Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Gross Food Week #3: Jeff's Chocolate Soda

Guys, I just discovered instagram. And you know what else I discovered? Jeff's Chocolate Soda. And you know what else I just discovered, today? The futility of mankind and the heartbreaking realization that we're all doomed, man, you know? Probably as a result of this soda's existence. All three are connected. Come, let's take a journey.
Jeff's Chocolate Soda, found in a Stop and Stop but easily purchased at www.getcreamed.net, the only non-porn website on the planet with an extremely porn-like name, is the end of mankind. Nowhere else can a label entice you with 50's style clip art graphics and brutally pervert you with a singular message. Get creamed. And by all means, the package warns you, do not shake this beverage. Why that is is not explicitly stated, but I think we can all figure out the rest.
The chocolate soda is 97% fat free and 99% flavor free, too, and allows you to get your daily recommended value of authentic Tootsie Roll flavor without compromising your lack of dignity. The soda smells like marshmallow cream and is a little salty, a scent that, combined with its visual euphemisms, makes this feel like an episode of dirty Blue's Clues. Luckily, this off scent disappears quickly after opening the bottle and does not translate to the drink's flavor. It has a thick texture that straddles a line between saliva and whipping cream- not quite solid, but nearing dangerous levels of mucus. It comes out of the bottle matte brown with a few runny bubbles on its surface. It's not a very appealing beverage for this and many other reasons.
I will give it this; for a soda containing one gram of fat, it certainly packs an enjoyable and authentic Dutch chocolate flavor. It is fair, simple, and immediately chocolatey- again, much like a Tootsie Roll. That's presumably also where the 48 grams of sugar (per 12 ounces) come in. With a soda like that, who needs enemies? This is a scant 5 grams of sugar away from beating out Sunkist as the world's worst soda, according to Men's Health. If poor Paula Deen wasn't already diagnosed with Type II Diabetes, one or two of these would have easily done the trick.
Unfortunately, I can't say I'm impressed. This soda's future is bleak if the company thinks it can ride with the big boys successfully on sugar and catcalls alone. For the sake of my health and my sense of humor, Miss Love and I will be sticking with something lighter and will likely find a more satisfying way to get creamed without all that fluff.

Corn Cookies

Christina Tosi's decadent desserts, like crack pie and compost cookies, have been all the rage the past couple of years. I've never actually been to Momofuku Milk Bar in New York to eat pastry chef Tosi's desserts, but I jumped at the chance last year to sample five of her cookies when South Philly's Green Aisle Grocery started overnighting Milk Bar cookies in from New York. (Haven't seen a tweet about Milk Bar cookies from Green Aisle in a long time, so not sure if Green Aisle is still getting them in.)

From my taste test, I concluded that Tosi makes great cookies, if not a little too sweet and greasy. The standout cookie from the bunch, though, was the corn cookie. Oh man, is Milk Bar's corn cookie good! It tastes somewhere between a sugar cookie and the sweetest summer corn you've ever had. The secret to getting that sweet corn flavor is corn powder. What's corn powder, you ask? Nothing more than freeze dried corn, that's been pulverized into a powder in a blender or food processor. If you can't find freeze dried corn in the snack section of Whole Foods or some other similar grocery store, you can always order it on Amazon. Tosi unleashed her recipe for corn cookies last year in a issue of David Chang's quarterly magazine Lucky Peach, as well as in Tosi's new cookbook Momofuku Milk Bar. The recipe for corn cookies is even posted on the Amazon page for Tosi's cookbook, so the cat is long out of the bag. I've had this recipe bookmarked for quite a while, but had to 1) procure freeze dried corn, and 2) get over the holiday hump of mega indulgence. The original recipe calls for two sticks of butter, which, really, isn't out of the norm for a batch of cookies, but in recalling how I felt her cookies were way too greasy, I cut out just two tiny tablespoons of butter from the recipe to great results. The cookies are still very buttery, but not sickly so. Next time I bake them, I might try to get the recipe down to one and a half sticks of butter.

I also measured the cookie dough out into uniform sizes, which is something I never do. And, would you believe it, the cookies all came out consistently sized and looking professional! Might have to be more exacting in my baking in the future.
Corn Cookies
adapted from Momofuku Milk Bar
makes about 13 to 15 cookies


14 tablespoons butter, at room temperature (original recipe uses 16 tablespoons)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 egg
1 1/3 cups flour
1/4 cup corn flour (I used fine corn meal)
2/3 cup freeze-dried corn powder
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
  • Cream butter and sugar together in a large bowl. Add the egg and beat for 7-8 minutes.
  • In another bowl, add all of the remaining ingredients and stir until just mixed. (I used my hands to mix the rather thick dough together.)
  • Measure out uniform scoops of cookie dough (I measured 1/4 cup scoops, but original recipe calls for 1/3 cup scoops), pressing the tops of the dough balls down slightly, and place them on a parchment lined baking sheet. Wrap baking sheet with cookie dough tightly with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least one hour, and up to a week before baking. It's very important to start with chilled dough when baking these cookies!
  • Place chilled dough about 4 inches apart on a Silpat or parchment lined baking sheet. Bake for 18 minutes in a preheated 350-degree oven, or until the edges are slightly browned.
  • Cool cookies on a cooling rack. Store in an airtight container for up to 5 days, or in the freezer for up to 1 month.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Gross Food Week #2: Yoplait Splitz Birthday Cake

Long-time reader MrsBug was being optimistic when she commented that Gross Week could only improve from here. So, riddle me this: is there birthday cake in hell? The obvious answer is "no" as there are no birthdays, but I'll leave that one up to the theologians. After tasting Yoplait's birthday cake flavored yogurt, I can definitely assure you that there is some form of birthday cake in hell, as this is as abominable as they come. Yoplait's new Splitz line, which coincidentally sounds like an incredibly flexible line of Bratz spinoff dolls, combines flavors of foods that traditionally come in or eventually turn into liquid form: rainbow sherbert, strawberry banana split, and strawberry sundae.
And then there's birthday cake. Yes, now you can have your cake and eat your live bacteria, too. As you can see on the package, they're not talking about some sexy Elizabeth Faulkner-commissioned dealy either. We're talking low budget, half-off day old birthday cake with Cool Whip frosting and a misspelled name in cursive. Classic grocery store fare, misery guaranteed. Ignore the festive bunting and sprinkles: it all tastes the same after the first bite.
This is something a kid gets when his dad has a new hippie girlfriend he's trying to impress. He can't shake the novelty of buying dessert-flavored products but has switched to yogurt for the kids to look like he doesn't order Taco Bell for dinner most nights a week.
The yogurt is translated into a "layered" format with a frosting-inspired layer and a cake-flavored base, all studded with sprinkles. It's the little sister of its adult counterparts scientifically designed to make adults resent dessert. Weirdly enough, the yogurt definitely smells like vanilla cake frosting but does not taste like it at all. There's that weird super-vanilla flavor all yogurt has, the one that tries to be dessert but simply lacks the sugar to do so. The creaminess is indulgent and thick with a solid body to it that makes it feel less like light yogurt. I feel like I'd have enjoyed this more if it was a pudding. It just seems like it's tiptoeing the line between health food and dessert and falling off to its death.
Even sampling this frozen didn't improve its flavor. As a child, I had a friend whose birthday fell on Passover every year. Her Orthodox mother would always make her a birthday cake that looked beautiful, but had a strangely subdued, bready flavor that put it squarely in the savory category rather than dessert. This yogurt brought back memories of those awful cakes because it had the same visual appeal with the same disappointing flavors, only this time I wasn't encouraged to have seconds and didn't have to play with pipe cleaners afterwards due to there being no television to entertain ourselves with.
The sprinkles, typically the most enjoyable part of a birthday cake, made this one fall apart worse than a Cake Wreck. For whatever reason, they were grossly oversized and rather waxy, giving the impression of biting into a crayon every few spoonfuls. Their two-tone neon color did no favors to the anemic yogurt and tasted bitter, much like the Funfetti sprinkles in my failed pancake experiment. If you're feeding this to your kid on their birthday, they're either ingesting this via IV because an actual cake was too difficult to liquify or you should have had your genitalia removed years ago. Yoplait has made birthdays sad even for the under-10 set now.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Gross Food Week #1: The Original Hooters Medium Wing Sauce

HOOTERS WHHHYYYYYYY???

Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system. With that exuberant commencement speech, let us begin Gross Week 2012. Today's selection embodies all of the principles that I consider to be important for this theme week, namely, that it is a proudly licensed product aggressively marketed by its source and even touted as "secret", that it is a disturbing shade of nuclear hazard orange, and that it was 99 cents at a grocery clearance store. The fact that it is not, like so many products at this store, past its sell date should give you a taste of its quality already.
Where to begin? There's just so much to cover on the label alone. Let's start with the lusty endorsement from the Hooters owl himself, "A thrill on the grill BBQ!" It doesn't take a professor with a Ph.D in Lolology to figure out how Engrishy that is. Despite my suspicions that this was some sort of perverted and failed test item, it turns out that Hooters still makes this sauce, selling it for a mere $7 on the interwebz, and still employs this awful catch phrase. Reading further, I caught the official Hooters logo emblazoned no less than four times on the jar. Either they're trying really, really hard to prevent copyright theft or they're actually proud of this product.
The directions on the side (whose inaccuracies I'll later explain) also provide a list of recommendations of foods with which you can drown in this sauce. Surprisingly, slathering the sauce on the breasts of an after-hours Hooters waitress is not one of them. There goes my bucket list. The cooking process sounded easy enough- fry up some wings, toss them in the sauce, enjoy with a side of classified ads to wipe away the tears and excess dribblings. Not so terrible, right?

AHHHHHHHH
AHHHHHHHHHHH
AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Oh my god, it's like the bastard child of napalm and nacho cheese. My hatred for Robin Williams and Spy Kids has nothing on this one. I think you get the picture. Yep, nasty surprise number two- the sauce had the texture of cold margarine and the smell of gasoline, Tabasco, and melting plastic. This in no way felt like something I should have put near my face, much less ingest. And I haven't a clue why the instructions said to shake the jar first- it's about as productive as shaking a jar of peanut butter. But readers, like a dutiful serf, what I do, I do for you. And so I began the process of cooking my wings.
I decided to try this on both breaded and non-breaded wings to get an idea as to how it adhered to the chicken. Huge mistake on my part. On both applications, the sauce had the softness of warm yogurt and melted like butter on toast. On the pieces of unbreaded chicken, it left no more than a slick trail on the skin and clumped at the bottom of the plate, and on the breaded pieces, it melted into the nooks and crannies and separated almost immediately after sticking on. It felt like the sauce was too runny to handle any temperature above lukewarm, yet was so congealed in its original form that it was also unable to function as a dipping sauce.
Once the wings were no longer molten and ready to eat, the sauce returned to its original liquid consistency, that of a melted almond bark coating, and shellacked the wings to the plate, rendering them mere components in a disgusting and inedible art project and requiring the force of a fork and knife to remove them from their glued-on state. Taking this photo was easy as they remained preserved in their original positions on the plate, held upside down, for over two minutes.
It tasted rancid. This is exactly the kind of product that aspires to be a hot mess and fails miserably. There was literally no element of this that made it appear edible, much less palatable. The heat is warm, but no warmer than a hamburger sitting next to a bottle of mediocre hot sauce and certainly not at the level of any Buffalo wing you'll find at a sports bar. It has an oily, thick consistency not unlike facial cream, were said facial cream purchased at a dollar store and had a slight numbing effect on the lips. It tastes predominantly of vinegar and Crisco with an aggressively salty bite and leaves a buttery slick all the way down the throat. The sauce had the unique ability to permeate through even the thickest flour breading on a wing, saturating the meat so with its liquid ass flavor and rendering every single wing I made inedible. Lest you worry that I went hungry, I thankfully deployed my backup wing supply with a hot honey and red pepper flake sauce and ate them with gusto.
Congratulations, Hooters. In the world of successful marketing vehicles, this sauce is the abandoned flaming Pinto on cinder blocks with a tarp and headless doll in the trunk.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Sweet Potato Currywurst

It's snowing. I have Queen's Greatest Hits (Vol. 1) on and I'm making an appropriately wintry dish for a god-awful day. I'm singing along to "Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy" like I was born to and am simply ecstatic (read: terrified) to start Gross Week tomorrow.
I figured I'd leave you all with an easy, healthy recipe before I spend a week face-deep in curdled sauces and creepy candies. Boy, are you in for a treat. Tonight's recipe features my twist on the sweet and spicy flavors highlighted in the traditional German street food, currywurst. If you've never had currywurst, think of it as the German poutine. It's hearty and healthy and, as a bonus, contains all of the best major food groups: meat, potatoes, and a rich sauce. This recipe swaps out the pork sausage for chicken, adds a little meat to the sauce to boost its protein content and make it a little thicker, and ditches the French fries for baked chipotle sweet potato fries. It's a delicious evening indeed when fries and sausage are the stars of the dinner plate.
Sweet Potato Currywurst
Ingredients (serves 2)

Sweet Potato Fries
1 sweet potato
1/2 teaspoon of chipotle powder
1/2 teaspoon of curry powder
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of pepper
2 teaspoons of oil

Currywurst

2 chicken sausages, pre-cooked
1 cup of shredded chicken
1/2 cup green pepper, diced
1 12 oz. can of tomato paste or sauce (alternative: 1 1/2 cups of curried or spicy ketchup. I happened to have some on hand and used it.)
1 teaspoon of honey
2 tablespoons of curry powder

1/2 teaspoon of cumin
1 teaspoon of masa harina, mixed with a few tablespoons of water until blended

1/2 teaspoon of cracked black pepper
1/2 teaspoon of salt
Hot sauce to taste
1. Start by preheating your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and setting a medium-sized saucepan on the stove on low to medium heat.
2. Place your sausages in the pan, allowing them to brown and crisp. Cut your sweet potato into fry-sized strips and place in a bowl of warm water for ten minutes to remove excess starch.
3. Pat fries dry. Mix spices and oil together for the fries and toss with fries until evenly coated. Place fries on baking sheet in a single layer and bake for 25-30 minutes or until golden and crispy.
4. Take sausages out when they are browned and put chicken, pepper, tomatoes (or ketchup), honey, cumin, and curry powder in the pan. Simmer for five to seven minutes or until bubbling gently and add masa and water to thicken and salt, pepper, and hot sauce to taste. Cut the sausage pieces into slices when cool to the touch.
5. To serve, place fries on a plate or in a bowl with sausage pieces on top. Ladle sauce over the top and sprinkle a little cilantro or cumin on top as a garnish.
Is this the real life? Hell yes, and you can eat it.

Friday, January 20, 2012

GIVEAWAY: $50 Gift Card to a Mohegan Sun Restaurant

Next weekend is the Mohegan Sun Wine Festival. We're totally going and will report back on all the awesome details, but we (with a little help from the cool people at Mohegan Sun) want you to have some fun, too. Who's up for a $50 gift card to any of Mohegan's best restaurants? This includes top chef favorites like Bobby Flay's Bar Americain, which we may soon be writing up, or Todd English's Tuscany, and new kid on the block Ballo, which we've previously covered here. Or maybe you'd rather spend it on one of Mohegan's buffets or get $50 worth of awesome pizza at Frank Pepe Pizzeria.
Regardless of what you choose, the first person to correctly identify this food and email me the answer at foodette.reviews@gmail.com will win the gift card. Mohegan Sun is in Uncasville, Connecticut, so this is perfect if you're a regular or are planning a trip to the casino. And check out the wine festival details while you're at it! If you're interested in going it's not too late! The festival starts Friday, January 27th and runs until Sunday, January 29th. Tickets range from $70-135 for the main event with seminars running $50-65 a pop.
For more information, follow @sunwinefest on Twitter or check out the event's website. Hope to see you there! Check back tonight to see the winner of the slow cooker giveaway! THE CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED! CONGRATULATIONS TO DANIEL, OUR WINNER FOR CORRECTLY GUESSING THE DISH! It was Khao Niaow Ma Muang, Thai sticky rice and custard! Also, props to JunkFoodGuy for guessing it first...next time I'm in DC we'll get grasshopper tacos together!

Slow Cooker Winner!

Dear readers,

The entries for the slow cooker contest ranged from breakfast to dinner, with snacks and sweets in between, and featured recipes from grandmas, blogs, favorite websites, and special cookbooks. There were many recipe entries, all ones I'd love to try, and I couldn't pick just one- I wanted to give you all slow cookers and force you into an awkward dinner party, so I left the task up to Keepitcoming Love.

The winner of the West Bend Versatility cooker is...Gwen! Gwen's recipe was for slow cooker mussels in white wine. We both liked the fact that it had a minimal ingredient list with easy preparation and no additional steps outside of turning on the cooker. We'll be featuring the recipe soon on the site. For the rest of you, don't despair! We'll be cooking your recipes and enjoying them all winter. Expect more fun giveaways in the future!

Foodette