This isn’t something you hate or can’t eat. It’s just a food item you personally think gets way too much love. Like bacon, or ranch dressing, or lobster.
What brought this on was dinner last night at a quite nice upscale Italian place. The wife wondered why I only took one piece of prosciutto with my share of the caprese appetizer. I replied that I thought prosciutto was one of the most overrated foods in the world. I don’t hate it, but I really can’t see the love for it. It’s just a very thin slice of fatty ham that isn’t even cooked. It adds nothing to the dish. Prosciutto-wrapped melon tastes better as just melon. So that’s my entry in the “Most Overrated Food” survey.
I think you’ve nailed all three of mine: bacon, ranch, and lobster. Well, I at least like bacon; ranch is terrible; and lobster–I can take or leave. Once a year I have a lobster roll, but I’ve never otherwise craved it or really enjoyed it all that much. Perhaps if I have in Maine I’ll appreciate it more.
I agree with the above mentions. I submit chocolate-dipped strawberries (or any chocolate-dipped fruit for that matter) as vastly over-rated. I see people oogling Shari’s Berries and I just cannot understand what is the attraction. Chocolate is good by itself, as are strawberries, but together it’s an cloyingly sweet concoction.
Same can be said for candy apples. Kids go wild for them, and then throw half of it away as the sugary sweetness catches up to them. And now they are all dipped-out and decorated with even more candy, chocolate, and crap.
But prosciutto I love. Not all prosciutto is created equal, but some nice room temperature LaQuercia Prosciutto Americano, with a glass of wine and some fresh bread. Good god! But I am a sucker for charcuterie. That nutty, melt-in-your-mouth, parmesan-y flavor just slays me.
I like a good hard sharp cheddar, preferably with chips or salty crackers, but I will never understand the American enthusiasm for pouring massive quantities of melted cheese over just about everything.
Bacon, easily. I have a theory that this whole bacon nonsense started from people currently around my age for whom bacon was a sometimes-treat and their mother would ration out a few slices to each person. then we got older, got jobs and decided “I can have all the bacon I want!” and invented some taste mythology to justify why we needed to each it like potato chips. I mean, it’s good and all. I don’t hate bacon. But people who praise it like it’s divinely touched seem a little wrong in the head.
I would suggest lobster but, truth be told, I don’t know if I’ve ever given it a fair shake. I’ve had it but I haven’t had it fresh while visiting New England or anything. Heck, I haven’t had it fresh out of the big fish tank at Red Lobster. So I guess it’d be unfair to judge.
I’ve had plenty of bacon though so those people can give it up, already.
Edit: Also pizza, in a way. People don’t go insane for it so much as people give it too much credit. Anyone who says that there’s no such thing as bad pizza just hasn’t had bad pizza yet.
Escargot. Had it for the first time last summer. It was very good but in retrospect, I couldn’t tell you what the meat tasted like. The seasonings were fantastic, but it was not like the difference between a beef steak and a venison steak. If I’m missing a salient point here, feel free to clue me in.
I would definitely have it again. If for no other reason, just as comparison to the first sample.
I was just thinking about this the other day. Now I like caviar quite a bit, but I think it became the epitome of “fancy food” more because of the price of some kinds than because it tasted better than anything else.
Yeah, the insistence of bacon love is kind of surprising to me, too. Of fatty meats, I’m probably more into Italian sausage, or even (a wee touch leaner) ground chuck with some onion and black pepper.
Bacon is prolly #1 all-time, but at the moment I think it’s sriracha. Smells like ass, tastes like worse ass. Oh, it’s got some heat alright, but the taste is foul. There’s plenty of other hot sauces that actually taste good (like Cholula, Tapatio, about eleventy-thousand boutique brands, etc.).
For me it’s seafood, in particular shellfish and crustacean’s. People (including my wife) clamour for them and pay massive prices, but I can take it or leave it. I’ve eaten enough, including crabs fresh out of the creek and straight in the pot, but it all leaves me kind of ‘meh’. I can easily take it or leave it.
When I read the thread title the first thought I had was bacon. I’m not a huge fan of bacon, but even ignoring that, it’s bacon, folks, I’ve got no idea why it’s suddenly so popular. It’s not like it was just invented 5 years ago but suddenly in everything and everyone talks about it like they’ve discovered this magic ingredient and they’re the only one that knows about it.
The other one is IPA beers. Again, not a fan of IPAs in general, but I know that’s not the point. They’re suddenly so popular that some breweries make almost exclusively IPAs. On top of that, people search out the most IPA IPA they can find. The bitterest of the bitter. IIPA’s, Hopslam, double IPAs, etc, paying $15+ for a 6 pack. Sometimes even treating it like a challenge. I mean, I guess if you truly think it’s a great tasting beer, go nuts, but if you’re just choking it down some Unearthly or Hop Stoopid to impress your friends (remember when you and your friends would see who could finish a Warhead), I think it’s a waste of money.
One of my problems is that, like I said, some breweries make almost nothing but IPAs, so I end up writing of the brewery as a whole.
Look at a brewery like Green Flash. I’m looking at their year round beers. I see 8 beers, 7 of them are IPAs. All of their seasonals (3) are IPAs and the three random beers they list that aren’t affiliated with a season or being year round…also IPAs. So of 15 beers, 14 are IPA. The last one is a double stout. Since I don’t care for IPAs, I don’t know how the brewery is as a whole so I’m not likely to pick up the last one. Might be great (because I know the brewery is supposed to put out good beer), might be crap that they just put out to appease non IPA lovers. C’mon guys, give me lager or an amber or a wit and maybe next time a friend shows up with an IPA I’ll say “that other beer I had from them was pretty good, I’ll try this”.
So, that’s my contribution. IPAs. I’m anxiously awaiting a shift in the hipster world to loving dopplebocks or brown ales or wheat beers so the market is flooded with those. There’s plenty of great wheat beers around, but Optimator is getting old and if a bar doesn’t have my favorite local brown, the only option I have (and it’s a perfectly respectable option) is Newcastle.
Does ranch get any ‘love’? To me, ranch dressing is what you get when you make a salad dressing and then subtract all the flavor. Sure, it gets put on everything as a flavorless flavor, but there’s a wide swath of this country that adores bland.
I think packaged foods (like Kraft Mac & Cheese) and fast foods all get far more love than they’re worth.
I’ve been horribly disappointed twice in my life by food items that were overhyped (to me).
One was caviar. Who in their right mind would pay big money for salty snot?
The other was a very old, very high falutin’ bottle of red wine my uncle won in a charity auction. He saved it for Christmas dinner and we were all salivating, waiting to find out what a really good wine tasted like. Well, this one tasted like wet dust. I don’t know if it was something wrong with that particular bottle of wine itself, or that’s just how collectible wine tastes, but at the prices those bottles go for, I’ve never felt tempted to try one again.
Twinkies. I have no idea why people made such a big deal when they were almost “taken off the market” a year or so ago. Dry, plasticky cake filled with sticky, plasticky goop. They taste like a life-sized Ken doll inseminated a sponge.
The big two, like yous guys said, are pizza and bacon.
Pizza is totally overrated. Sure, a good Neopolitan pie once in a while doesn’t hurt, but in moderation.
Most pizza is not good pizza, and I don’t get why people have to have pizza every week. It’s everywhere for every occasion, it’s always the go-to for work lunches, it’s at parties, it’s what we have on Friday nights when nobody wants to cook.
I have always loved bacon on its own or with pancakes or in an omelette. Had a yummy BLT tonight. However, I don’t need bacon on everything. Bacon on a burger or with other meats is just excessive. Bacon wrapped tenderloins mean either the bacon is floppy or the steak is grey and tough. It seems lately that the challenge is “how thick can we cut this here bacon to serve with the IPA?”
p.s. I also love a good IPA, but the recent onslaught of all-IPA all day all night, is crazy and I am scared that in a year or 2 it will be passe and no longer available and people will look at me like I can’t keep up with whatever the Next Great Beer Trend is.