get overpriced, cold, soggy food delivered to your door.

Jordan, this is why I try to pick up takeout rather than rely on delivery

Mh: Agree to disagree. For me, the best guac is guac that just got made, and is still zippy from a finishing glug of lime juice and a third of a minced onion

Chili, however, definitely benefits from waiting a day and reheating.

xpost for me, it was often that I was teaching an 8 hour class and only had a 30 minute lunch and I didn't feel like getting up early to pre-make myself a lunch.

outside of that though i try not to use Uber Eats because it about doubles the cost of what you're getting unless you're like buying for your whole family

re:steak talk - yeah I've never really enjoyed a steak. ultra-thin slices of marbled steak with kimchee on rice, yes that's good. huge chunk of semi-cooked flesh, however good it is, I get bored after a few mouthfuls.

burgers are also usually a disappointment, especially any more than a few inches tall. how am I supposed to eat it? have they not considered this?

subway is much, much worse than mcdonalds / burger king / kfc / any other fast food restaurant you can name, also not cheaper or healthier

An open faced peanut butter sandwich is superior to a flip over or one made of two pieces of bread.

I need an explanation for this!

Like, it doesn't take any longer to make an actual stir-fry or pasta than it does to microwave a TV dinner. I can make a real soup in the same time it takes to heat up a canned soup.

― carne asana (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, March 24, 2023 7:00 AM (fifty-one minutes ago)

do you just have a really slow microwave or are you not including prep time in your calculations? also, what kind of soup are we talking about here? ... last night I heated up a store bought container of split pea soup in the microwave. It took less than 10 minutes from fridge to table. Making split pea soup from scratch ... I would really like to hear how that can take 10 minutes or less.

I don’t really like biscuits (uk definition: mainly wheat-based crunchy sweets, what Americans call biscuits are fine) - this might not be uncool idk, but ppl here are mad for the things, they’re like the go-to quotidian treat & are frequently consumed by the packet; I don’t hate them but I’ve never bought a packet & don’t care if I never eat one again