With all the cultural exports the U.S. floods the world with, it's hard to imagine the iconic Oreo is only now making a splash in England. But, sources tell me, drinking a glass of milk, let alone dunking cookies in it, is an alien concept in Europe. I love the subhead on the Christian Science Monitor story on the phenomenon: "What fresh vulgarity have the Yanks brought now? Milk dunking!"
Pretz is a popular Japanese snack in the form of a pretzel-like stick that mostly comes in savory flavors. Like many Japanese snack commercials, the advertising for Pretz is...unique. Sumo wrestlers, geishas, and dancing scientists are just some of the characters used to illustrate the awesomeness of this snack.
Watch five examples after the jump.
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
Long before I was introduced to the snap, crackle, and pop of Rice Krispie treats, I was sinking my teeth into these Chinese soft flour cakes, or sachima. Made with flour, eggs, maltose, and lard (yes, lard—which, gram for gram, has “less saturated fat, more unsaturated fat, and less cholesterol” than butter, so I’ve never understood why people get so antsy about it), these are chewy, sticky-sweet, and have that fun, universally adored “mozzarella stretch effect," trailing gossamer strands of golden malt syrup between bites.
No, you do not want to eat these with braces or a newly installed crown.
When I was little, there was a girl in my class at school who, at lunch, would lick the ketchup off her French fries and then re-dip them. I've never forgotten it, mainly because it was so gross, but also because I sort of understood where she was coming from. Ketchup is delicious. I can't enjoy a burger without it. Or, for that matter, scrambled eggs at brunch, a ballpark hot dog, or a greasy diner grilled cheese.
With Super Bowl Sunday right around the corner, I've been thinking a lot lately about snack foods. And one of my all-time favorites is definitely ketchup chips. Not only are they completely addictive—salty, tangy, and a tiny bit sweet—they're also a shocking shade of paprika red. Way more sophisticated than nacho cheese orange, ketchup chips are the perfect addition to any sports-related smorgasbord.
Perhaps the best use of two dollars, Meiji's Kinoko No Yama ("mountain mushrooms"), are found at even the most average Japanese market. The chocolate cap and biscuit-like cracker stem harmonize wonderfully. And the chocolate-to-cracker ratio is spot on. While the milk chocolate isn't great quality, similar to Glico's Pocky, there's something about the chocolate's density that offsets the cracker stem perfectly.
In Singapore, watermelon seed consumption is a predominantly Chinese affair. At wedding ceremonies the seeds are fertility symbols for the couple (representative of their family’s eager wishes), and at traditional Taoist three-day funerals the seeds are everywhere you look. Strangely enough, despite the Chinese love for symbolism there does not seem to be a significance for the watermelon seeds’ ubiquity at funerals.
In the past week, I’ve asked all the matriarchs I know as to whether a deeper meaning lies behind it, and I’ve come to a (half-baked) conclusion. But first, a little preamble (bear with me): The Chinese believe that the deceased’s body needs to be watched over at all times—lest a pregnant cat jumps over the coffin, prompting the corpse to sit up. Now, I don’t know how true this is, only that it’s a very good thing Chinese families tend to be large and extended…so relatives can take turns to "chor ye"—the filial duty of staying up to shoo cats away. Everyone knows staying up requires munchies, and what better to munch on when struggling to stay awake than something as tedious and time consuming as watermelon seeds?
Editor's note: Our Grocery Ninja, Wan Yan Ling, is currently visiting Singapore, from where she's filing additional Snapshots from Asia.
The concept of "chestnuts roasting over an open fire" is an alien one to Asians, and the notion of buying chestnuts raw and roasting them yourself even stranger—why would anyone choose to go through all that hassle when the streets are lined year-round with hawkers frying them right before you?
When I lived in Australia, I was horrified by the price of hot griddled chestnuts sold on the streets, and no wonder they were exorbitant: Each individual chestnut would be meticulously turned and cosseted as it cooked, and it would take (to my impatient mind) till the cows came home for the vendor to roast up a goodly sized paper bag full of them.
Crispy shrimp snack coated with mild chocolate!! Enjoy the perfect match of shrimp and chocolate.
Weird food combinations found in Japan is not this week's theme for Photo of the Day, but I couldn't ignore Japundit's photo of a shrimp and chocolate snack. Oh, how my mouth waters!...not really.
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
So I've been peeking into other grad students' offices and using this column as a way to not look like the resident moocher. (You know, the guy who wanders around the office cadging a fistful of chips here, a cookie there, and when you ask him why he doesn't keep food in his own cubby, his response is always to pat his tummy and say: "Oh, I couldn't... I'd polish it off in seconds!" before reaching around you for an extra caramel.)
Anyway, a new discovery I've made: The leverage you get when you've got a professional-looking SLR on your arm is considerable. It's like, "Oh, look at your spiffy camera! I see you are on a quest to further the bounds of human knowledge. Here, try this x-y-z I traded a monk my GPS in Timbuktu for, carted back via camel, and smuggled through customs!"
Anyway. The one thing grad students, especially international grad students, can always be counted on is to have food in their office. And it doesn't matter how busy they look, they're always happy to talk about food from home.
I first heard about Twiglets via France-based Graham Holliday (Noodlepie, Word of Mouth). This British expat journalist's Twiglet madness initially manifested itself on his blog, then spread to his Flickr account, and later to Twitter. It became severe enough that Holliday created a separate site devoted to these "crisps."
Thanks to my wife, I discovered Roots and Grubs a few weeks ago. It's Matthew Amster-Burton's blog about his food life with his wife and young daughter. I really liked Matthew's take on cooking and eating with children and asked him if he'd blog on Serious Eats here and there. So every other week, on Mondays, we'll bring you a bit of advice from him. Here's his first entry. Enjoy! —Ed Levine
By Matthew Amster-Burton | The Man has crushed some of my family's favorite convenience foods under his twin jackboots of recall and import ban!
When the FDA announced a recall of salmonella-tainted Veggie Booty snack food in late June, I was concerned for the safety of its young consumers, but I was also smug. OK, I had a bag of the stuff on top of the fridge, but we're past the stage where my three-year-old, Iris, would request Booty and a cup of warm milk every afternoon for a snack. And adults don't eat that sort of thing. Maybe seven or 12 pieces here and there while preparing Iris's snack. That's it.
Then, the same day, the U.S. banned
imports of one of my favorite convenience foods: eel from China. (The ban also covers catfish, shrimp, basa, and dace. Sorry about that, all you basa and dace fans.) A package of barbecued eel in the freezer and a bag of rice on the shelf meant lunch was minutes away: Cook some medium-grain rice in the rice cooker, and when the rice is almost done, toss a frozen barbecued eel fillet on top and let it steam until the eel is hot.
The same meal will set you back maybe $12 in a Japanese restaurant; at home it's a couple bucks. If you have a little more time, you can buy unagi no shiroyaki, eel without sauce, and make your own sauce with soy sauce, sugar, and mirin.
Well, you could at least, before traces of nitrofuran, malachite green, gentian violet, and fluoroquinolones were found in the now-banned Chinese seafood.
So now our house is a Booty- and eel-free zone. To the global food industry: Please clean up your act. Nobody wants to see a frozen potsticker recall. That's one staple dad and daughter can agree on.
Is there a Veggie Booty or eel addict in your house? How are you dealing?
About the author: Matthew Amster-Burton lives in Seattle. His work appears frequently in the Seattle Times and Seattle magazine. His favorite food is pad Thai.
According to the New York Times, it's the Kettle brand lightly salted variety. I believe the attorney general's office should look into the Times rankings (just kidding). My only question: How could they leave out Cape Cod Dark Russets? For me, that dark brown crunchy beauty is so baked potato-y, so crisp, and just greasy enough that it should be enshrined in the National Potato Chip Hall of Fame, which unfortunately doesn't exist—as of yet.
Here's the Times's Top Ten:
Celebrating the Fourth in proper fashion, the New York Times dining section is all over one of life's perfect foods, the potato chip. Kim Severson's lead story is chock-full of resonant chip history, lore, and fun facts. Appropriately, she leaves the chip science to Harold McGee, who fills us in on the sonic appeal of the chip, or as McGee calls them, the "sounds of crispness." Serious Eater Jonathan Bender weighed in on some of the newer "designer" chip flavors here on this site almost three months ago.
Snack pimping: the act of constructing a grossly giant version of a snack, usually a member of the chocolate, candy or pastry family, although savory specimens have also been known to be pimped. The snack pimping movement started in the UK and is best documented at Pimp That Snack.
When I need something to brighten my day, one of my solutions is to head over to Pimp That Snack and see what new developments have occurred in the snack pimping world. What ghastly bomb of sugar and fat has someone come up with now? What cross section of a monsterously huge chocolate bar monster will I stare into next? Perhaps I should be disgusted that the world's abundance of chocolate bars and wafers can result in the birth of a bowling ball-sized Ferrero Rocher that no one should eat, but not only am I not disgusted, I'd happily take a baby chunk out of the Rocher-zilla for personal consumption.
After watching Giles Coren make a giant Jaffa Cake on Gordon Ramsey's The F-Word, I felt somewhat inspired to pimp a snack. Only somewhat because Giles had to find an industrial-sized oven to fit his giant pan and his Jaffa Cake didn't actually end up being palatable. Besides that, it looked great.
Maybe I will start off with a simple pimp. A giant Pocky stick probably wouldn't be that difficult. What snack would you pimp?
Taiwan is not a country that generally comes to mind when the food-obsessed think of where to vacation, but everyone I know who's ever been has come back completely gobsmacked by everything they've eaten there, vowing to return and in some cases already planning their second trip back. Mei is lucky enough to live in Taiwan, and she put together her own local snacking guide, Top Ten Taiwanese Tucks.
Everything she describes sounds delicious, from the stuffed pastries to the knife-sliced noodles, but the listing that intrigues me most is her favorite shaved-ice place: "Xin Fa Ting in the Shilin Night Market. Winter or summer, come rain or shine, this place is always packed. What makes the ice here so special is that the store actually makes the ice out of condensed milk."
It's been open for more than 30 years, so it must be doing something right.
I am currently in Barcelona eating as much ham as I can before leaving on Sunday. In between porcine bites, I sometimes venture into places like supermarkets just to see what a supermarket in Barcelona looks and feels like.
Last evening, marching down the snack aisle, I came across two kinds of Lay's potato chip bags with a drawing of what looks like a chef. I pick the bag up and discover it is none other than Ferran Adriá of El Bulli fame, the man often described as the greatest chef in the world and the man who moved foam from the shaving kit to the dinner plate.
Lay's is putting out a line of Ferran Adria "Artesanas" potato chips. They're Ferran Adriá Autograph Model snacking material.
I opened the bag half expecting foam to be coating the chips. Alas, they were just regular old chips, not half as good as say Cape Cod Dark Russets or even regular Cape Cod chips. These chips are the emperor's new chips.
Even the molecular gastronomers among us have a price they're willing to sell their name and likeness for.
Photographs by Adam Kuban
With artisan potato chips showing the same detailed preparation and ingredient experimentation as micro-brews and independent wineries, it was only natural that Serious Eats would hold a tasting. While eating 11 varieties of chips is not something we’d recommend (two of our five tasters bowed out after the ninth round), the chance to examine what makes a potato chip great is worth the sodium intake.
The chips were graded on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the most desirable) in nine categories that encompassed taste, texture, and smell. The five types of Kettle Chips were part of the third-annual People’s Choice Passport to Flavor campaign (all limited-edition releases). Island Jerk was selected by the public in 2007 as a permanent addition to the Kettle line-up. The other six flavors were from Anchor O’Reilly’s Chip of the Month Club, which ships its customers six bags monthly from three or four independent chip producers.
The chips are reviewed in the order they were tasted. Water and Diet Coke were applied liberally between rounds.
Nosheteria says snacking, thy name is decadence: "When the bacon is sizzling hot, and crisp to your heart's content, remove the bacon from the pan, and add popcorn kernels to the grease. Cover the pot, you wouldn't want your popcorn to bounce everywhere. Appalling though it might seem, this is really no different than adding oil to pan of popcorn kernels. It's just in this case the oil tastes like bacon!"
[via Slashfood]
Hilarious piece on a potato-chip connoisseur, from The Onion: "On my birthday last year, I opened a delightful three-year-old bag of Doritos that I'd been saving, which had a ranch essence—but with cooler undertones," Sterken said. "I'll say it again, 2003 was a great year for Doritos."
Thanks to Dan Dickinson for pointing it out! We've got a thread on favorite potato chips and flavors over on Serious Eats: Talk, tell us what you like to munch on!
"Isn’t it wonderful to live in a country where drunken panda-seals lounge on peanut snack packages sniffing beer? Well, not all Japanese packaging is that weird, but see for yourself. Here is PingMag’s Best of Snack Characters. Enjoy!"
Island Jerk is the winning Kettle Chips People's Choice flavor, beating out Dragon Five-Spice and Twisted Chili Lime in what was apparently a tight three-way tie. You can order all three plus the other two finalists (Aztec Chocolate and Royal Indian Curry) in a party pack before supplies run out in a a five bag mix-and-match pack for $14.95 or two sets of the five-bag mix-and-match pack for $24.95; prices include a free world music CD, a metal chip-bag clip, food pairing suggestions, drink recipes, and, best of all: shipping.
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