Many are disappointed by North Carolina style barbecue. I was certainly taken aback the first time I tried it. I had grown up thinking of barbecue as whole pieces of meat (ribs, chicken) cooked on a grill with tomato-based barbecue sauce brushed on it. North Carolina style is shredded roast pork, generally grayish in color. The Eastern part of the state uses vinegar-based dressing, the Western part includes some ketchup. Much info on NC BBQ is here http://hkentcraig.com/BBQ.html
White Castles hamburgers are steamed, too, if you’ve ever had those.
I’m pretty sure they’re cooked on a griddle.
Ahh, after some researching it seems that they are cooked on top of a bed of onions that are on a griddle. So the steam from the onions helps cook them (especially with those holes,) but I’d say that they are close enough to being grilled.
I’m surprised to hear that White Castle’s burgers are steamed.
What causes the interesting “side effects” of White Castle consumption that I’ve heard so much about?
How the heck do you de-bone chicken feet? They’re mostly all bone and there can’t be a lot of meat on there.
North Carolina barbeque is the food of the gods. The true nobility of the race.
White Castle considers it “steam grilled.” For all practical purposes, I consider it steamed, as it has none of the flavor (caramelization/Maillard reaction) one associates with griddled or broiled burgers.
Oh, yeah, I like it now. But it does result in a lot of :eek: the first time people see a pile of grayish shredded meat on their plate when they were expecting saucy ribs or chicken.
I have yet to visit NC to sample the barbecue, but when I barbecue at home (and I’m talking proper barbecue, low-and-slow over wood, let the meat shine through), it’s always NC-style that I usually do: pork shoulder, dry-rubbed, smoked for 8-12 hours over wood (usually a mix of white oak & hickory for me. Sometimes apple and/or cherry work their way into the mix.) Serve with the plainest, cheapest white buns you can find (or skip the buns), and sauce on the side. I like the plain ol’ vinegar/pepper flakes one, but most of my friends prefer the Lexington style with a little bit of tomato ketchup in it. South Carolina (mustard-based) also gets good reviews around here. I also like to serve it with a vinegar-based coleslaw.
It truly is the food of the gods, and I can only imagine what it must taste like out in NC.
Usually, the vast quantities of beer consumed beforehand.
While they are not necessarily health food, Sliders are perfectly wholesome. They are just low-fat beef (fastfood burgers are usually use low-fat because faster cleanup more than makes up for the higher price), onions, pickles, and buns. The meat never touches the grill, so I have to disagree with bouv. They are so simple and perfect that condiments wreck them.
Eh, it’s not the beer. I’ve had White Castle perfectly sober and still had my ass writing a musical the next day. And it’s amazing, because what comes out has a very distinct smell. I think it must be the onions.
For me, it’s definitely the onions. And, yes, you don’t want to be around me after I’ve had a sack of White Castles.
Well, there IS the gas, but that’s not the same as the explosive diarrhea they are rumored to cause. 
A number of the local Asian restaurants here in 'Jersey are weird amalgams of cuisines: Chinese restaurants with a sushi bar along one wall; Japanese that also have Chinese items; IIRC a Japanese place with Korean items (and a lot of kimchee)… and the Thai restaurants here are mostly pretty damn disappointing. There’s a Turkish restaurant where I had the driest, blandest, most inedible and boring chicken dish I’ve ever had. The meat was so tough and dry, it was practically jerky.
I’m not crazy about most of the pizza joints, either; New York style rules (I think it’s because they’re just being stingy with the sauce), and Chicago style is virtually unknown.
There’s an independent ice cream stand in Highland Park (or maybe it was just across the boundary line with Edison) that has managed to screw up vanilla ice cream – by not having any discernable vanilla in it. Just frozen sweetened milk & cream, apparently. Disgusting.
I live in the Afghan capital of the US, and have never had a bad meal. I’ve been to an Afghan restaurant in DC many times over the last 30 years, and it’s been excellent also.
My nomination is the American breakfast in Tokyo. I stayed at a fancy hotel, just blocks from the Ginza. The American style breakfast consisted of very runny and undercooked eggs, some soggy oven fried, cocktail weenies, and a salad. I only tried it once, the Japanese breakfast was good. They guy I was traveling with was allergic to seafood, so he was stuck with the American breakfast every day.
(And gefilte fish in the jar is excellent - as long as you have purple horseradish. And White Castle never bothered me, when I was lucky enough to live near one.)
Was it a Korean-owned sushi joint? Those are pretty common all around.
Probably. It’s been a long time, and I have no idea if the place I was recalling is still around.
Do you remember the name of the place?
Ref.Blackpudding I enjoy it AND I know how its made.
Mushy peas are vile however used.
I’ve always loved Kebabs after drinking but once mistakenly I had one
sober and found that not only do they seem to somehow be similtaniously be swimming in grease AND incredibly dry but are half raw as well.
My contribution though is a dish that all Cockneys wax lyrical about when away from London.
Pie and Mash served in establishments of the same name.
You get a meat pie whos pastry is as hard as a tortoises shell with a minced meat filling of no determinable taste accompanied by overcooked and runny mashed potato that would be shamed by a packet of instant mash in a blind tasting,
AND a watery green liquid poured over it called liquor(possibly because it inspires an urgent desire to have a stiff drink or three to take the taste of it and the rest of the meal away)
You find that the intensity of nostalgia about P&M expressed by Londoners grows expotentially with the distance in time or space of them actually having being in danger of having to eat one.
Much as I support tradition thankfully P&M shops appear to be a dying breed.
I moved to Chicago a couple of years ago, and I don’t understand the lure of White Castle or
ugh
ox-tail soup.