If you're preparing to visit the United States for the first time, you might want to read up on traditional American cuisine. You can probably find some burger joints scattered throughout the country to keep you fed. But to experience true American food, you should get away from the tourist areas and eat like the natives.
When on Earth has a helpful guide to 10 American foods. They are commonplace in American restaurants and supermarkets, but foreigners often think of them as strange. Try them! You'll enjoy fried rattlesnake, bull testicles, pickled pigs' feet, and akutaq, which is a Native Alaskan dessert consisting of polar bear fat, seal oil, snow, and berries. Dig in!
Redditor dfreshv is brilliant! Take a peanut butter Oreo, a strawberry/raspberry Oreo, remove a cookie end from each, combine what's left, and you've got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Make a bunch of them and that's a full and reasonably healthy meal.
Domino’s Pizza has always taken a rather lighthearted approach to advertising (remember the Noid?) but when it comes to creating national ad campaigns it can be really easy to take humor too far.
Take this Sriracha Pizza spot Domino's wisely decided not to include in their Superbowl ad campaign:
The ad was created by advertising agency McCann Israel, and even though the pitch was never approved the image inevitably made its way online and is now causing quite a stir. Domino's reps are ardently denying they authorized use of their logo, and claim "the people responsible are being dealt with", but it sure looks like a legit pitch to me.
It’s obviously meant to cash in on the Fifty Shades Of Grey hype and add some edginess to their ads, but deciding the S&M theme was a little too NC-17 for a national ad campaign was clearly a smart choice. -Via The Daily What
Look at these adorable little hedgehogs! Don’t you just want to eat them up? That’s what you do, because they are dumplings, stuffed with sweet cream filling. But they are only available at one restaurant, in the Chinatown section of Yokohama, Japan.
The spiky little treats are available at Yoseigo, a dim sum takeout joint that’s been in business since 1946. If you’re after orthodox fare, Yoseigo has steamed shrimp dumplings, egg rolls, and the like. On the other hand, if you’re in the mood for something sweet, and also a little playful, you can’t go wrong with their hedgehog dumplings.
The palm-sized snacks appear to be steamed first, and then later deep-fried to help give them a more defined shape. This brings us to what might be the only negative point about the hedgehog dumplings. Though they have a pleasantly crisp texture, the “quills” on their spiky backs are indeed a little sharp, so you’ll want to chew carefully to keep from poking yourself.
It’s true that most cheeses are named after their place of origin, so John Green goes ahead to tell us the story of the cheese’s origin as well. Even cottage cheese was once made in cottages. However, there are some in which the name is a little more complicated, like Monterrey Jack (there is a Jack involved). There’s even a cheese named after another cheese! Learn about two dozen cheese names in this week’s mental_floss List Show.
Foodies get mighty attached to their favorite food products, and we continue to search online and check in with local stores “just in case” long after our favorite products have disappeared from store shelves.
Sometimes it’s hard to accept that you’re never going to get to eat another P.B. Crisp, or take another satisfying sip of an ice cold Ecto Cooler, and the cupboards look mighty empty without your fav food products of yesteryear.
BuzzFeed put together this video of various coffee concoctions from countries all across the globe. Some are iced, some are hot, all are decidedly different than anything you'll get in most American coffee shops. Have you tried any of the recipes included here? If so, weigh in with your review in the comments. (I'll be over in the corner with my tea.) -Via Viral Viral Videos
KFC rolled out a new menu item Monday: the Double Down Dog. This carnivore’s concoction consists of a hot dog nestled in a "bun" of breaded fried chicken pieces. You can have yours with a splash of melted cheese or other condiments. But the supply of the Double Down Dogs was limited yesterday to 50 each at 12 outlets in the Philippines, which sold out all 600 of the sandwiches. However, there will be more Tuesday, the last day of the promotion. Will we ever see the Double Down Dog in the U.S.? That may depend on how well it goes over in this limited run. What's the point in putting a hot dog in your fried chicken, anyway?
DK's Donuts of Orange, a simple, walk-up donut stand in Orange, California, offers this donut that is anything but simple. 7 Deadly says that it would make cronut inventor "Dominique Ansel to kneel over and sob French tears." That would be a great shame, for it would be sad for Ansel to, like Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, withhold future works of his genius from the world to prevent them from being altered.
What does it taste like? Let the reviewers from 7 Deadly speak:
However, the first bite makes it clear that the cronut-gimmick is merely a vehicle for the punch-in-the-face flavors of the thick Sriracha glaze and generous amount of candied bacon sprinkled on top.
If you’re looking for something “delicate,” this is not the donut for you. This savory behemoth is a Sriracha-soaked, protein-packed meal that just happens to be on a cronut-like pastry. There’s a faint hint of sugar from the dough, but that quickly gets lost as the spicy, meaty heat overwhelms every square centimeter of your tongue.
The Locally Laid Egg Company puts their name right their on cartons of their eggs, which are available only in northern Minnesota and parts of Iowa and Indiana. In December they received a letter from a man who was offended by the name. How do you respond to that? Lucie B. Amundsen, the company’s “marketing chick,” wrote, in part:
Here’s why we named our company, Locally Laid. First off, it’s completely demonstrative of what we are. We are the first pasture-raised egg company in the Upper Midwest providing you with eggs which are laid locally. More on the sassy part of the name in minute, but let’s look at local. It’s important.
She goes on to explain the importance of free-range, organically-raise chickens and how they differ from nationwide factory farms. She also explains how important mid-sized farms are to preserving local economies. It’s pretty interesting, in a post that's all due to a customer with a dirty mind. -Thanks Carol Anne!
A couple of years ago, we linked to a story about how the variety of apples diminished to just a few kinds, and the efforts of one man to bring back their glorious diversity. The same fate has befallen potatoes. Thanks to market forces, particularly the demands of the French fry industry, the overwhelming majority of potatoes available in the U.S. are Russet potatoes. Contrast that with the many kinds of spuds that are still grown in South America. Potatoes were first cultivated thousands of years ago in the Andes mountains, on the border of what are now Peru and Bolivia.
Back then, the potato was synonymous with diversity. The Andeans inhabited a mountainous mosaic of microclimates in which one plot of land presented a very different set of growing conditions than its neighbor. No single variety could survive in such a heterogeneous landscape, so the Andeans diversified — to the extreme. Farming so many different types of potatoes also provided a more interesting and enjoyable diet, a tradition that is still alive today. “If you go to a typical Andean household,” explains Stef de Haan, a researcher at the International Potato Center in Lima, “they will eat what is called chajru, which means ‘mixture’ in the Quechua language. They sit around a big bowl of potatoes. And the joy of eating those, the culinary delight, is that every time you pick a potato, you pick a different one. In Quechua, especially when it comes to the taste of potatoes, they have this whole unique vocabulary — almost like somebody from France would tell you about the taste of wine.
Now a few folks are trying to bring back potato variety in the U.S. One is helping chefs develop ways to harness different tater flavors, colors, and textures, while another is encouraging diversity on farms. Read about the many types of potatoes we could be eating soon at Modern Farmer. -via Digg
Happiness is possible on this earth because these haggis pops are actually real! It's more portable than the world's largest haggis and surely just as tasty. Instructables member PenfoldPlant, the inventor of the Möbius bacon strip, made them for a Burns Supper, an annual celebration of the life and work of Scottish poet Robert Burns that takes place on January 25.
PenfoldPlant, a true traditionalist, made them from fresh sheep guts. He even cleaned and prepated the stomach itself, which serves as the coating of these delicious wonders. This step required careful work. He placed a ping pong ball in part of the stomach, then tied off and cut that part off the rest of the stomach.
The famous Danish chef René Redzepi has brought the entire staff of Noma, his restaurant in Copenhagen, to Tokyo. At his new location, he's offering his unique take on Japanese cuisine. He launched the endeavor with a grand 16-course feast that began this dish. It's jumbo shrimp served with black ants. The Japan Times describes the taste:
But it is the seasoning — “flavors of the Nagano forest” the menu calls it — that defines this dish. A dozen tiny wild black ants are carefully arranged on the shrimp, their little pinpricks of sharp acidity acting as a perfect accent for the sweet, pink flesh.
Mere strawberries don't cut it anymore, nor do cheesecake-filled strawberries. Fia Fortune of Fia's Maine Kitchen pushes the boundaries of culinary decadence even further with this deep fried concoction. She used Dogfish Head Tweason’ale, which is a strawberry-flavored beer, for the batter. The stuffing consists of cream cheese and confectioner's sugar.
People in Japan love cantaloupe, where last year one lovely pair of melons sold for $17,500. Hokkaido, the northernmost of the large islands of the Japanese archipelago, is particularly well known for its cantaloupe. When Casey Baseel of Rocket News 24 visited, he saw this simple and delicious dessert on sale. It consists of nothing more than soft serve ice cream and sliced cantaloupe served in its rind. I can almost taste it though the computer screen!
