I found some recently at a local natural foods market on clearance for $2, and for that amount decided to purchase and try it, which I did last night, spread thinly on a saltine.
It looked like and had the consistency of molasses, but it sure didn’t smell like it, and it did have a strong salty and yeasty flavor, which I liked, even though it seemed to coat the inside of my mouth and throat.
There’s just one problem.
I swear I can still smell and taste it! How long is that going to last?
My old pastor said on Facebook that she liked it on fried egg sandwiches, and I thought that sounded like a good idea - until this morning.
My experience is pretty much the same as the OP’s. Kind of tasty in strong, assertive way. I ended up using it mainly in soups and I’ll still buy a jar of it once in a while.
Just as an experiment, we tried giving a bit of it to my mother’s Jack Russel terrier “Sparky”. Sparky was a relentless beggar and would eat nearly anything. He saw us peoples sampling something strong smelling and new. He also wanted us to know that he was starving by alternately staring at us and doing the dance of insane dog joy. Just to calm him down, I offered him the chance to lick a spoonful of Marmite. As that first taste crossed his lips, at least 4 different expressions of shock and contempt crossed his little face. He jumped off my lap, sprinted into my sister’s arms and glared at me with utter dog loathing. I had to break out the Doritos to get him to come back to me.
This 125g jar had a sell-by date of April 2019, which was probably why it was so cheap. I’ve seen it before, usually in the $8 to $10 range.
(When I was in college many years ago, I dated a man who said he had once gone to a genuine Chinese restaurant, and fish lips were on the 99 cent menu. What they heck - 99 cents, right? They knew something wasn’t right when they brought out a platter of things that looked - and tasted - like gelatinous rubber bands. Nobody actually swallowed any of them, but he always said it was worth 99 cents to say he’d tried fish lips. )
p.s. Alpha Twit, that’s hilarious! Did the dog eventually forgive you?
I find Marmite fairly nice on hot buttered toast, though refuse to buy into their hugely successful false dichotomy marketing of ‘love it or hate it’. In the UK at least, ‘Marmite’ has become a descriptor for something which sharply divides opinion.
I much prefer Twiglets, which are basically twig-like pretzels with a Marmite coating.
The hotel where The Basque Team stayed the first couple of weeks we were in Scotland offered marmite in little individual packets. Having heard of it, we decided to give it a try rat-style; I volunteered to be the tester rat.
I put some on my toast. Tried it. Said “oh, ok!”
Team: “well?”
Me: “it’s like Avecrem but liquid.” (Avecrem is a brand of bouillon cubes)
Team: “oh, OK!”
She-Boss, confused: “what?”
Team: “what what?”
She-Boss: “how do you know what Avecrem tastes like?”
We look at each other. We look at her.
Math-Girl: “are you telling us you’ve never licked the paper of an Avecrem cube, or your fingers after using one?”
She-Boss, horrified: “do what?”
Silence.
Only-Boy: “have you ever cooked?”
We’re still traumatized by She-Boss’s lack of culinary experience. Then again, her mother would put flour in tomato sauce shudder…
Hmmm, sell by date of April 2019. Two things (a) the average jar of Marmite I find generally lasts about two years - it’s something that’s always in the cupboard, but you never have to actually go out and buy. This is because you use it in such small quantities, however (b) I’m not convinced it ever actually goes off, so it wouldn’t occur to me to check a sell by date anyway.
Vegemite, similar to but better than Marmite, survives for years. One routine news-column filler on slow news weeks is to find out who has the oldest jar of Vegemite still in progress. Ten year old jumbo jars are common, and people seem to survive just fine on stuff that’s twice that old.
Marmite isn’t beefy, except metaphorically. It’s an extract from yeast, and apparently high in Vitamin B12. I like it on toasted buttered crumpets, but it is indeed a matter of taste.
The trouble with keeping the jars for a long time is that it can set solid around the thread the cap screws on to. But if it dries out in the jar, a little hot water soon frees it up.
I am meticulous about keeping my marmite jar threads scrupulously clean. A jar lasts me about a year. Once, my gf asked what it tasted like, so I gave her a bite. She was sure she’d been pranked.
VegeMarMite is unexpireable. Microorganisms are too wimpy to go near it. One must have hearty constitution to endure it, and a boundless appreciation of the potentialities of Nature to enjoy it. Hence, as said upthread, Food of the Gods.
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