Like from a piece of meat. Is a blob of shortening delicious? I know people are supposed to think olive oil is delicious — how about the neutral ones like canola?
Are you a supertaster?
I don’t think fat is delicious, and it would explain a lot if it turns out that most people love it in itself. My mother would grow so angry when I’d cut the fat off. Also, with solid fat, I’m not a fan of the mouthfeel.
Isn’t that the whole point of bacon being delicious. The meat in bacon is just to carry the fat goodness.
No. It’s gross. Even if the flavor is amazing, the texture is… offputting, at best.
As a kid I was notorious for performing surgery on my meat to excise every bit of pure fat. I’ve grown out of that mostly, but still a big blob of pure fat still gets cut out and discarded.
Bacon is a great example because the fattiness is gross to me when it’s not crispy, and it gets sort of bitter and nasty to me when crispy, and yet everyone was in love with it.
There’s some truth to the Jack Sprat nursery rhyme. I can’t handle jiggly fat in my mouth — hate the taste and the texture. Steaks get trimmed, ham gets trimmed, chicken get eaten carefully.
But: cream is delicious, and so is butter, egg yolks, marbled steaks, crisp bacon, cream cheese frosting, peanut butter.
James Herriot wrote an All Creatures story where he visited a farm house and was proudly served a breakfast which included a large cube of animal fat. The central conflict is trying to eat it (under the family’s beaming faces) without gagging.
Yeah, some sort of very fatty bacon.
Look, fat makes meat taste better and makes meat more tender. So yeah, I love a well marbled steak. But after cooking I do not eat the larger fat at the sides of the cut.
Olives and olive oil taste of almost nothing to me. Not unpleasant, just nothing. Perhaps I have a mutation in one of the relevant receptors, I’ll check one day when I get my genome sequenced.
As far as the fat rimming a piece of meat: I don’t like the fat by itself, I find that repellent. A little bit of the fat, eaten in the same mouthful with the meat, is however very good. If there’s a lot of fat along the edges, I’ll trim most but not quite all of it off.
Crisp brown edges of fat are also good, if in small quantities. That version of bacon I like. The version where you get served basically a chunk of limp white fat with a thin streak of lean, I don’t like.
As far as shortening: it’s delicious as part of the pastry crust, or whatever. Just eating a chunk of shortening strikes me also as repellent. And I love butter, but again, on or in something. I’m not going to just take a bite out of a stick of butter. Ditto oils, olive or otherwise – in or on something, not straight.
I love olive oil. The flavor varies a lot from brand to brand, due to differences between the soils in which the olive trees grow.
I once had a girlfriend who was grossed out by my dipping pizza crusts in EVOO. That relationship did not last long.
The untrimmed fat is the best part of eating a nice steak. I love how it melts in my mouth!
Hmm, there’s purified olive oil that doesn’t have much flavor, but olives pack a pretty strong punch. Maybe your are missing some receptor?
I’m not a super taster, but i have a much better sense of smell than most people, and that goes along with a much better sense of taste. (Super tasters have more receptors for “bitter”, usually. At any rate, that’s about sweet/salty/sour/bitter/umami, not about other flavors.)
And i like many fats and oils. I like (in moderation) butter, beef tallow, bacon fat, goose fat, chicken fat, olive oil, cocoa butter, and some others. Some fats, like peanut oil, are neutral to my tastes. They might help carry other flavors, but i don’t like them on their own, even in moderation. Yet other fats are unpleasant. Canola oil is just nasty stuff.
A veeeerrrrrry long time ago, maybe the 80s? When low fat dieting first became the rage, I went on the Dr. Atkin’s version. Essentially, you cut out all fats and fatty foods.
As a diet, it works, at least in the short term. Turns out most manufacturers and people just compensated for the lost calories by piling in more sugar, not at all improving their health. Anyway, after I’d been on the diet for about six weeks I was making up school lunches for my sibs, and accidentally got a blob of mayonnaise on my finger, and automatically licked it off. You know, the way you do with stray smears of food so you don’t keep smudging it around on other stuff?
It was the most delicious thing I had ever had in my mouth. I wanted to grab a spoon and start eating the mayo right from the bottle – and I generally don’t like mayo at all. But right then, I think I could have inhaled the entire bottle.
My body had been deprived of dietary fat so long and now it was screaming YES! YES! More, more, more!
I hate fat. When I cook a steak (rare) I first carefully trim off any fat. When I buy ground meat I get the lowest possible percent fat. I sous vide bacon at 150 Fahrenheit, then pour off the fat, then crisp up the meat.
I will dip good bread into very good olive oil.
The thought of this literally makes me nauseous. I’m exactly like this:
Will happily eat a lump of butter, but strong gut-level aversion to texture and taste of non-crispy animal fat.
Moe at the Gilded Truffle:
“Bring us the finest food ya got, stuffed with the second finest.”
Fat by itself, no not delicious. Fat spread on a piece of bread, or included as a modest portion of a larger bite of food, very nice!
I’m OK with bacon, but I like it crispy so the fat doesn’t have the same flabby mouthfeel of other types of fat.
I think you got this backwards. On the Atkins diet you cut out the carbs and eat fat and proteins. Preferably healthy fats, but I’ve seen people live on bacon and pork rinds and lose lots of weight. I always thought that they would be the thinness of heart attack victims.
A chunk of animal fat contains lots of connective tissue, which can make it quite gross for lots of people who don’t care for that sort of texture (I don’t care for it myself). But rendered animal fat, like (delicious, delicious) chicken schmaltz, bacon drippings etc. is the food of heaven.
Now that I’ve read this, you’re right! So, what was that diet that I was on? It was touted by some doctor, and in fact one of my mother’s friends was the ghost writer for his publications.
Whatever, it banned all pure fats and foods with high intrinsic fat levels, and left me with a craving for fat after a few weeks on it. I’ve read of people forced onto low fat content diets due to circumstances, and how they can develop various ills and even die if it goes on too long. I vaguely think Rabbit Fever was one of them…
I was going to make a joke that you were on the Jack Sprat diet, but it turns out there really is one called that.