Canned vegetables vs. fresh. It seems like when I was a kid, 90% of our vegetables came from a can or frozen. Canned green beans. Canned corn (we got it fresh on the cob in Summer, at least). Frozen peas and carrots. My dad loved canned spinach, which I found absolutely disgusting. Same with canned (or jarred) pre-cooked asparagus. Wasn’t until I was an independent adult in my 20s that I discovered that fresh spinach and asparagus, cooked properly, were amazing.
Mac & Cheese: when I was a kid all I knew of M&C was out of a blue box. Even as a kid I found it to be insipid slop. Again, wasn’t until years later that I discovered that making it from scratch, with a variety of cheeses, a nice crunchy layer of bread crumbs on top, is a whole different level from the box crap.
Overcooked meat: my dad preferred his steak (on the rare occasion we had steak) well-done, but at least my mom appreciated a good medium-rare steak, so cooked my dad’s steak to shoe leather, but the rest of ours to medium-rare. But pork was typically dry and not great. Not so much my mom’s fault as that was just the guideline back then-- all pork had to be cooked well-done. Wasn’t until I was well into adulthood and the FDA guidelines on pork dropped the temp to 145F that I discovered how delicious a nice cut of pork loin can be.
Same thing with vegetables, but my mom used fresh vegetables more. However, she boiled the ever-living shit out of everything, turning it into disgusting mush. I hated almost all vegetables until I was an adult and started trying vegetables cooked properly.
To my mom’s credit, I think she did that because that’s how it was done when she was a kid. She learned to prepare vegetables properly later in life, as well.
Chicken breast. A $60 sous vide stick solved that. I still prefer dark meat in general, but if I get stuck with some chicken breasts I know what to do with them.
Spinach. As an elementary school kid in the 1970s, that canned shit with the vinegar was on my lunch plate far too often. Blech. But once I had it fresh and cooked into a dish … yum!
Sounds like the OP still hasn’t had well-done meat prepared properly. Well-done meat is more tender than rare, not less. That’s why we cook meat, to make it more tender. Unfortunately, way too many people don’t know that, and think “well-done” means “keep on overcooking until you’ve driven out every speck of moisture”.
And most vegetables (except beans and maybe tomatoes) are horrible when canned, but most of them can be frozen just fine. Well, probably not the leafy vegetables, but most other things. I’ve had frozen green beans that were indistinguishable from fresh.
For my own contribution, I’ll second @Si_Amigo 's mention of calamari, though I wouldn’t say that I was “always” disappointed with it, given that I only had it bad once before getting it good. The first time was at my college’s cafeteria, which overall was usually very good, but sometimes their reach exceeded their grasp on some exotic dishes. Fortunately, I realized that that was the case, so once when I was at a fancy restaurant I decided to give it another chance. Heavenly.
Funny you should mention steak – I came here to post about that. My Mom was the opposite – she had an unrealistic paranoia about undercooked meat. She’d buy the best quality steaks and then overcook the living daylights out of them. I never really enjoyed them, but she would chide me by pointing out how much a steak like that would cost in a restaurant, which left my young self wondering why grown-ups would pay good money for something so tough and tasteless. It probably wasn’t until I was out on my own and got my first outdoor grill that I discovered that steaks were actually delicious! OTOH, Mom was a pretty good cook in most other ways.
Yes, though pork and chicken dishes need more doneness than beef, they have long been victims of overcooking guidelines.
I’m not a huge fan of calamari but it can be enjoyable when the mood strikes. I’ve had good calamari in a few restaurants (mostly Greek, I think) and there’s also a good frozen premium store brand available at the supermarket that goes well with seafood sauce or chipotle tartar sauce.
As for escargot, I put that in the same category as frogs’ legs – totally inedible, and proof that in some aspects of cooking the French are insane! Snails and frogs are garden pests, not food.
It entirely depends on the type and cut of meat. A beef brisket or a pork butt? Yes, absolutely they need to be cooked to an internal temp of 200-205F to render the collagen and tenderize the meat.
But a steak or a pork loin? Cooking to well-done causes the meat to be dried out. Fattier cuts of meat with connective tissue need to be cooked well-done until tender; leaner cuts need to be cooked to less than well-done to not drive out the natural juices.
I will agree that, I used to think ‘the rarer the steak the better-- serve it still mooing, haha’, but these days I think medium-rare on a good steak is better than rare or blue, because it is more tender. Unless you’re talking some super thin-sliced Carpaccio, yum.
Yeah, that’s at least part of the reason that my dad wanted his steaks cooked well done. I don’t know if he actually preferred a well-done steak, but he was a germophobe. He and my mother used to have arguments over whether she and us kids should be allowed to have our steaks cooked medium-rare, because he thought it was not entirely safe.
Sweet potatoes. When I was a kid, we only ever had them out of a can, baked in a casserole with mini-marshmallows melted on top. Disgusting!
I was surprised as an adult to find that I really love sweet potatoes, baked or fried, or in a savory dish. Marshmallows also have their place, but that place is far away from my taters.
I can’t tell you precisely how (beyond that it was on a backyard grill), because I wasn’t the one who did it, but I’ve had well-done steaks that didn’t even need a knife, and were still juicy and full of flavor.
I don’t know how well-done and juicy can exist in the same steak at the same time. I’m thinking either the steaks you’ve had were either not completely well-done, maybe a medium-well, or they weren’t really all that juicy as you remember. It’s not about tenderness, it’s about juiciness and flavor. To me, a well-done steak is a wasted steak. But if you prefer your steaks well-done, that’s your business.
Mushroom soup: I considered it a Red & White canned ingredient for casseroles and vintage meals. Like Velveeta or corn syrup, it’s good for that but not food-food. Then, I bought some house-made refrig from a (now closed) Polish grocery. It’s been 20 years and I still remember the revelation.
Have you had them in Paris? Both are delicious when prepared properly. Same goes for croissants. In the US, they are just a weird shaped biscuit. In Paris, they are….words fail me.
I can certainly believe that real French croissants are better than the American ones, but I wouldn’t call American croissants “just a weird shaped biscuit”. The typical American croissant is much better than the typical American biscuit (though not nearly as good as a really great American biscuit).
My mom would make “Chicken Kiev” and “Chicken Cordon Bleu” by rolling the ingredients up and deep frying it. And it was fine. I liked it. But when I got to college, one day I went to the Good Restaurant (where you paid cash instead of just using your meal plan.) and ordered chicken Cordon-Bleu. It was baked and it was amazing. It retroactively made my moms cooking disappointing.
Yes, chicken, unlike the modern pork guidelines, is still recommended to cook to an internal temp of 165F. Theoretically, cooking chicken to an internal temp of 145F would be safe, since no pathogens survive more than 140F, but the problem is that the 140-145F internal temp for chicken would need to be sustained for an extended period (not sure how long-- 10 minutes? Something like that).
There’s no easy method to cook and maintain chicken to an internal temp of 145F without going over-- unless you do sous vide. I’ve not tried sous vide cooking yet, but if and when I do, I would most likely try chicken breast as my first sous vide experiment.
I agree – it does totally depend on the type and cut of meat. Generally speaking, tough cuts like beef brisket, pork butt, or pot roast are cooked long and slow, often in liquid, or else covered or wrapped for much of the cooking time so the roast slowly steams in its own juices. Whereas overcooking a steak on the grill or stovetop is pretty much guaranteed to produce shoe leather. Cite: my childhood.
I think this is basically true, but I’ll make allowances for those whose personal preference is for steak done rare, though “blue rare” is a bridge too far. For roast beef, however, it’s definitely possible for some of it to be too rare and thus stringy. I aim for my prime rib roasts to have lots of pink in the interior, but definitely not blood-red. A medium to medium-rare roast beef pairs well with hot horseradish in addition to gravy!
I have not, and never will. Nothing can be delicious when the very thought of it is repulsive. One thing I do enjoy, though, is an escargot-style appetizer served at one of my favourite restaurants – shrimp in garlic butter in an escargot dish, covered with cheese that’s been browned in a hot salamander and served with crusty bread for dipping. It’s delicious, and I presume delivers some of the presumably good flavours of escargot without the slimy snails!
I’m pretty much with the OP. Fresh veggies were usually not on the table, either because it was hard to get good ones in Alaska in those days, or they were just inedible by the time they reached us. Meat in our house was well done and pretty flavorless.
Eggplant. Never touched it until I had moussaka. Then my wife made ratatouille and I was sold.
Coffee: never had a taste for it until I went on a job in Kotzebue, AK. It’s a matter of survival there. Also, it’s one of those things that the more you spend on it, the better it’s going to be (in general).
I’ve only once had eggplant that I thought was actually good (I’m not counting breaded, deep-fried, and covered in marinara sauce and cheese, because anything’s good under those conditions, and lots of other things would be better). It was part of a grilled vegetable platter. Even there, it wasn’t better than the other veggies that were part of the same platter, but it was good.
On the few occasions that we had it, either at home or at school, it had been cooked to an unappealing and rather tasteless mush. But when I first encountered it properly prepared, and with cheese melted over it, I liked it, and now it’s high on my list of preferred vegetables.
). Then I went to Japan and tried it and was amazed.