What's on your mind?

[GoatmasterGeneral]

14 minutes ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

I think I was born with an old soul (or maybe an iodine deficiency) because when I step into a new restaurant and see that the average age of the patrons is above sixty I take it as a good indicator I'm going to enjoy the food there...

...except Cracker Barrel. Cracker Barrel has this weird inverse principal going on where everything but the food is absolutely miserable. They make you go through their gift shop in case you want to get a souvenir for the people in your life that you hate, there's always somebody's shitty grandkids tear-assing around the whole place and heeding the siren "break me" song of the overpriced rocking chairs out front, the seats and tables were designed by the Spanish inquisition themselves with the express purpose of being as uncomfortable as possible, the entire staff has that "Too long have I lingered in shadow" stare, there's always some ancient mole man still unable to admit he needs a hearing aid screaming at their waiter about how there's not enough salt in all of North America for his food, and God help you if you have to piss because they make you go back through the gift shop to get there, and again to go back. Hell. There is a hell, and it's true name is Cracker Barrel. 

I remember seeing Cracker Barrels at pretty much every god damned exit, on every god damned interstate highway across the whole god damned country when I was trucking, but I have never stepped foot into one. I've always imagined it looks like dinnertime in the mess hall at the old folks home in there. And yes, I do happen to be just a tad over 60, but when it comes to my food, just like my music, it seems I have skipped a generation and adopted what the Gen-X-ers tend to like instead of what shriveled old fucks like me are supposed to like.

 

I've never actually had poutine. I do remember seeing it on offer at many Brooklyn restaurants back when I was making deliveries. I remember this one place on 3rd Ave had a sign in the window "Try our poutine!" and I've been meaning to try it one of these days, I just haven't gotten around to it yet. We are talking essentialy about loaded fries right? Or 'disco fries' as they're sometimes called in the diners of New Jersey. Twice cooked fries with gravy and cheese curds? Could be good I guess, but it looks a bit soggy to me and I've never been a gravy on the fries kinda guy. Fries (chips, or hot chips to the Commonwealthers) need to be crispy/crunchy on the outside with gooey potato goodness on the inside.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

24 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

Just get a piece of toast, cover it with salt and smear it with some powdered beef stock.

I've never had Vegemite either, but I'm assuming here that Vegemite is somewhat similar in overall general taste to NZ Marmite, (to us Yanks one yeast extract is as good as another) and I was the designated Marmite spreader at my house. It's more bitter than what Orca describes. It manages to be bitter and very salty at the same time with a weird aftertaste. Typically spread lightly over buttered toast, it's very concentrated so a little goes a long way. Yeast extracts must be one of those things that you had to grow up with to really appreciate. My wife always had me spread it a bit more thinly than they've done for the photo. 

 

NZ Marmite vs UK Marmite vs AUS Vegemite.

[FatherAlabaster]

20 minutes ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

I think I was born with an old soul (or maybe an iodine deficiency) because when I step into a new restaurant and see that the average age of the patrons is above sixty I take it as a good indicator I'm going to enjoy the food there...

...except Cracker Barrel. Cracker Barrel has this weird inverse principal going on where everything but the food is absolutely miserable. They make you go through their gift shop in case you want to get a souvenir for the people in your life that you hate, there's always somebody's shitty grandkids tear-assing around the whole place and heeding the siren "break me" song of the overpriced rocking chairs out front, the seats and tables were designed by the Spanish inquisition themselves with the express purpose of being as uncomfortable as possible, the entire staff has that "Too long have I lingered in shadow" stare, there's always some ancient mole man still unable to admit he needs a hearing aid screaming at their waiter about how there's not enough salt in all of North America for his food, and God help you if you have to piss because they make you go back through the gift shop to get there, and again to go back. Hell. There is a hell, and it's true name is Cracker Barrel. 

Oh man. Cracker Barrel is so awful. My wife has convinced me to stop at a few of them on road trips, and some have been less depressing than others, but you've nailed the vibe.

47 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

Just get a piece of toast, cover it with salt and smear it with some powdered beef stock

Excellent, I'll put it on the list

[AlSymerz]

7 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I've never had Vegemite either, but I'm assuming here that Vegemite is somewhat similar in overall general taste to NZ Marmite, (to us Yanks one yeast extract is as good as another) and I was the designated Marmite spreader at my house. It's more bitter than what Orca describes. It manages to be bitter and very salty at the same time with a weird aftertaste. Typically spread lightly over buttered toast, it's very concentrated so a little goes a long way. Yeast extracts must be one of those things that you had to grow up with to really appreciate. My wife always had me spread it a bit more thinly than they've done for the photo. 

 

NZ Marmite vs UK Marmite vs AUS Vegemite.

I've never had Marmite, but it does seem that people who adore the shit out of Vegemite will make every excuse they can to distant it from Marmite. I understand they are both different textures with Marmite being a bit more like syrup or thick soy sauce whereas Vegemite looks like it's been scraped from the bottom of a diesel engine that's done a million miles without and oil change.

I don't know how Marmite works in other meals but because Vegemite has the beefy taste of bouillon it does work well in other things that require a beefy taste. But one does need to be careful using it because the salt content can really change a meal.

Weirdly Vegemite has a better beefy/meaty taste that stock cubes in this country. Our major supermarkets don't sell real real bouillon any more. It's all vegan safe shit which means the stock is not made with animal bones, therefore the flavour is really artificial. Vegemite, despite also being vegan safe, still manages a more meaty flavour than stock cubes.

Vegemite mixed with a little oil, then seared onto a steak at high temp, fried for a few minutes each side, then oven cooked until the internal temp reaches about 60-63C (about 145F I think) makes for an amazing steak.

[Nasty_Cabbage]

I've only had vegemite and marmite a couple of times, and that more as a kind of novelty food at one of those weird junior high and high school field trips where all these different countries had their own representative stand. It was alright. I think maybe the issue stateside is that it's something that can be good in very small and controlled portions, and portion control's just not something we do over here. If it's worth eating it's worth eating a lot of.

One thing I was impressed by was falafel. I love meat, and I know falafel is often touted as a meat substitute, but goddamn if it isn't good just as it's own thing. I still go nuts for the stuff whenever I'm able to get it. Most of the gyro meat you get at those stands is pretty much just lamb baloney anyway. I love cheap hangover cure gyros, but let's not kid ourselves.

Poutine is excellent. Used to live down the street from a sandwich shop run by a really nice couple where the wife was originally from Canada and the husband was from Philly so they had both cheesesteaks and poutine available. I learned fairly early on that place was for lunch only on days off. Stopping by on a break from work had the effect of essentially putting me on a half-day.

[Thatguy]

29 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I'm assuming here that Vegemite is somewhat similar in overall general taste to NZ Marmite,

It's like heaven and hell.

As promised.

[AlSymerz]

Yep, I've seen used diesel oil in better condition than what you've ruined those crumpets with.

 

[RelentlessOblivion]

24 minutes ago, Thatguy said:

It's like heaven and hell.

As promised.

 

i’m like 99% sure that violates the Geneva convention…

[GoatmasterGeneral]

He really slathers it on duddnee?

[AlSymerz]

He probably threw them in the bin uneaten after he took the photo.

 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

2 hours ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

I've only had vegemite and marmite a couple of times, and that more as a kind of novelty food at one of those weird junior high and high school field trips where all these different countries had their own representative stand. It was alright. I think maybe the issue stateside is that it's something that can be good in very small and controlled portions, and portion control's just not something we do over here. If it's worth eating it's worth eating a lot of.

One thing I was impressed by was falafel. I love meat, and I know falafel is often touted as a meat substitute, but goddamn if it isn't good just as it's own thing. I still go nuts for the stuff whenever I'm able to get it. Most of the gyro meat you get at those stands is pretty much just lamb baloney anyway. I love cheap hangover cure gyros, but let's not kid ourselves.

Poutine is excellent. Used to live down the street from a sandwich shop run by a really nice couple where the wife was originally from Canada and the husband was from Philly so they had both cheesesteaks and poutine available. I learned fairly early on that place was for lunch only on days off. Stopping by on a break from work had the effect of essentially putting me on a half-day.

 

Not saying it's a good idea or healthy or anything, but on a bet or something I could probably live on nothing but cheesesteak sandwiches for a year without getting sick of them. But they have to be made with mozzerella like we do up here in NY/NJ, they can't be made with American cheese or worse canned cheeze-whiz like they do down in Philly. Need plenty of mayo and the (preferrably garlic) bread needs to be toasted. And more onions than peppers and mushrooms combined.

And yeah falafel is great. Used to be this middle eastern place on DeKalb Ave at the corner of Clermont in Fort Greene, called Black Iris and we used to go get lunch there when they were frying up the falafels.

[AlSymerz]

A year of melted cheese and onions farts. Eeewww that doesn't bear thinking about.

 

[Thatguy]

3 hours ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Unlike apparently everyone else here I've never had Vegemite but it kinda sounds like I might like it in the right situation.

The right situation is on anything toasted. Ignore the Orca. He is from south of the border.

59 minutes ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

i’m like 99% sure that violates the Geneva convention…

You savages don't know what's good for you.

[AlSymerz]

1 minute ago, Thatguy said:

The right situation is on anything toasted. Ignore the Orca. He is from south of the border.

You savages don't know what's good for you.

Unlike the others here I'm prepared to defend your tastes to a point. Toast, bread, as a cooking additive, sure, Vegemite works. But on crumpets? No way, that's white coat and a padded room territory.

 

[Dead1]

Vegemite is Ok on crumpets but much better on toast.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Buying bread from a man in Brussels

He was six-foot-four and full of muscles

I said, "Do you speak-a my language?"

And he just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich

And he said: I come from a land down under where beer does flow and men chunder

[Nasty_Cabbage]

38 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Buying bread from a man in Brussels

He was six-foot-four and full of muscles

I said, "Do you speak-a my language?"

And he just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich

And he said: I come from a land down under where beer does flow and men chunder

Goddammit. I tried to share my Vegemite on my lunch break, but all the men were at work.

 

1 hour ago, AlSymerz said:

A year of melted cheese and onions farts. Eeewww that doesn't bear thinking about.

 

I got to the whole prior to life party way too late. All the good superpowers were taken so I ended up with the digestive system of a god. It's something I guess.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

16 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

Crumpets aren't crap, they are 99% fat free bro! (actually they are 99% free of everything given all the holes).

What do you consider cooked bacon? Crispy edges, curled up, almost no pink?

Our shortcut bacon doesn't lend itself to being cooked that way, it's also not great for making what one might see as Canadian Bacon. But shortcut bacon is something we've been conditioned to think is 'healthier'. It's changed in the last 5-10 years but we used to have this massive push for people not to eat streaky bacon so shops began selling less of it. For years a lot of streaky bacon was sold here as "cooking bacon", i.e. the stuff you use to add to things like fried rice, or bolognese etc.  But short cut bacon really doesn't cut it. Sure it fits nicely in a burger or a sandwich but that's about all it's good for.

Almost no pink? I'll reiterate, all we have for bacon in the states is your 'streaky bacon' which we call simply 'bacon' and there are no other kinds of bacon here. Or at least nothing else that gets to be called 'bacon' except Canadian bacon which isn't even bacon it's just ham. And obviously no, there shouldn't be any pink left whatsoever when cooking streaky bacon. I cook it til all the white fat has been rendered and it's stiff and brittle, incinerated might be a good way to describe it. Charcoal if you will. Ideally I'd like to get it off at the last possible moment that you could still bend it without snapping it in half, but more often than not I'll overshoot and end up with incinerated. I tell myself each time that this time I'm gonna take it off a minute sooner but then I usually make the same mistake each time and end up at incinerated. And I'm ok with that because I don't want those blobs of raw fat when I eat bacon. Red meat like beef and lamb should be med-rare pink inside. Bacon and pork as well as chicken, no pink please. 

 

The goal is #4 but I often end up with #5. I could eat #3 in a pinch, but I'd still rather have #6 than #2.

 

We don't have any 'bacon' here in the states that looks like this:

 

Now my beef I want med-rare 130° (55°C) and anything past 140° (60°C) is effectively ruined. I get the exact same feeling when someone at my table orders it med-well 150°+ as I would if they'd asked the waiter to have some nice rap infused nu-metal piped into the dining room area.

 

[AlSymerz]

Bacon at 2 or 3 is fine, 5 or 6 is just like eating the coals from the BBQ, no point wasting good bacon by burning the shit out of it.

What happens to the end of the bacon in the US? I'm not a fan of short cut bacon but it seems like a waste to not eat all of it.

Steak cooking is BS these days. Stupid TV chefs and reality TV shows have driven the world to believe that uncooked in the middle is how meat should be cooked. Lamb, pork, beef, the only meat TV chef's cook properly is chicken because they are shit scared of showing anything pink in a chicken. This idea that a steak has to have uncooked portions of a deeper red in it to be rare is BS. If any part of the meat is uncooked it's raw, not rare.

[SurgicalBrute]

21 hours ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Oh man. Cracker Barrel is so awful. My wife has convinced me to stop at a few of them on road trips, and some have been less depressing than others, but you've nailed the vibe.

Restaurant may be lacking, but goddamn I can't help but love that sourdough bread they sell. Shit is so tasty I can eat it by the slice with nothing added

33 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

Bacon at 2 or 3 is fine, 5 or 6 is just like eating the coals from the BBQ, no point wasting good bacon by burning the shit out of it.

It's like you're my spirit animal, because I completely agree. I can even tolerate it up to 4 because that's about where my wife likes it, but beyond that you may as well chew on a briquet.

6 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

 

We don't have any 'bacon' here in the states that looks like this:

Yeah we do...It's not everywhere, but depending on the market, you can definitely find fatback (both the real kind and the back bacon kind) in stores. It's just not as popular for eating.

[Thatguy]

6 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I cook it til all the white fat has been rendered and it's stiff and brittle, incinerated might be a good way to describe it

This is another unbridgeable cultural gap. You have produced a carcinogenic waste product that tastes overwhelmingly simply of salt. Yep, I've eaten this 'foodstuff' in the states and here. It's a cruel way to treat bacon.

No. 6 is simply burnt. N0.'s 4 & 5 badly overcooked..

[AlSymerz]

That 'shortcut' bacon image GG posted isn't actually what our shortcut bacon started as. Shortcut here started as the meaty part without the fat and rind, it was supposed to be a healthier alternative. It's only in the last decade or so where supermarkets and delis realised that fat and rind is better for them when a product is sold by weight, that it started to appear on short cut bacon. It's the fat and rind that actually makes short cut edible, cut that off and it's not bacon it's little more than a piece of ham.

3 minutes ago, Thatguy said:

 You have produced a carcinogenic waste product that tastes overwhelmingly simply of salt.

 

I read about the black, burnt bits were thought to be carcinogenic a decade or so ago, but I never heard if it was actually proven. Guess if a Doc, or even an ex-Doc, is saying it there must be truth to it.

[Nasty_Cabbage]

1 hour ago, AlSymerz said:

Steak cooking is BS these days. Stupid TV chefs and reality TV shows have driven the world to believe that uncooked in the middle is how meat should be cooked. Lamb, pork, beef, the only meat TV chef's cook properly is chicken because they are shit scared of showing anything pink in a chicken. This idea that a steak has to have uncooked portions of a deeper red in it to be rare is BS. If any part of the meat is uncooked it's raw, not rare.

First off, if you don't like your steak rare, that's cool, but the grade of doneness literally functions on an objective scale. It's not a matter of opinion. If you're driving five miles per hour under the speed limit there's no fudging it by saying that you put ethanol in your tank by mistake and changed the flash point of your engine so you were actually going five miles over. Second, the reason you're able to eat beef with "raw" parts to it is because the risk of food borne illnesses in steak is almost zero so long as the temperature of any surface area has been raised to the point where microorganisms can't survive. This isn't the case with pork or fish which can be contaminated with a number of things even if the surface area has been cooked.

I do agree with you that the whole celebrity chef thing has gotten well beyond the point of annoyance. I become especially frustrated with chefs that haven't gotten anywhere near a busy commercial kitchen at rush hour in decades going on game shows where they basically mean-mug the camera as if there weren't ten people behind them in the competition all of whom are just as responsible for the meal that comes out as they are. Most of them are just restauranteurs promoting their brand.

Most food-centric television irritates me to no end. Something like 90% of it are these shows that will give you tiny little factoids relevant to the food and proper preparation and then spend all their time on shots of the food with exaggerated sound effects. People make fun of me for enjoying Good Eats as a rare example of a food show done right, despite the corny dad-humor sketches, but Good Eats was practical and content dense. I'm not watching informational food programming to be given no information.

[AlSymerz]

I don't get your analogies, but I stand by the statement that anything red is raw and not rare. How someone likes their steak is entirely up to them but eating raw steak, no matter whether it's safe or not is ridiculous.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

37 minutes ago, Thatguy said:

This is another unbridgeable cultural gap. You have produced a carcinogenic waste product that tastes overwhelmingly simply of salt. Yep, I've eaten this 'foodstuff' in the states and here. It's a cruel way to treat bacon.

No. 6 is simply burnt. N0.'s 4 & 5 badly overcooked..

Yes Doc, 6 is burnt beyond all recognition, so my saying 6 is preferable to 2 was a bit of hyperbole. But not completely untrue, because I absolutely would not be able to eat it at 2, I'd send it back or cook it some more if I was home. As I've said, 4 is the goal, but I'm an amateur so it often gets away from me and ends up at 5. I know that it keeps cooking after I take it off, and I'm conscious of this fact the entire time as I'm tending it. I tell myself to take it off before I think it's ready, but yet it still frequently gets away from me. This is why we're sending Blivvington to culinary school and not me. Thing is I'm not just gonna throw my expensive bacon out, so I have gotten used to eating it at 5. I am always quite chuffed though when I can manage to hit my target of 4. I find 3 to be edible, but I do much prefer it at 4. Not at all pleased when I get bacon out somewhere and they bring it to me at 2, which happens a lot and I have to send it back because to me that's just raw. I like my black metal raw, not my pork products. I will say though I've always found that the crispy burnt edges and ends of anything are always the best part where the most flavor will be found. And I'm not alone in this opinion. 

 

58 minutes ago, SurgicalBrute said:

Yeah we do...It's not everywhere, but depending on the market, you can definitely find fatback (both the real kind and the back bacon kind) in stores. It's just not as popular for eating.

Fair enough Surge, I will take your word for this. I haven't seen this in the supermarkets, but I'm not out looking for it either. I'm not a butcher and I honestly don't even know what 'fatback' is, or 'short cut bacon' and I probably wouldn't recognize it in its uncooked state if I saw it. Likewise when Orca asks "What happens to the ends?" I don't really know what he's talking about. I'm a city boy, have no experience with livestock or butchery. Bacon comes in a package labeled "Bacon" and we buy it and cook it, that's all I really know. And I also know the stuff I got on my plate in Australia and NZ bore little resemblance to what I have always thought of as 'bacon.'