Or you could do it the George Carlin way: “We’re not doing turkey this year. We’re having swan. You get more stuffing.”
My sarcasm must have gotten lost. For the record, Cecil’s column in response to “What’s wrong with ketchup on hot dogs” basically came down to “It’s too sweet and it drowns out the flavors of the dog itself.”
That said, I prefer my hot dogs (on the rare occasions I eat one) with nothing but ketchup.
The crisis in the UK was heavily reported in USA newspapers. When Oprah Winfrey hosted. . .
Mind you, the Mad Cow problem had been preceeded by prior instances (years apart) of food inspectors finding horse meat in McDonalds burgers, e. coli outbreaks being traced back to Jack-In-The-Box# burgers, and someone noticing that McDonalds was including seaweed$ in their burgers. Thus, by the time the news hit USA’s newspapers, a lot of people were already rather distrustful of ground beef anyway.
Absolutely. Fuddruckers was in San Diego in the early 1980’s, Five Guys started in Virginia in the mid-1980’s and In-N-Out was popular throughout LA for years before it came to San Diego in (roughly) the late 1970’s. Angus is a beef breed, but there are several. Around the same time that In-N-Out was expanding south from Los Angeles, American ranchers were banding together to create the Certified Angus brand [http://www.berkeleywellness.com/healthy-eating/food/article/truth-about-angus-beef].
As noted above, the Mad Cow hysteria hit the USA beef industry hard in the mid-1990s despite the fact that the news reporting was about cattle industry problems on the other side of the Atlantic ocean.
After the hysteria died down (well, after the Texas cattlemen lost their lawsuit) there rose an inexplicable fad for fare from ‘better burger’ joints – Five Guys, Fuddruckers, the Carl’s Jr. Six Dollar Burger, and the venerable Jack & Mac places boasting they were using Certified Angus beef – ostensibly to remind people their cows weren’t European, even though there are Angus breeds in Scotland, Germany, (and, for that matter, even Argentina and Australia). Note that this fad began well before the backlash against Michelle Obama’s push for healthy meals (a backlash which popularized deep-fried chocolate-covered bacon) and, although it may be tastier, Black Angus beef is actually more fatty+ so it’s less healthy than beef from other breeds (wagyu, for instance, whether from Kobe or other regions).
Ultimately, my points are
- Hamburgers aren’t that tasty, much less delicious – though I’d rather eat a beef-burger than a turkey-, lamb-, or tofu-burger.
- The sudden popularity seems inexplicable to me, as if the fad-followers had no memory beyond a year. Thus, I suspect it was a manufactured fad – manufactured by the beef industry to revive its flagging profits.
–G!
Subsequent joke: Kid: Is it safe to eat a Jack-in-the-Box? Parent: Sure! It used to be risky, but now they cook the shit out of their burgers!
$ McDonalds freely admitted to this and noted that the ingredient increases moisture-retention – it makes the burger juicier.
- But, as every good cook knows, fat is where the flavor is!
I’m good with a glass of water (or on rare occasions a Stella Artois) while everyone else is maowing down on their cherry-topped, cherry-glazed triple-layer angles food cheesecake in bernaise sauce or whatever.
Whatever divine entity I can blame for coming up with the mushroom, all I can say is that I’d like to give that entity a good frog-marching perp walk.
To Doom.
Or contracting out Snidely Whiplash to plonk the ole dynamite plunger on all beets.
To each, their own, I guess. Hamburgers absolutely are delicious! There are few foods I love more than a hamburger tailored to my tastes. And I feel similarly about hot dogs. (Like I literally do get endorphin rushes when I dig into a good burger or hot dog. As in, they can actually lift my mood.) Then again, my friends do say I’m kind of the connoisseur of low-brow foods, so there’s that. I enjoy my steak from time to time, but four times out of five, I’d rather have a hamburger. The only reason I don’t eat them more is I’m conscious of my waistline.
I’m not sure there was a “sudden” popularity, but certainly over the past 15 years or so, hamburger choices have expanded quite a bit in the city, and the overall quality of hamburgers has improved.
Agreed. My wife often observes that I’d eat a burger every day if given the choice. And a good LA street dog will pep up your entire day.
Got a cite that McD’d used horsemeat?
Sure, e coli can come from burgers, but much more often lettuce and other vegetables and fruit.
Burgers can be delicious, and it certainly wasnt a manufactured fad since i remember eating burgers- and there being burger places everywhere- long before mad Cow was even a thing.
I used to hate them, then I discovered that frying them in the steak juices after you cast iron pan fry a steak- lovely!
Brining chicken and turkey makes it too salty, and makes the skin rubbery. Roast fowl is fabulous and moist if you don’t over-cook it and if you let it rest properly. Brining makes it harder to get it right, not easier.
Thing is, most commercial turkey already comes pre-brined.(And even a lot of chicken is already “enhanced” as well.) I’m with you in how it changes the texture of the meat itself. Not necessarily a good thing, but if you’re dealing with people who only roast chicken or turkey once or twice a year, it’s a godsend.
The e. coli problem for Jack-in-the-Box occurred just before I went to Japan. When I got there, the scandal-of-the-day was about kangaroo meat being found in McDonald’s beef patties. The problem for most people wasn’t the meat itself (although my manager seemed to have a skin reaction after ingesting it) because Australians have eaten kangaroo for decades. The problem for most people was the lack of disclosure.
Butt e. coli is only recently a scandal in the vegetable industry. Prior to that, there were scandals like the one linked above. The bacteria itself (Quadgop and others can go into more detail, but there are several variants) is a resident of intestines and when it is found as a contaminant in leafy vegetables the source is the manure* (porcine or bovine, usually) that farmers buy to spread on the fields – an age-old gardening and farming practice.
The problem of contaminated foods was neither new in the 1990’s nor new to the fast food industry. It’s one of the reasons laws were passed (and signs started getting posted) requiring restaurant employees to wash their hands after using a restroom and before returning to work. The ‘bacteria burger’ scandals go back as far as I can remember (early 1970’s) but were mostly localized because the news just didn’t carry all that far back then. As newspaper syndicates expanded and consolidated – and even became nation-wide under Gannet’s USA Today a story about a handful of people getting sick at a restaurant in (for instance) Somis could be turned into scandalous nationwide news that made an entire restaurant chain look bad.
The horse-meat rumors may have been conflated with the fast food burger rumors when the parent company of Jack-in-the-Box updated the signage at their San Diego headquarters and used their own (rather than the restaurant’s) name: Purina#. Purina had long been known as the maker of Purina Dog Chow and Purina Cat Chow and people (particularly around San Diego) quickly learned that Purina Corporation sells a Chow for just about any animal you might want to keep on a farm, ranch, hatchery, or home. So learning that the same corporation produces horse-chow and also runs Jack-in-the-Box probably made it easy to jump to a rumor that “Jack-in-the-box puts horse in its Chow.” I believe Purina reverted the signage on its Kearny Mesa campus back to say Jack-in-The-Box again in the early 1990’s.
There have been burgers and burger restaurants for eons, but they expanded to chains along with the growth of the highway system and car culture. I certainly don’t mind a tasty burger; my controversial culinary comment is that a burger worth digesting – as opposed to the trillions served 
– isn’t available at a drive-thru. Good restaurant-quality burgers come from either a) Your own kitchen, or b) a quality restaurant. The Jack-N-Mac chains know this and try to create higher-end specialty-style burgers, but they really can’t compete with a quality restaurant’s offering, largely because a really good burger isn’t a mass-produced item. It takes time, care, and individual attention.
–G
- A ridiculous culinary conspiracy theory of mine is that the meat ranchers intentionally added ground-up intestines in order to contaminate the vegetables as an attack on their public image to combat the vegetarianism fad that is harming the ranchers’ profits. Yeah, I know, it’s a pretty far-fetched theory that even I don’t really believe.
My friends and I started joking at the time; when we would drive past the local Jack-in-the-box franchise we would point and say, “Look! It’s the Purina People-Chow place!”
So, you have nothing but a rumor that McD’d used horsemeat (they haven’t) then add another base canard- that they used kangaroo meat. They haven’t.
Altho this is Cafe Society, not GQ, we still like facts here, no fake news being spread as if it is a fact.
The fact is- you are spreading 100% false and damaging rumors vs a company.
Most farmers in the U.S. today use chemical fertilizers, not manure. E. coli contamination in leafy vegetables more often comes from bird droppings, contaminated water, and run-off from nearby ranches.
Whole grain pasta doesn’t work for me.
Last thanksgiving converted me to the deepfried turkey camp. I got my bird from a nearby turkey farm and deep fried it. It was delicious and photogenic (there were actual oooohhhhssss and aaahhhhsss).
I’ll join this controversial comment. I usually make 3:1, with orange bitters and a lemon twist. But have also enjoyed more or less vermouth.
Hell a good vermouth is tasty on its own.
I’ve used vermouth in cooking, but I’ve never used it as a component in a drink. I’ll shake some vodka and ice then strain the vodka into a glass. Maybe drop in an olive. I call it a Vodka Martini, but it’s not a hill I’d die on.
Organic is a French word meaning “comes with dirt”.
Some is, some isn’t. It probably does make the roast a little harder to completely over cook, but a properly done roast is SO much better.
Those are good, although my roast is usually more photogenic than my brother’s deep-fried. (I’ve gotten comments about how it belonged on a magazine cover. Mostly, I jut make sure the skin browns nicely.)
Yeah, we have both. Different family members prefer different preparations, and while everyone would be okay eating the fried turkey, several would be sad if we didn’t have stuffing and gravy. And you get neither a stuff-able cavity nor drippings suitable for making gravy if you deep fry.
(Yes, I’m a stuffing purist. It tastes really different if you cook it in a casserole. I’ve tried adding broth and/or fat to the extra stuffing that gets cooked outside the bird, and it just doesn’t cut it.)
There’s a special place in culinary hell for people who make ramen noodles by putting the hard noodles directly into room temperature water and then microwaving it, as opposed to boiling the water separately and then adding it later. By microwaving the noodles themselves you get entirely soggy and tasteless noodles. I had a friend’s wife who did this as a “snack” for her husband and it was pretty much the worst prepared food I have ever eaten.
To be fair, packaged ramen is pretty much the worst prepared food ever eaten, no matter how you cook it. That’s why it’s ten for a dollar.