Pizza is one of those foods that if you’ve never had good pizza, you can’t tell how mediocre to poor most pizza actually is. Even so, it varies wildly.
Nearly all chain store pizza span the range of mediocre to ‘ok’ – and a few are just awful (Papa John’s, for example). One clue – any brand that advertises that their pizza has less crust, or is substituting non-pizza items for the normal crust, is telling you that they don’t know how to make good crust. Frozen pizza can be almost as good as chain-store pizza, but usually it isn’t.
Note that even within a chain, pizzas can vary widely. In Connecticut, I’ve had Dominoes Pizza that literally had freezer burn. But Dominoes is generally better than that. Pizza Hut is one of those places where I’ll never ever go to again even in a pinch, simply because the service I’ve found to be universally awful (one waitress turned her back to me when I started choking, and pretended I wasn’t there).
One of the best pizza’s I’ve had was at this little family-owned place in New Jersey – it was brick-oven pizza, cheese that melts in your mouth, fresh herbs, real italian sausage that doesn’t taste like the usual cardboard you get at other places, etc.
So while MOST pizza is certainly overrated, you CAN find extraordinarily good pizza if you look in the right places.
Meat. There, I’ve said it. Even as a child it was obvious meat was extremely overrated. There’s this whole mythology behind it being the best part of the meal and there’s that many people who claim they get sick if they don’t have tonnes of it every dinner time, but seriously… North Europeans & presumably Americans as well eat utter garbage when it comes to dead animals. Any culture that pretends that sandwich ham is not in fact, a cheap & nasty cut of meat of last resort is seriously deluded. There’s so much fatty sickening shitty meat that people consider the highlight of their day merely because it’s a dead animal. And I say this as someone who likes good meat, but it’s clear as day that so little of it ever makes it to my plate.
I agree with the overratedness of steak (yes, I’ve had 60 day dry-aged ribeyes), IPA beers, bacon (I mean, it is OK but not some god meat), burgers in general.
I disagree on wings (love em), seafood, mayo on burgers and ‘fancy’ mustard. I only keep plain yellow mustard around for use as a glue for making rub stick to meat on the smoker.
I’ll add butter as overrated. It is just salty, neutral grease. I have absolutely no use for it and haven’t had it in the house for years. I don’t butter rice, pasta, veggies, seafood, corn, popcorn or bread. I don’t saute in butter. I don’t bake.
And I know this makes me the odd man out but I’m highly sweet adverse. You’ll never catch me eating cake or cookies or candy.
Sriracha is awesome. I don’t love Chipotle – it’s just okay, for me. But I find sriracha (the Huy Fong version, anyway) useful for nearly every entree I cook.
The question was what I think is overrated. I’m sick of hearing everything sriracha’d and chipotle’d. I offer no opinion about how either of them taste just that I’m sick of hearing about them.
I love bacon, but I think that’s overrated too. It’s tasty and yummy, but it’s not the food of the gods.
I love virtually every condiment made. I’ve actually researched making my own brand of hot sauce as an income source. If I won the lottery I’ve often joked that I would have a closet like Emelda Marcos, except it would be filled with every available condiment/sauce one could get rather than shoes.
But for some reason Sriracha sauce leaves me flat. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t make me gag, but I could take it or leave it.
I have my suspicions that its the first sauce that non sauce people happen to discover lately.
But how can you possibly say that without trying either? Do you think Paris is overrated… but you have never been there? Is Casablanca overrated but you have never watched it?
Just because something is popular and you are tired of hearing about it (although never bothering to see what the fuss is about) doesn’t make it overrated.
I like both Sriracha and Chapotle… I also like bacon. It is very possible that they are all overrated because I don’t go nuts over them like some seem to.
I have never seen a single episode of Game of Thrones nor Dr. Who. There have been tons of discussions about each. They really don’t sound like they would appeal to me personally, but I would never dream of claiming that they are overrated just because I don’t like that particular genre and I’m sick of people who do discussing them.
You suspicions are not universally correct. My family and I have collected different sauces before it was even a trend (yeah, we were hipsters in that arena). My mother even has the full collection of Tabasco prints that represent most major painting styles carefully framed and hung on her walls as well as an expensive walnut display cabinet with nothing but sauces, hot and otherwise, from around the world. We are quite experienced with sauces from all over.
However, something was a little different back in 2002 when I worked around the corner from a crappy little Asian diner that happened to have Huy Fong Siracha sauce on their counter. The first time I tried it, that was a revelation. I started ordering tofu and vegetable dishes from them because all I was really interested in was that sauce rather than the food itself. I stopped going when supermarkets around me started carrying it. I don’t use it that often anymore but I still think it is an unusually distinctive and versatile sauce that deserves the attention that it has gotten.
Remember that Huy Fong siracha only grew its brand through organic word of mouth. It wasn’t created by some mega-corp with a large advertising budget. It was created by an immigrant on a shoestring budget and the packaging is positively downscale to this day. It isn’t like there weren’t other hot sauces out there when it took off. There were thousands of them and that was the one that people responded extremely well to.
I don’t care for yellow mustard, but brown mustard? MMMMMM.
I like bacon too, but I consider it a condiment, not a dish. Right now, we’re in fresh green bean season, and I love them cooked in the Crock Pot with onion, garlic, and bacon.
This. I was thinking this trend has to be over now, but IPAs still dominate. I love the craft brewing explosion, but can we get past the IPA thing already?
Most people are GF because it’s trendy. I’m sure that there are people who are allergic…but not THAT many. It’s crazy how many people are looking for GF products now.
It’s been a couple of decades or more since you could consider sushi a “craze” or “trendy”. It’s as much a craze as pizza or Chinese food is nowadays.
