If I have to ask myself,“Do I want to eat it, or take its picture?”
Well, that depends. Who’s doing the polishing?
And most of the “free range” food I’ve eaten has come from sources I know personally. I wouldn’t assume anything in particular about something in a store labeled “free range”, since I don’t think that’s actually a regulated term.
+1
perhaps, but I’d rather avoid the chemicals they add to keep it from clumping.
I really don’t know if exotic salt is any healthier for us, but I don’t get the hate. Is everyone a shareholder in Morton or something?
I haven’t either, and I’ve been to quite a few “fancy places” both in the US and abroad.
The thing is, the meal is probably intended to be multiple courses- appetizer, entree, sides and dessert.
If you go in and short-circuit the thing and just eat the bread and get an entree, you may end up being hungry.
So don’t be a cheapskate if you go somewhere nice (somewhere that costs roughly $40-50 per person or up). Pay the money and eat everything!
I loathe woo and nonsense, especially when it’s used to sell crap. If sellers are allowed to make bizarre, fictional and unsupported pronouncements about taste and health benefits - especially while extracting a premium price for their invisibleness - I should be allowed to point out the stupidity of their claims. I don’t have to defend my “hating” or go away because I’m not playing nice.
They most certainly aren’t.
Fair enough. I object to much “woo” myself. I like balsamic vinegar, however, and the basic claims by the unrefined salt people don’t seem that farfetched. I have no doubt they’re over-hyping the advantages, but for those us us who see an advantage to unbleached flour or whole grains, I don’t think it’s a stretch to prefer unrefined salt. (Although I haven’t tried any yet)
De gustibus non est disputandam, in the most literal sense. If you like it, no further justification is needed. Cooking is, after all, all about taste. The problem for me is in those cases when one maker claims that some utterly nonsensical aspect of the product or processing makes one variation vastly more costly than another, when blind tasting shows no difference. If you can’t taste the difference between Heinz Balsamic Vinegar and some uber-exotic version made from champagne grapes and balsam hand-picked from an obscure Greek isle… does the tree make a sound?
Utterly different situations that should not be difficult to understand.
There is no such thing as “unrefined salt”; there is only pure NaCl and NaCl with various impurities still in it. While removing those impurities might be considered “refining” in a technical sense, it’s not in any way the same thing as what’s done to sugar or food grains wherein nutritive parts of the product are removed. Leaving those components in rice and other grains is of indisputable nutritional value; most grocery-shelf flours have been all but stripped of nutritive value.
But salt is a simple chemical and subject to simple chemical analysis. While you can’t necessarily dispute what subtle differences of taste their might be in various unpurified salts, you can analyze the other components and completely dismiss claims made, in specific or in general, for those components.
Trace elements in salt might produce flavor variations. In no significant case do they increase “healthiness” or food benefit.
At home, I use Balsamic Vinegar of Modena. Cheap shit. Tasty shit. Little hint of sweet, little tang, goes great on salad.
At a moderately snooty restaurant near me, they have the “real” stuff. It’s a whole different beast. Sweet, barely any tang, it’s thick and syrupy and comes straight from the nipples of angels.
I like both. But hell yeah, I could tell the difference in a blind taste test.
So yes, I agree with your point, but balsamic vinegar is a lousy example of it.
If you can’t taste the difference than, sure, it’s not worth paying the price. There’s plenty of stuff I don’t pay a premium for because, for my uses, a much lower priced substitute works just as well. But I bet you could tell the difference between cheap-ass “balsamic vinegar of Modena” and real balsamic vinger. Whether you care enough to pay the premium is your choice. (And I, too, have “balsamic vinegar of Modena” in my house.) This isn’t like tasting the subtleties between one premium high-grade tasteless vodka and another. This is like tasting the difference between Kraft singles and an aged Vermont cheddar cheese. Like I said, whether you care is up to you.
I agree here. I don’t know so much about what is considered “free range,” but the “cage free” eggs at our local grocery are about 2.5-3x the price of the regular eggs. Ethical issues aside, these eggs taste exactly the same to me. I would pay $5/dozen to get real free-range farm eggs. They taste and look completely different to me. The cage-free stuff is a waste of money–tastes exactly the same as the battery farmed chickens.
The diet does make a huge taste difference in the flavor of chicken and their eggs. The eggs I’ve had from chickens that have been fed exclusively a grain diet have been flavorless and bland: your typical supermarket eggs. The eggs I’ve had from chickens that have been eating bugs and worms and dirt and whatever it is that chickens eat in addition to grain have always tasted more “eggy” and the yolk has been a firm with a vibrant orange color, rather than a kind of limp, lemon yellow yolk.
But diet affecting the flavor of meat shouldn’t be surprising. Anyone who’s had grass-fed beef vs. grain-fed been knows the difference diet can make (and I personally am not the biggest fan of grass-fed beef, even though it is sold at a premium. There is a clear difference in taste, though.)
As a foodie, I’d say that the silliest thing about the whole thing is the snobbiness/snottiness of some of the other foodies.
It’s the exact same thing that some proportion of enthusiasts in any hobby get wound up in, whether it’s wet-shaving, foodies, beer nerds, wine people, or what have you. They get convinced that whatever it is that they like (usually hard to get/hard to do) is THE best, and anything else is inferior and gives sub-standard results.
I think it’s idiotic; I’m a foodie, and I still dig a McDonald’s cheeseburger and fries from time to time. I’m a beer nerd, and I have no problem with Budweiser or even 2.99 Walgreens beer. I’m not a huge wine person, so I don’t have a good example there. I own a Gillette Fat Boy, a Sigma brush, and have a tube of SMN shaving cream bought in Florence, yet some of my best shaves are with Barbasol and a Target house brand disposable razor.
Thing is, I really don’t get that from other so-called “foodies.” I guess I’m a “foodie” in that I love food, I have particular tastes, and I love talking about food and eating it. But there’s no “hipsterism” involved in it. Guess where I took my wife on Valentine’s Day for dinner? White Castle. But I don’t think I’m particularly weird that way. As I’ve mentioned on this board before, I think the whole “foodie who looks down on what others eat” is a bit of a strawman. I’m sure they exist, but I really can’t think of a time I’ve encountered them.
Heaven forbid you strain your delicate wrists. :rolleyes:
Seriously, if people can’t see why it might be beneficial to have a tool in the kitchen that produces salt of differing sizes, then they have no business turning up their noses at people who dare to use salt grinders.
I got one as a wedding present, and it’s great for getting a tiny grind for popcorn. I can run some kosher through the food processor, but it cakes like crazy. Otherwise, it just makes a nice pair for the pepper grinder on the kitchen table.
Sw’what? I’ve never actually heard of such a thing, but I like that idea. So it’s a pepper grinder, then, more or less, that you put salt into. That’s a potentially useful kitchen tool (that I’d probably hook my hand drill into to grind for me.)
No, no, no, what I’m railing against is this nonsense: Sea Salt Grinder. It’s not adjustable. It takes 5,325 grinds (approximate) to get a teaspoon’s worth. It’s as ergonomically incorrect as it’s possible to be.
And that, my friend, is useless, pretentious twaddle.
I have one of those, or something like it. It’s perfect for sprinkling a light dusting of salt on a meal without dumping it all in one place.
Wait, yeah. Those are beyond useless.
Looks like we had our signals crossed, WhyNot.
How do you get it even? I get a chunk there, a flake over here, and nothing over vast areas of real estate. Maybe I’m just…special. A pinch of kosher salt from a dish and a rubbing of the fingers over the plate gets me much more even coverage.
On the salt thing… I buy pickling salt, which is coarse grained. I buy it because table salt contains dextrose and anti-caking agents, which I don’t see a need for in salt. I also buy it because it is cheap, and when I boil potatoes, I dump a lot of salt in the water I boil them in. I like to think about those pennies I’m saving.
So the grains are a bit too big for the tiny sprinkle I want on the foods that I salt, and I don’t like getting a big chunk of salt in a mouthful, so it goes into a recycled spice grinder container and I grind out however much I want. I had no idea that I was so pretentious.
Well, there is at least one significant case, so significant that most grocery-store salt has a trace element deliberately added. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the importance of iodine in the diet was discovered from the fact that people in some areas (where the local salt was naturally iodized) had less thyroid problems than people elsewhere. So if you lived in the pre-iodization era, salt from those regions really would be more healthful. Likewise, it’s conceivable that there’s some other trace element that’s less important than iodine, but whose significance we haven’t realized yet, in which case some location’s unpurified salt might still be more healthful than the purified kind.
Of course, it’s still mostly meaningless marketing twaddle, just not quite entirely.