How hungry would you have to be before you would eat a pure pork fat candy bar?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Near death. Picure me stranded in the Andes after a plane crash.

I have a complete freak out if I accidently take a bite of fat. I spit it out and try not to vomit. Interestingly enough, I can eat bacon, but not fat on a steak or roast or anything.

For the record, I also don’t eat Twinkies or the insides of Oreos. I scrape off the middle, and eat the cookie.

22

laughs at Corvus…you funny! Your imagination is about as creative and vivid as my own.

And as for the chocolate-covered pork fat, you’d have to tie me down and force feed me before I’d even think of eating it. shudders

23

[homer voice] mmmm… salo [/homer voice]

Well, I don’t know how keen I’d be on the chocolate-covered variant, but living in Moscow I have reluctantly tried salo on occasion (plenty of khokhly - Ukranians - living here). The salted-and-smoked version is more palatable than the plain salted variant, kind of like bacon without the token streaks of meat. Sliced thin on black bread, it’s not bad as a chaser to a shot of vodka. The plain salted stuff, on the other hand, ranges from barely edible to out-and-out vile. Feh. Chocolate could only improve it.

Salo seems to be a major ingredient in Ukranian/southern Russian cooking. As a guest, I’ve been served kazachye kolbaski, which are just pork loin pounded thin and rolled up around a filling of chopped salo (and then fried, of course). I had to resort to the childhood trick of spreading the bits around the plate to try to disguise the fact I wasn’t eating the filling.

24

Okay, just to clarify things:

  1. What was in the middle of an Oreo was not “pure lard”. People walked around saying, “Oh, what’s in the middle of an Oreo, that’s just pure lard”, but they were speaking metaphorically. What it was, was a variation on good old standard butter cream cake frosting, which is where you take a stick of softened butter and mix it into one box of 10X confectioner’s sugar. This gives you enough frosting for one cake or one batch of cupcakes. (And then you can use any leftover to make graham cracker and frosting sandwiches.) They used lard for Oreos, probably because it’s more stable at room temperature than butter, which tends to melt if it gets too warm, and the frosting all slides off the cupcakes.

So it was lard and sugar, creatively mixed together, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

  1. What was originally in the middle of a Twinkie was based on plain old whipped cream, a.k.a. Creme Chantilly, which is of course just heavy whipping cream and sugar. No lard.

  2. It sounds to me as though the Ukrainian pork fat candy bar is just a block of pure white rendered lard, similar in texture to Crisco but slightly harder. It doesn’t sound as though it’s brown and crispy like pork rinds.

25

Just to make some of you feel better an update to this story pointed out that this candy is marketed as a novelty item and marketed as a bit of self-depricating(sp?) humour poking fun at Ukranians taste for salo and the rest of the worlds reaction to it. (case in point, this thread)

26

I’d imagine one would need this after having that tasty treat…eesh