Given that this thread has been unalloyed USA #! hoo-rah from start to finish, the least you could do is accept the occasional counter fact with a tiny amount of grace.
I mean at least no one has said your food is an "abomination" despite never having been to your country and knowing very little about it.
To be as unalloyed USA USA as possible, at least our abominations actually taste decent and aren't horrifying. If a taco shell made out of a chip is the worst we can do, that's pretty good.
I mean, Norway's got lutefisk, the Chinese have buried eggs soaked in horse piss, and southeast Asia has balut, which is duck embryos boiled alive. Even Italy's got casa mazu or whatnot where they leave the cheese outside so maggots can get in it. Compared to that spread a Doritos taco sounds like fine dining.
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
Given that this thread has been unalloyed USA #! hoo-rah from start to finish, the least you could do is accept the occasional counter fact with a tiny amount of grace.
I mean at least no one has said your food is an "abomination" despite never having been to your country and knowing very little about it.
To be as unalloyed USA USA as possible, at least our abominations actually taste decent and aren't horrifying. If a taco shell made out of a chip is the worst we can do, that's pretty good.
I mean, Norway's got lutefisk, the Chinese have buried eggs soaked in horse piss, and southeast Asia has balut, which is duck embryos boiled alive. Even Italy's got casa mazu or whatnot where they leave the cheese outside so maggots can get in it. Compared to that spread a Doritos taco sounds like fine dining.
I mean, not to take their side as I think America has the greatest depth and likely highest density of highs of anywhere in the world...
But we also have Rocky Mountain Oysters, Pickled Pigs Feet, and a bunch of other cringey things many of us like to eat here.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
But we also have Rocky Mountain Oysters, Pickled Pigs Feet, and a bunch of other cringey things many of us like to eat here.
Oh yeah! USA enthusiasm slightly dampened now
edit- fried pork skins, ech
I'd say everyone should at least try ____ mountain oysters at some point. For the experience, if nothing else.
I've had what a restaurant called Ozark Mountain Oysters (sheep testicles.) They were delicious and nearly indistinguishable from high quality scallops. They didn't taste as fishy as scallops sometimes do, obviously.
I'd order them nearly every time I went to the place, if they were still on the menu.
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VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
edited July 2015
I find something deliciously ironic about dismissing our use of something like Doritos as a breading as a culinary innovation for hipsters. It's almost like an inversion of the no true scotsman argument, but coming from the other side. Oh, that's not real food/innovation, it's only something that self-congratulatory hipsters like. You should probably examine your own elitism before lobbing terms like "hipster" around.
I'll take a different stance. I think the fact that America mass produces metric fucktons of garbage food while simultaneously producing some of best to be a good thing. I think that when chefs try to marry the two together, they're at least flirting with the potential of arriving at something delicious and innovative. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes we end up with the Chizza.
A good example is mexican food. The culinary abominations that came out of like, El Paso taco seasoning and Taco Bell fifty years ago are pretty much what led to the assimilation of more traditional mexican food. Without their help, we wouldn't have the numerous regional variations (ie Tex-Mex, California Burritos, Colorado green chili etc).
America claiming to do Indian food better than Britain is arrant nonsense of the most despicable kind.
Indian food in the UK is so good that we have long and torturous conversations about where does the absolute best Indian food.
The arguments are epic in length before we settle on the cotrect answer of Glasgow.
People in Glasgow expend their energy on arging which resteraunt does the best version of each dish (For chicken Karahi the Shish Mahal is the winner).
America claiming to do Indian food better than Britain is arrant nonsense of the most despicable kind.
Indian food in the UK is so good that we have long and torturous conversations about where does the absolute best Indian food.
The arguments are epic in length before we settle on the cotrect answer of Glasgow.
People in Glasgow expend their energy on arging which resteraunt does the best version of each dish (For chicken Karahi the Shish Mahal is the winner).
That's a funny way to spell Manchester
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
Eh. Guess I'm feeling salty about the UK claiming curry et al as "theirs", which IMO is more of a sad commentary on the inadequacy of the actual native cuisine.
Like, had to go halfway around the planet to find something that'd actually give your tastebuds a workout.
And then, like the Izzard joke, you plant your flag on it and say "this is ours now!"
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
Oh yeah, that's fair.
I just have a bit of a knee-jerk response to "authenticity is better," because I feel it's limiting.
Eh. Guess I'm feeling salty about the UK claiming curry et al as "theirs", which IMO is more of a sad commentary on the inadequacy of the actual native cuisine.
Like, had to go halfway around the planet to find something that'd actually give your tastebuds a workout.
And then, like the Izzard joke, you plant your flag on it and say "this is ours now!"
It's ours from an exciting fusion caused by immigration.
"Indian" food as a term used outside of India is used to refer to a style of food invented in the UK. Really, it could use a better label, but this is also true for all regional food types.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
Given that this thread has been unalloyed USA #! hoo-rah from start to finish, the least you could do is accept the occasional counter fact with a tiny amount of grace.
I mean at least no one has said your food is an "abomination" despite never having been to your country and knowing very little about it.
To be as unalloyed USA USA as possible, at least our abominations actually taste decent and aren't horrifying. If a taco shell made out of a chip is the worst we can do, that's pretty good.
I mean, Norway's got lutefisk, the Chinese have buried eggs soaked in horse piss, and southeast Asia has balut, which is duck embryos boiled alive. Even Italy's got casa mazu or whatnot where they leave the cheese outside so maggots can get in it. Compared to that spread a Doritos taco sounds like fine dining.
I mean, not to take their side as I think America has the greatest depth and likely highest density of highs of anywhere in the world...
But we also have Rocky Mountain Oysters, Pickled Pigs Feet, and a bunch of other cringey things many of us like to eat here.
You know who I'm pretty sure has the best Indian food? India.
Why, though?
I'm sure India has the most authentic cuisine, but there's nothing inherently better about food that is closer to its origin than something else.
This is always taken for granted (you can see it throughout the whole conversation, at least about Indian food) but it always felt super weird to me.
There is nothing inherently better about food closer to its origin, but it is conceivable that the more authentic cuisine is more refined due to more people working on it for longer.
That said cuisines are also adapted to suit the tastes of the people consuming them, so a particular authentic cuisine may not be to the taste of a particular foreign person who is not accustomed to it. Spiciness, for example, was and still is uncommon in West-European cuisines (at least to the degree of some other cuisines), so authentic Indian food may not at all be to the taste of West Europeans, simply because they can barely taste it at all.
Eh. Guess I'm feeling salty about the UK claiming curry et al as "theirs", which IMO is more of a sad commentary on the inadequacy of the actual native cuisine.
Like, had to go halfway around the planet to find something that'd actually give your tastebuds a workout.
And then, like the Izzard joke, you plant your flag on it and say "this is ours now!"
I mean, Norway's got lutefisk, the Chinese have buried eggs soaked in horse piss, and southeast Asia has balut, which is duck embryos boiled alive.
A local Asian store (I'm in Iowa) sold balut so I thought I'd try it and see what all the fuss is about. Once you get past the slight squickiness of the sight it's actually pretty good, especially with some salt. It's very eggy (somehow slightly moreso than the usual hard-boiled egg, if that makes any sense) and not really meaty and it's undeveloped enough that it's not like you're eating a fluffy chick and choking on feathers and bone bits.
Among my Filipino friends, balut is even considered to be a gross thing in their culture, but it's something which everyone has to try in order to "enter" the culture. But it's not necessary to even eat the embryo part, but rather to just drink the liquid and the yolk around it. They don't eat the chick.
I mean, Norway's got lutefisk, the Chinese have buried eggs soaked in horse piss, and southeast Asia has balut, which is duck embryos boiled alive.
A local Asian store (I'm in Iowa) sold balut so I thought I'd try it and see what all the fuss is about. Once you get past the slight squickiness of the sight it's actually pretty good, especially with some salt. It's very eggy (somehow slightly moreso than the usual hard-boiled egg, if that makes any sense) and not really meaty and it's undeveloped enough that it's not like you're eating a fluffy chick and choking on feathers and bone bits.
Fun story:
I was in the Philippines with some coworkers and one of them found a guy selling balut. He says he'll try it if someone else does so I say I will. He buys a couple and we head back to the hotel.
He goes first and it's as awful as you expect. He looks miserable the entire time but manages to eat the entire thing. "Alright, your turn" he says.
To which I replied "Nope" and left to go find some adobo.
It was a good night.
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jmcdonaldI voted, did you?DC(ish)Registered Userregular
I mean, Norway's got lutefisk, the Chinese have buried eggs soaked in horse piss, and southeast Asia has balut, which is duck embryos boiled alive.
A local Asian store (I'm in Iowa) sold balut so I thought I'd try it and see what all the fuss is about. Once you get past the slight squickiness of the sight it's actually pretty good, especially with some salt. It's very eggy (somehow slightly moreso than the usual hard-boiled egg, if that makes any sense) and not really meaty and it's undeveloped enough that it's not like you're eating a fluffy chick and choking on feathers and bone bits.
Fun story:
I was in the Philippines with some coworkers and one of them found a guy selling balut. He says he'll try it if someone else does so I say I will. He buys a couple and we head back to the hotel.
He goes first and it's as awful as you expect. He looks miserable the entire time but manages to eat the entire thing. "Alright, your turn" he says.
To which I replied "Nope" and left to go find some adobo.
I find something deliciously ironic about dismissing our use of something like Doritos as a breading as a culinary innovation for hipsters. It's almost like an inversion of the no true scotsman argument, but coming from the other side. Oh, that's not real food/innovation, it's only something that self-congratulatory hipsters like. You should probably examine your own elitism before lobbing terms like "hipster" around.
I'll take a different stance. I think the fact that America mass produces metric fucktons of garbage food while simultaneously producing some of best to be a good thing. I think that when chefs try to marry the two together, they're at least flirting with the potential of arriving at something delicious and innovative. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes we end up with the Chizza.
A good example is mexican food. The culinary abominations that came out of like, El Paso taco seasoning and Taco Bell fifty years ago are pretty much what led to the assimilation of more traditional mexican food. Without their help, we wouldn't have the numerous regional variations (ie Tex-Mex, California Burritos, Colorado green chili etc).
There's also much to be said for how a lot of the garbage food does interesting things with chemistry and other science that modern chefs have realized is worth examining. The citric salts used by Kraft to make Velveeta so smooth despite containing pretty awful stuff can be used to make actual cheese melt and emulsify into a sauce far better than a roux can. Likewise a stabilizer used to make some heavy cream last longer before going bad is a seaweed used for centuries in Ireland as a gelling agent that has its own unique properties from standard gelatin on top of being vegan friendly.
You know who I'm pretty sure has the best Indian food? India.
Why, though?
I'm sure India has the most authentic cuisine, but there's nothing inherently better about food that is closer to its origin than something else.
This is always taken for granted (you can see it throughout the whole conversation, at least about Indian food) but it always felt super weird to me.
It's worth pointing out that France has been having this big thing in its culinary circles about a lot of their restaurants ordering the equivalent of heat and serve packages of various dishes and whether it qualifies as cooking. So even the native countries have stuff going on with authenticity.
My buddy made nachos with some aged cheddar and sodium citrate, turned out pretty great.
Sodium citrate based cheese sauces have become my standard way of making macaroni and cheese. I prefer to use a smoked and/or aged cheddar but it works really well with run of the mill grocery generic cheddar with some fish sauce or fermented shrimp paste to add in more umami/savoriness.
Early English food is mostly about bread (and porridge and puddings and pies both sweet and *cough* savoury), roots and veggies (leeks, lentils, onions, squash, 101 ways to prepare a turnip, etc), sometimes fruit (apples, pears, berries) and nuts (walnuts & almonds), dairy FAT (cheese, cream, butter), animal FAT (lard, suet, yummmm), and if you were rich and/or lucky (at least enough to own some chickens or know where you could find some deer or rabbits no one would miss), meat and organs (boiled, roasted, ground into sausage or baked in a pie)... oh, and eggs. For flavor, and/or to cover food that had "gone off" a bit, you had salt, herbs, salt, fat, salt, and honey. Pretty much everything is baked, boiled, stewed, or fried in various combinations, to produce dishes with names that foreigners find charmingly incomprehensible or faintly silly.
Expanding trade with the continent and lands beyond led to the dawning realization that there was a whole world of taste out there, if they were willing to pay for it or (better yet) go out and take it for themselves. And so the great age of imperial expansion commenced. Notable acquisitions of this period were the tomato, the potato (used to feed, then starve, the Irish before being made into chips - potatoes, not the Irish), coffee and tea (both of which provided an excuse to boil water in the days before germ theory, supplanting the previous method of making it mostly safe to drink, which was to mix it into grog or weak ale and just live with everyone being slightly hammered all the time), citrus fruits (which both rewarded/encouraged and fueled the expansion of the Empire in their own special way)...
and then they finally got to India, and the skies did open up and choirs of angels sang, and the LORD said, "Behold, for I have led you to the Promised Flavour."
(Actually, no, they just stuffed their holds full of peppercorns and tumeric and ginger etc etc and sailed for home, to be hailed as heroes - very wealthy heroes.)
Which leads us to the present, in which most or all of the really tasty "English" food is actually imported/immigrant food, with some local variations.
But that's fine, that's fair; the same is true of pretty much all "American" food too.
Both are about equally good for ya, too. Deep-fried Mars bar, anyone?
Commander Zoom on
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AlazullYour body is not a temple, it's an amusement park.Enjoy the ride.Registered Userregular
Given that this thread has been unalloyed USA #! hoo-rah from start to finish, the least you could do is accept the occasional counter fact with a tiny amount of grace.
I mean at least no one has said your food is an "abomination" despite never having been to your country and knowing very little about it.
To be as unalloyed USA USA as possible, at least our abominations actually taste decent and aren't horrifying. If a taco shell made out of a chip is the worst we can do, that's pretty good.
I mean, Norway's got lutefisk, the Chinese have buried eggs soaked in horse piss, and southeast Asia has balut, which is duck embryos boiled alive. Even Italy's got casa mazu or whatnot where they leave the cheese outside so maggots can get in it. Compared to that spread a Doritos taco sounds like fine dining.
I mean, not to take their side as I think America has the greatest depth and likely highest density of highs of anywhere in the world...
But we also have Rocky Mountain Oysters, Pickled Pigs Feet, and a bunch of other cringey things many of us like to eat here.
Uh...
The idea of eating offal isn't uniquely American. There was a time people ate that kind of stuff to survive, not because they considered it fine dining.
And if you haven't tried them, I wouldn't knock them either. Next thing you know people won't be eating tripe, tongue and cheek...
User name Alazull on Steam, PSN, Nintenders, Epic, etc.
Given that this thread has been unalloyed USA #! hoo-rah from start to finish, the least you could do is accept the occasional counter fact with a tiny amount of grace.
I mean at least no one has said your food is an "abomination" despite never having been to your country and knowing very little about it.
To be as unalloyed USA USA as possible, at least our abominations actually taste decent and aren't horrifying. If a taco shell made out of a chip is the worst we can do, that's pretty good.
I mean, Norway's got lutefisk, the Chinese have buried eggs soaked in horse piss, and southeast Asia has balut, which is duck embryos boiled alive. Even Italy's got casa mazu or whatnot where they leave the cheese outside so maggots can get in it. Compared to that spread a Doritos taco sounds like fine dining.
I mean, not to take their side as I think America has the greatest depth and likely highest density of highs of anywhere in the world...
But we also have Rocky Mountain Oysters, Pickled Pigs Feet, and a bunch of other cringey things many of us like to eat here.
Uh...
The idea of eating offal isn't uniquely American. There was a time people ate that kind of stuff to survive, not because they considered it fine dining.
And if you haven't tried them, I wouldn't knock them either. Next thing you know people won't be eating tripe, tongue and cheek...
And then sometimes they blow through the other side and become haute cuisine like chicken liver pate/mousse or trendy like tripe in pho with everything.
Given that this thread has been unalloyed USA #! hoo-rah from start to finish, the least you could do is accept the occasional counter fact with a tiny amount of grace.
I mean at least no one has said your food is an "abomination" despite never having been to your country and knowing very little about it.
To be as unalloyed USA USA as possible, at least our abominations actually taste decent and aren't horrifying. If a taco shell made out of a chip is the worst we can do, that's pretty good.
I mean, Norway's got lutefisk, the Chinese have buried eggs soaked in horse piss, and southeast Asia has balut, which is duck embryos boiled alive. Even Italy's got casa mazu or whatnot where they leave the cheese outside so maggots can get in it. Compared to that spread a Doritos taco sounds like fine dining.
I mean, not to take their side as I think America has the greatest depth and likely highest density of highs of anywhere in the world...
But we also have Rocky Mountain Oysters, Pickled Pigs Feet, and a bunch of other cringey things many of us like to eat here.
Uh...
The idea of eating offal isn't uniquely American. There was a time people ate that kind of stuff to survive, not because they considered it fine dining.
And if you haven't tried them, I wouldn't knock them either. Next thing you know people won't be eating tripe, tongue and cheek...
And then sometimes they blow through the other side and become haute cuisine like chicken liver pate/mousse or trendy like tripe in pho with everything.
Trendy haute cuisine that reflects actual authentic dishes from their points of origin?
Welcome to Flavortown baby!
User name Alazull on Steam, PSN, Nintenders, Epic, etc.
Then we coat those dregs with Dorito crumbs and serve them to hipsters and congratulate ourselves on our fucking culinary innovation.
I'm sorry you apparently missed the last ~14 pages of what we do best when this same half assed complaint was knocked down.
Oh really? You discussed how the US exports its quality seafood because Americans aren't willing to pay for quality seafood? Or did you discuss how hipsters are actually just so awesome?
Yeah I read a few pages before the preening threatened to make me lose my cheeto-encased, hot-dog crusted, deep fried American lunch. The US is the goddamn Tom Haverford of Flavortown.
A few years ago I had dinner with an Egyptian. He was amused by the steak knives that came with his steak. "I've never seen these things before coming to America," he said. I wondered why. Then I started eating steaks in other parts of the world. Now I know. If I need a fucking special knife to cut through your gristle, son, get that bullshit off my plate.
There's a lot of crazy talk here but I thought I'd highlight this. I'm pretty sure they have knives in Egypt. The standard for a good steak is not, I can cut it with a fork. You can probably cut most fillets with a fork but many of the best cuts are not anywhere near fork tender with just a simple grilling. I don't care where your meat came from. You can get any meat that tender with various kinds of long cooking. Either this story is made up or it's just pure ignorance.
Given that this thread has been unalloyed USA #! hoo-rah from start to finish, the least you could do is accept the occasional counter fact with a tiny amount of grace.
I mean at least no one has said your food is an "abomination" despite never having been to your country and knowing very little about it.
To be as unalloyed USA USA as possible, at least our abominations actually taste decent and aren't horrifying. If a taco shell made out of a chip is the worst we can do, that's pretty good.
I mean, Norway's got lutefisk, the Chinese have buried eggs soaked in horse piss, and southeast Asia has balut, which is duck embryos boiled alive. Even Italy's got casa mazu or whatnot where they leave the cheese outside so maggots can get in it. Compared to that spread a Doritos taco sounds like fine dining.
I have to say, I don't buy this.
We all have a good laugh at the dorito-taco-shell and that's fine and well, but I'm barely informed about American dining to determine more than half of what's on a menu on any generic American-style middle-income restaurant. But even I know that there are people here who celebrate deep-frying a stick of butter and serving it on an ice cream cone. If anything, a dorito-taco-shell is just a reflection of the reality that, I wager, most mass-consumption taco shells are made out of pretty mediocre ingredients not that different than chips. You know, versus how did we come to the point where we're eating a stick of butter?
And I have absolutely no doubt that a fried stick of butter is not the most abominable item in American cuisine, as horrifying as it is to me. If it's being celebrated on television as a point of local pride in the vaguely-defined heartland of the country, it definitely isn't. If we're going to compare "abominations" in flavor-town in the context of highs as well as low, then America doesn't get a "pass" so to speak. We're not giving China or Italy as pass either, after all.
I'd also add that we can't dismiss it offhand either--to use a response I've heard on these forums with some frequency when confounded by strange aspects of living in Georgia, "Well, that's the south (or wherever they're eating fried sticks of butter). It's not really America." Fine, it's not America. It just happens to be where tens of millions of American live in shared cultural traditions. And the food they eat is invariably part of American cuisine, for better and worse. After all, the criteria isn't, "Do a minimum hundred million Americans eat this on a daily basis?", because if it were, we'd be discounting some of greatest cuisine we've seen in this thread.
I'm not going to even question that America is the undisputed king of flavor town, my rather middling experience aside, because I know I haven't tried enough to say. I could say with confidence that America isn't the king of best-beef-noodle-bowl towns, because I have tried a lot of beef noodle bowls in the US, versus those of locality where beef noodle bowls predate eating beef in literally any other form, and the results seemed pretty clear--but I'll say that beef noodle bowls are a very specific dish in the grand scheme of things, and hardly a good indicator of what it is to be "king of flavor town."
But the dorito-taco-shell as the bottom of the bucket? Who are we trying to fool?
EDIT: And I have no doubt that practically everyone who eats a fried stick of butter thinks it's delicious. Seriously, why else would you eat that, short of some bizarre G.O.P. primary hazing tradition? I'm sure Italian maggot cheese or Chinese soaked eggs are delicious to their consumers too.
EDIT EDIT: Maybe this is just lunch time coming up, but if anyone wants to share their impression of the best pan-friend jiaozi (I'm reluctant to call them dumplings, as I know that's a distinct, different dish here) in the United States, I'd like to hear it. I was never able to do a really comprehensive survey of those like I was with noodle bowls.
Then we coat those dregs with Dorito crumbs and serve them to hipsters and congratulate ourselves on our fucking culinary innovation.
I'm sorry you apparently missed the last ~14 pages of what we do best when this same half assed complaint was knocked down.
Oh really? You discussed how the US exports its quality seafood because Americans aren't willing to pay for quality seafood? Or did you discuss how hipsters are actually just so awesome?
Yeah I read a few pages before the preening threatened to make me lose my cheeto-encased, hot-dog crusted, deep fried American lunch. The US is the goddamn Tom Haverford of Flavortown.
A few years ago I had dinner with an Egyptian. He was amused by the steak knives that came with his steak. "I've never seen these things before coming to America," he said. I wondered why. Then I started eating steaks in other parts of the world. Now I know. If I need a fucking special knife to cut through your gristle, son, get that bullshit off my plate.
There's a lot of crazy talk here but I thought I'd highlight this. I'm pretty sure they have knives in Egypt. The standard for a good steak is not, I can cut it with a fork. You can probably cut most fillets with a fork but many of the best cuts are not anywhere near fork tender with just a simple grilling. I don't care where your meat came from. You can get any meat that tender with various kinds of long cooking. Either this story is made up or it's just pure ignorance.
Ignorance is quite likely. Again, a chef I know that travels to Mediterranean, including North African, countries has told me how the average Egyptian has to fork over a month of pay for a kilogram of meat that is most likely not going to be beef much less steak. Steak is nowhere near as common as other meat preparations outside of the Americas and Europe.
Posts
yes dorito crumbs are american heritage
To be as unalloyed USA USA as possible, at least our abominations actually taste decent and aren't horrifying. If a taco shell made out of a chip is the worst we can do, that's pretty good.
I mean, Norway's got lutefisk, the Chinese have buried eggs soaked in horse piss, and southeast Asia has balut, which is duck embryos boiled alive. Even Italy's got casa mazu or whatnot where they leave the cheese outside so maggots can get in it. Compared to that spread a Doritos taco sounds like fine dining.
I mean, not to take their side as I think America has the greatest depth and likely highest density of highs of anywhere in the world...
But we also have Rocky Mountain Oysters, Pickled Pigs Feet, and a bunch of other cringey things many of us like to eat here.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
edit- fried pork skins, ech
I'd say everyone should at least try ____ mountain oysters at some point. For the experience, if nothing else.
I've had what a restaurant called Ozark Mountain Oysters (sheep testicles.) They were delicious and nearly indistinguishable from high quality scallops. They didn't taste as fishy as scallops sometimes do, obviously.
I'd order them nearly every time I went to the place, if they were still on the menu.
I'll take a different stance. I think the fact that America mass produces metric fucktons of garbage food while simultaneously producing some of best to be a good thing. I think that when chefs try to marry the two together, they're at least flirting with the potential of arriving at something delicious and innovative. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes we end up with the Chizza.
A good example is mexican food. The culinary abominations that came out of like, El Paso taco seasoning and Taco Bell fifty years ago are pretty much what led to the assimilation of more traditional mexican food. Without their help, we wouldn't have the numerous regional variations (ie Tex-Mex, California Burritos, Colorado green chili etc).
Indian food in the UK is so good that we have long and torturous conversations about where does the absolute best Indian food.
The arguments are epic in length before we settle on the cotrect answer of Glasgow.
People in Glasgow expend their energy on arging which resteraunt does the best version of each dish (For chicken Karahi the Shish Mahal is the winner).
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
But everyone knows Bradford is The One True.
That's a funny way to spell Manchester
Walk into any Indian restaurant on Glasgow.
Done.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
India.
Meh. They don't also have great Cantonese food and Scots-Italian cuisine.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Why, though?
I'm sure India has the most authentic cuisine, but there's nothing inherently better about food that is closer to its origin than something else.
This is always taken for granted (you can see it throughout the whole conversation, at least about Indian food) but it always felt super weird to me.
there is the belief that authenticity = better
it's not necessarily true, but we are natural essentialists like that so
Like, had to go halfway around the planet to find something that'd actually give your tastebuds a workout.
And then, like the Izzard joke, you plant your flag on it and say "this is ours now!"
I just have a bit of a knee-jerk response to "authenticity is better," because I feel it's limiting.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
It's ours from an exciting fusion caused by immigration.
"Indian" food as a term used outside of India is used to refer to a style of food invented in the UK. Really, it could use a better label, but this is also true for all regional food types.
There is nothing inherently better about food closer to its origin, but it is conceivable that the more authentic cuisine is more refined due to more people working on it for longer.
That said cuisines are also adapted to suit the tastes of the people consuming them, so a particular authentic cuisine may not be to the taste of a particular foreign person who is not accustomed to it. Spiciness, for example, was and still is uncommon in West-European cuisines (at least to the degree of some other cuisines), so authentic Indian food may not at all be to the taste of West Europeans, simply because they can barely taste it at all.
What do you know about our native cuisine?
Would that be... nothing?
Whichever it was that you were referring to.
A local Asian store (I'm in Iowa) sold balut so I thought I'd try it and see what all the fuss is about. Once you get past the slight squickiness of the sight it's actually pretty good, especially with some salt. It's very eggy (somehow slightly moreso than the usual hard-boiled egg, if that makes any sense) and not really meaty and it's undeveloped enough that it's not like you're eating a fluffy chick and choking on feathers and bone bits.
Fun story:
I was in the Philippines with some coworkers and one of them found a guy selling balut. He says he'll try it if someone else does so I say I will. He buys a couple and we head back to the hotel.
He goes first and it's as awful as you expect. He looks miserable the entire time but manages to eat the entire thing. "Alright, your turn" he says.
To which I replied "Nope" and left to go find some adobo.
It was a good night.
high fives all the way out i assume?
There's also much to be said for how a lot of the garbage food does interesting things with chemistry and other science that modern chefs have realized is worth examining. The citric salts used by Kraft to make Velveeta so smooth despite containing pretty awful stuff can be used to make actual cheese melt and emulsify into a sauce far better than a roux can. Likewise a stabilizer used to make some heavy cream last longer before going bad is a seaweed used for centuries in Ireland as a gelling agent that has its own unique properties from standard gelatin on top of being vegan friendly.
It's worth pointing out that France has been having this big thing in its culinary circles about a lot of their restaurants ordering the equivalent of heat and serve packages of various dishes and whether it qualifies as cooking. So even the native countries have stuff going on with authenticity.
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Sodium citrate based cheese sauces have become my standard way of making macaroni and cheese. I prefer to use a smoked and/or aged cheddar but it works really well with run of the mill grocery generic cheddar with some fish sauce or fermented shrimp paste to add in more umami/savoriness.
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Expanding trade with the continent and lands beyond led to the dawning realization that there was a whole world of taste out there, if they were willing to pay for it or (better yet) go out and take it for themselves. And so the great age of imperial expansion commenced. Notable acquisitions of this period were the tomato, the potato (used to feed, then starve, the Irish before being made into chips - potatoes, not the Irish), coffee and tea (both of which provided an excuse to boil water in the days before germ theory, supplanting the previous method of making it mostly safe to drink, which was to mix it into grog or weak ale and just live with everyone being slightly hammered all the time), citrus fruits (which both rewarded/encouraged and fueled the expansion of the Empire in their own special way)...
and then they finally got to India, and the skies did open up and choirs of angels sang, and the LORD said, "Behold, for I have led you to the Promised Flavour."
(Actually, no, they just stuffed their holds full of peppercorns and tumeric and ginger etc etc and sailed for home, to be hailed as heroes - very wealthy heroes.)
Which leads us to the present, in which most or all of the really tasty "English" food is actually imported/immigrant food, with some local variations.
But that's fine, that's fair; the same is true of pretty much all "American" food too.
Both are about equally good for ya, too. Deep-fried Mars bar, anyone?
Uh...
The idea of eating offal isn't uniquely American. There was a time people ate that kind of stuff to survive, not because they considered it fine dining.
And if you haven't tried them, I wouldn't knock them either. Next thing you know people won't be eating tripe, tongue and cheek...
And then sometimes they blow through the other side and become haute cuisine like chicken liver pate/mousse or trendy like tripe in pho with everything.
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Trendy haute cuisine that reflects actual authentic dishes from their points of origin?
Welcome to Flavortown baby!
There's a lot of crazy talk here but I thought I'd highlight this. I'm pretty sure they have knives in Egypt. The standard for a good steak is not, I can cut it with a fork. You can probably cut most fillets with a fork but many of the best cuts are not anywhere near fork tender with just a simple grilling. I don't care where your meat came from. You can get any meat that tender with various kinds of long cooking. Either this story is made up or it's just pure ignorance.
I have to say, I don't buy this.
We all have a good laugh at the dorito-taco-shell and that's fine and well, but I'm barely informed about American dining to determine more than half of what's on a menu on any generic American-style middle-income restaurant. But even I know that there are people here who celebrate deep-frying a stick of butter and serving it on an ice cream cone. If anything, a dorito-taco-shell is just a reflection of the reality that, I wager, most mass-consumption taco shells are made out of pretty mediocre ingredients not that different than chips. You know, versus how did we come to the point where we're eating a stick of butter?
And I have absolutely no doubt that a fried stick of butter is not the most abominable item in American cuisine, as horrifying as it is to me. If it's being celebrated on television as a point of local pride in the vaguely-defined heartland of the country, it definitely isn't. If we're going to compare "abominations" in flavor-town in the context of highs as well as low, then America doesn't get a "pass" so to speak. We're not giving China or Italy as pass either, after all.
I'd also add that we can't dismiss it offhand either--to use a response I've heard on these forums with some frequency when confounded by strange aspects of living in Georgia, "Well, that's the south (or wherever they're eating fried sticks of butter). It's not really America." Fine, it's not America. It just happens to be where tens of millions of American live in shared cultural traditions. And the food they eat is invariably part of American cuisine, for better and worse. After all, the criteria isn't, "Do a minimum hundred million Americans eat this on a daily basis?", because if it were, we'd be discounting some of greatest cuisine we've seen in this thread.
I'm not going to even question that America is the undisputed king of flavor town, my rather middling experience aside, because I know I haven't tried enough to say. I could say with confidence that America isn't the king of best-beef-noodle-bowl towns, because I have tried a lot of beef noodle bowls in the US, versus those of locality where beef noodle bowls predate eating beef in literally any other form, and the results seemed pretty clear--but I'll say that beef noodle bowls are a very specific dish in the grand scheme of things, and hardly a good indicator of what it is to be "king of flavor town."
But the dorito-taco-shell as the bottom of the bucket? Who are we trying to fool?
EDIT: And I have no doubt that practically everyone who eats a fried stick of butter thinks it's delicious. Seriously, why else would you eat that, short of some bizarre G.O.P. primary hazing tradition? I'm sure Italian maggot cheese or Chinese soaked eggs are delicious to their consumers too.
EDIT EDIT: Maybe this is just lunch time coming up, but if anyone wants to share their impression of the best pan-friend jiaozi (I'm reluctant to call them dumplings, as I know that's a distinct, different dish here) in the United States, I'd like to hear it. I was never able to do a really comprehensive survey of those like I was with noodle bowls.
Ignorance is quite likely. Again, a chef I know that travels to Mediterranean, including North African, countries has told me how the average Egyptian has to fork over a month of pay for a kilogram of meat that is most likely not going to be beef much less steak. Steak is nowhere near as common as other meat preparations outside of the Americas and Europe.
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