Man, people miss out on so much good eating because of preconceptions and gatekeeping.
Berries go with almost anything. And yeah, technically strawberries aren’t berries. But the point is that pretty much every berry is a blend of acidic tartness, sweetness, and complex flavors. There’s no world in which berries make something bad.
Any fruit has the potential to go with any standard food. Meats, pastas, breads, even veggies. It’s a matter of balancing the specific fruit with the other ingredients.
That’s why pineapple on pizza works. Tangy, sweet, and with that hard to describe tropical fruitiness. It brings out the sweetness of a good tomato sauce while cutting through the fattiness of toppings and any oils.
Pork chops and applesauce baby, it’s a classic for reason. Pork stuffed with apples; and other things, orange chicken or duck, blackberry glazed venison roast (seriously, you want to try it), apricot beef (or lamb), curried goat with prunes (or apricot, or peaches even), roasted brussels sprouts with apples and cranberries.
It’s all about the balancing with other things.
The Polish strawberry pasta? It’s balanced out with sour cream that mutes the sweetness some, and works as a bridge with the pasta.
I know I’m talking into a void here, what with this being a meme, but I’m always so amazed that people will dismiss a food combination without trying it, or sometimes without even trying to imagine the possibilities.
I blame Alton Brown.
Hear me out.
Alton Brown is undoubtedly a legendary figure and he did a lot of good for the modern state of culinary entertainment. His scientific, experimental approach was authoritative. He came up with what was scientifically the best way to do a thing, demonstrated why, and did it in a very entertaining way.
But with that, came scores of fans who saw “this is the best way to do a thing” and interpreted that as “this is the only way to do a thing, fuck you you’re doing it wrong.”
Alton wasn’t doing what other TV chefs were doing. Emeril and Julia presented really good recipes, they’d add some flare and say hey, this is how we do it around here. Bourdain explored the world and showed off a lot of great ways to cook. He was reluctant to criticize and clearly just loved the food.
But Alton Brown, for all the good he did, opened up authority to fans who didn’t know shit about fuck. He spoke with confidence about how his method was the right method.
Right about the time the Internet was coming in to it’s own and arguing about nonsense online became a hobby a person could have.
Now, there’s a culture of being right about cooking online. People who log in every day just to bitch about how somebody else cooked something.
Obviously it’s not exclusively Alton’s fault, and Alton is as open to new and interesting ways to cook things as Bourdain was, a fact you’ll discover if he ever happens to visit your home town and read what he says about the food there on his Facebook page.
But there is a through line there, and it starts at Good Eats.
9/11 also did a number on food shows
You know, I agree, especially about Alton not being the cause as much as it is the viewers looking for am excuse to feel holier-than-thou about something.
You’re dead right that people took his work way too far and assumed that because he was breaking things down into the underlying food science and methodology that the exact preparations he used were default the best, period.
He wasn’t prone to that himself, though he did go hard against myths.
He’s a terrific food educator. One of the best in television history imo. But you’re also dead right about the entertainment side screwing things up. His on screen persona, combined with the structure of good eats as a show made it too easy for food snobs to glom onto the wrong parts
I think you said it better than I did. Dude just wanted to educate and people just can’t let something be good. It has to be correct.
I still can’t get over the militant grilled cheese vs melt arguments that were common online a year ago.
If food tastes good, who cares what the hell it’s called or how “authentic” it is. No food is authentic from the get-go; someone tries something new one day, other people like it, and it catches on and becomes a thing. If it’s not your thing, or if you think it could be done better with x, y, and z, that’s fine, everyone has personal tastes and you don’t have to like everything.
I don’t know if I agree with that. I think Alton was vastly more New Guard, Question Tradition than many of the other notable celebrity chefs and cooks during his come up. If you want to talk about people enforcing tradition, let’s take a look at Giada DeLaurentis, or hell even Rachel Ray whenever it comes to anything with Sicilian origin.
I think the Old Guard mentality is vastly more rigid about these sort of traditions and giving people a critical understanding of the processes behind cooking doesn’t, at least to me, imply any kind of singular authoritarian approach to cuisine.
edit: typos and cleaning up for clarity
Also Brown definitely wouldn’t have been the first to enforce faux tradition.
That shit has existed forever and the more meaningless, the more militant.
Ketchup on hotdogs. Folded pizza. Seafood with red wine.
All said with more authority yet far less evidence than anything Alton Brown ever said.
Syntax error: Unmatched parentheses on paragraph 5
The classic pitfall of the ADHD parentheses in a parentheses info dump
Nice catch, thanks :)
Ok now I’m hungry and I want to try Polish strawberry pasta.
I haven’t had access to good, fresh strawberries since I heard about it, but even grocery store ones were yummy. Maybe not the best thing ever, I would prefer a strawberry shortcake pretty much every time. But it’s essentially the same flavors (excepting the sour cream); the textures are what makes it a new experience.
It worked really well, maybe fifteen, twenty minutes of work total. I kept things kinda medium chunky. Used a potato masher for maybe ten mashes. Tried it both warm and chilled. The taste was more strawberry forward warm, but it was overall better chilled since the sauce hits the tongue different. It kinda rolls across, deploying the strawberry in layers with the sour cream more. Made for better mouth feel and general taste, at the expense of that vibrant strawberry kick.
I get people wanting to defend the “traditional” preparation of a food, because otherwise you get into weird philosophical “burrito of Theseus” issues, but… You can just slap “non-traditional” on it and then carry on and enjoy the food. If you feel really strongly or it’s really out there, call it a fucked up ____ inspired whatever.
One of the best pizzas I ever had was at a pizza place near me that has a “trust us” pizza, where you don’t know what it is, but it’s new and definitely worth the cost (they’re not giving you a plain cheese pizza). It was like a strawberry and anduille pizza with a seasoned sweet white sauce. It was weirdly good.
Seems dangerous to let people order a dish without knowing what’s in it. Lots of people are allergic to strawberries and might not otherwise expect that to be on a pizza if not disclosed up front.
They do ask you to let them know if you have any allergies, and they do tell you what everything is when they give it to you. You’re not at risk for eating something you can’t. You’d have to not tell them when they ask, and then ignore them when they told you the ingredients.
That sounds ok, then, if they actually ask you your allergies up front. If they only told you when serving, I’d still be a bit upset if I ended up paying for a dish I couldn’t eat. Better than dying of anaphylaxis either way, though.
Totally. And the staff is also pretty reasonable about how it’s ultimately just a fun way to get food you might not have thought of.
I usually tell them I hate sour cream and they’ll let me know if I should get something else, which is technically against the “rules”, but it’s also just pizza that I’m paying for and not a national secret or anything.
Man, I would love a place like that.
pasta with strawberries is yummy :3
Can you link a recipe? Could only find a kind of dessert…
get strawberries
get cream (or cottage cheese)
get sugar
get pasta
toss them in a bowl & mix
done! :)
Fruit goes on cooked flour.
It’s been like that for centuries.
Cake. Danish. Fruitcake. Pizza. Filled doughnuts. Kolacky. Raisin bread. Banana bread…
Not sopping wet flour
Ya know when ya put Danish I thought you were calling the Danes gay and just kinda accepted it.
I love strawberries, that sounds awful, and next strawberry season I would love to try it. Could I have a recipe?
There are tons of recipes for fruit pierogi if you google em, they usually include the recipe for the pasta as well. They’re little dumplings, basically ravioli. My fiance is polish and I make them for him on occasion with twarog and blueberries, (a simple milk cheese that’s really easy to make -you can skip the cheese and serve them with cream which is great too) boil them, then fry them in butter and sprinkle them with powdered sugar.
Once, out of salt, I put sugar in my fries. It wasn’t bad.
I don’t get your logic but I can see that working.
logic was fries alone wouldn’t taste like much ^^
I tend to fry them with some minced onion, theyndont really need salt afterwards.
About 6 months ago, I refilled the office salt pot with sugar for a laugh.
Nobody seems to have noticed yet.
American ketchup is basically corn syrup with red dye, you’re just cutting out the middleman.
Alright guys. How do you all feel about a dessert lasagna?
It’s been a long time since I’ve been, but I distinctly remember Olive Garden having a chocolate lasagna. It was decent, but nothing to rave about.
Since I generally prefer another serving of the main course over dessert, sure, I can just eat more lasagna for dessert.
I would like to know more!
Ever had spaghetti ice cream with strawberry sauce and grazed white chocolate as “parmesan”
Is this for real? How has this not been brought up already as a crime against humanity?
Sugar, cinnamon, and butter on spaghetti is amazing (sans meat, herbs, and spaghetti sauce, in case it needed to be said). It doesn’t taste like spaghetti; it tastes like dessert.
brazilians making stragonoff pizza:
As an average enjoyer of that particular flavor, fuck anyone who thinks it sounds terrible.
I’ve been wondering recently if you could replace the pineapple with banana slices.
I think Sweden already picked that as their insult towards Italy
Pineapple, banana, chicken and yellow curry powder, served with a side of terragon mayonnaise(usually called bearneise, but very far from it) is a very common pizza in Sweden, and it’s really good :)
Wouldn’t even be hazardous, nothing stopping you, maybe you’re behind the next big thing.
Only one way to find out. Maybe throw some Nutella in there if we want to get real crazy with it.
Brazil already does that, banana pizza with or without chocolate
Banana and curry powder is a staple pizza in Sweden.
A famous italian chef branded the strawberry and champagne risotto, so maybe not
Hawaiian pizza was invented by a Greek man running an Italian pizzeria in Toronto inspired by the sweet and sour flavors of Chinese cuisine
Need to polish them tastes
I’m a man of strange tastes so I say y’all should carry on with whatever nonsense that pops into your head. How do you think we got to this point as far as the culinary arts go?
