Inspired by this threadabout IPA beers that get over-hopped by small breweries.
So, expanding on this concept - what food categories do you have a particular interest in, love the fact that they have been getting artisanal attention, but have also seen some producers taking it simply too far in order to…I dunno, stand out, be extreme, whatever.
As I mention in the other thread, hot sauces immediately jump to mind. I love super-hot sauces - you know, like a great habanero sauce. But the over-the-top, break-the-Scoville-scale machismo I see in so many hot sauce brands seems laughable at this point. I can take the heat - I tried some “Ghost Pepper” hot sauce a couple of weeks ago - yes, it was ultra-violent, but to the point where it wasn’t enhancing the flavor of anything - it was just essence of heat. What’s the point?
So - mustards, cheeses, pickles, breads - what food categories have you seen get over-artisanalized?
I like salty and sweet together, but some of the versions they’ve been putting out lately are way too salt-intensive. The salt should just be a wisp of flavor melting on your tongue, not something you could spread on your driveway.
[Inserting movie reference]Whenever I read about hot sauce, I am reminded of a line from a movie, Evil Under the Sun from 1982. Maggie Smith plays the manager of a sub-tropical island resort, and she says, more or less in passing (this is from memory, as I couldn’t find the quote online):
“I was just in the kitchen giving a pleasing stream of the old rancid to the chef, explaining to him that there is no point in serving a sauce so hot that it actually raises blisters in the mouths of the guests…”[/movie reference]
For me it’s chocolate. I love a good chocolate, intense and bitter-ish. I’ve even nibbled on baking chocolate when there was nothing else in the house. But there is a store on Market St. in San Francisco that specializes in “gourmet” chocolate, and I swear some of them seem to be competing to see how bitter and disagreeable they can be. You need a little sugar, guys.
Me, I’m happy with Ritter Sport Fine Extra Dark (the one in the pinky mauve wrapper).
Roddy
We had a friend that got into the home coffee culture so bad he couldn’t drink coffee anywhere else that he had no made himself. Not just made himself but roasted the beans himself and ground them and then ran though a £700 espresso machine himself.
It was laughable as eventually even his realised. He had to go coffee cold turkey for about two months, get rid of all his home crap and start again.
Take the thread on burgers - people mention all these creations with this exotic ingredient, or that rare item slathered on. What ever happened to chopped beef, maybe a slice of onion, perhaps a slice of cheese, catsup, mustard and a good bun? Do we really need foie gras, truffle, thibetan muskox gruyere or hand plucked microgreens grown by some descendent of the 5th Dalai lama? Dude, wagyu?! You are serious, ground wagyu? You mean the meat that exists to have the fat marbling interspersed with fork tender muscle fibers melting in your mouth run through a grinder into an amorphous blob of fat and muscle tissue?
I find that basic ingredients, the best affordable, prepared in the simple basic manners tend to be the best. A great steak needs nothing more than salt and pepper and some coals to be excellent. Perfect pencil thin asparagus needs nothing more than some steam, and a squeeze of lemon juice. Scrub an idaho potato, rub some olive oil on the skin and bake, serve with a sprinkle of kosher salt and sweet unsalted butter. [I like bakes with butter.]
Not sure if we can say Beer, since it was covered in the OP. But… Beer. There’s a huge difference between interesting and weird for the sake of weird.
Unusual hops and malts in reasonable amounts: Great!
Bacon: The brewer needs to take a mental health day to get back on target.
I am also against over hopping. I know that it’s hip now to go for the 100 IBU beers and claim that it is ambrosia but, unless it is meant to be aged, you may as well get hop extract and drink it. A good IPA should have a great balance between bitterness, flavor and aroma as well as a balanced malt profile that works well with the hop profile. Twenty pounds of Cascade per barrel at the beginning of the boil is not how you make a good IPA.
Also agreeing with Dark Chocolate - some of that hardcore stuff…when is chocolate supposed to make you cringe?
As for burgers, I don’t know what to do with fancy restaurants that try to show how they can “reinvent” the burger or “show gourmet interpretation of American cuisine” or something. Daniel Boulud’s db Bistro Moderne in NYC has a super-pricey burger stuffed with fois gras and shortrib meat. Just…ugh.
Agree on the chocolate (I’ve had my knuckles rapped for saying so before on the SDMB).
I completely get that some people like it dark and bitter. I’m just less than convinced that these folks who try to out-percentage one another are in it for the chocolate as much as the… well… machismo is the right word.
Someone gave me a bar of Lindt 99% cacao the other day. Of course, I tried some for the sake of curiosity. It’s not pleasant. The stuff has no capacity to melt or dissolve in the mouth - it actually doesn’t taste chocolatey at all, because it just sits there on your tongue like a block of vaguely bitter wax.
I even tried shaving some on top of a foamy coffee, and it didn’t melt - just floated around like pencil shavings.
I don’t really like milk chocolate much at all anymore. I’ve just lost my taste for it. But I find my sweet spot for dark ( so to speak ) is ~60-75%, more usually 65-70. Anything over that is just not that pleasurable, like overly tannic wines. I don’t care for too “chewy” in most things - red wine, chocolate and hoppy beers all have been done to excess in recent years.
As with over-oaked CA Chardonnay the trend towards high-alcohol BIG Cabernet Sauvignons ( hopefully past now ) was also not to my taste.
I also agree on the hot sauces. I like ultra-hot sauces, but most anything with extract ends up tasting chemically to me. That said, it has been done well. I think Dave’s Insanity Sauce has good flavor, while still being pretty hot (although not obnoxiously spicy to my palate.)
I can also do the ghost peppers and Trinidad scorpions and things like that. (Hell, I grew them in my garden this year.) But they don’t have quite the same chemically-ness of sauces like Wanza’s Wicked or similar products.
ETA: Oooo…over-oaking is a good one. That annoys me. Also, anything with that creosote-laden Liquid Smoke flavor to it.
I get your basic point, but have to disagree. I mean, compared to mass-produced bland food, I love the fact that this artisanal bent has proliferated. I just think there can be a forest-for-the-trees miss way too often - great ingredients, attention to processing and detail, but the wrong objective. Too much Guy Fieri in the mix ;).
People are talking about at least two different things here.
The hot sauces, for example, that are just too hot, sacrificing all other flavor, are not artisanal–they are the opposite of that, the loss of craftsmanship. An artisan would care, and know, before his customers, if the product was “too” anything.
On the other hand, someone who is so devoted to great coffee that they feel they must mastermind every step from raw bean to cup, can’t stand anything less… well, perhaps they’re oddly obsessed, but it’s an obsession with artisanship.
Also, I thought over-oaking of American chardonnays was an abuse of some standing (20+ years), not so much a new thing.
Not exactly artisinal products, but what comes to mind is the trend for super over-the-top fatty restaurant dishes - burgers (double, with bacon and cheese) served between Krispy Kreme donuts, burgers (ditto) served between flattened grilled cheese sandwiches…and an infamous higher end example is the Double Down at Joe Beef in Montreal, bacon and cheese with aioli sandwiched between potato-chip breaded, deep fried slabs of foie gras, the whole thing drizzled with maple syrup (apparently invented a joke to get the attention of hipster food bloggers, but kept on the menu since people actually order and eat the thing).
) is ~60-75%, more usually 65-70. Anything over that is just not that pleasurable, like overly tannic wines. I don’t care for too “chewy” in most things - red wine, chocolate and hoppy beers all have been done to excess in recent years.