Today, I was at the grocery store and notice an 11.5 oz bottle of steak sauce for $9. I thought to myself: “I gotta know what a $9 bottle of steak sauce tastes like.” (It’s Robert Rothschild Farm chophouse steak sauce)
I haven’t tried it on a steak yet but the preliminary tasting was okay but not $9 worth of okay. 
I’ll do that from time to time with cheeses at the good local grocery store. I call it the Parm Reg line - anything that’s more expensive than real Parmigiano Reggiano (which is typically about $19-22/lb here) piques my interest, and I’ll often get a small piece to take home and try.
One time, the upper-class grocery store here had on its shelves in the produce section just about every kind of exotic mushroom I’d ever heard about. A special purchase. Shitake, oyster, hen-of-the-woods (how I love that name!) - a few others I can’t remember. These were going for $19 a pound and more! So I bought a small amount of each kind of exotic mushroom (which ended up costing about $40). I cooked each batch separately for a taste test. My overwhelming favorite was the oyster mushroom, followed by the shitake, followed by the mundane white or brown baby portabella. So…the exotic, hard to find mushrooms were …eh, meh. Glad to know the ones I really liked were available pretty much all of the time.
I mostly use this theory about steak houses; but I believe there’s a rule of diminishing returns that applies to most food. It’s basically like this… there are some pretty good steak houses out there; but you reach a level in the mid-high price range where there all pretty fricking good, and I don’t care to make a distinction beyond that! Beyond that you’re paying for atmosphere, which is certainly OK in some cases.
I always remember that it’s been proven over and over in blind taste tests that people can’t discern “good” wine from “cheap” wine; and in many cases, red from white.
So, all things considered, I don’t need the best tasting, I content with “this is good enough for me.”
In a supermarket in St Martin I found a small container of what looked like pate of some sort. Nothing in English, and a price that converted to $30, so I bought it. It was reindeer liver pate, and it was delicious.
Also, beer. I have a sour in the refrigerator that was $35 a bottle (bomber). I split a bottle of Utopias with two other guys; we each threw in $40.
Can I just say I have absolutely no idea what this sentence means. Something about expensive beer but the sums don’t seem to add up.
Fois gras and caviar are the classic expensive temptations and I have tried both and confess that the attraction was pretty much the high price
Caviar? perfectly fine as nibble food. Delicately fishy and salty and there is good sense in pairing it with sour cream and booze. However, any halfway decent lumpfish roe (£1.99 from any good supermarket) gives you 99% of the experience for 1% of the price
But Fois Gras? This is a goose of a different medical condition entirely. You can try other anatidae-based products and they may be fine-to-wonderful but you will always be thinking “it’s great, but it ain’t fois gras and yes, I am happy to spend big bucks on it”
Sam Adams Utopias, each time a new release comes out, tries to break the world record for strongest beer. They’re now weighing in at over 20% ABV, where your typical BudMillerCoors is around 5% and your big bad microbrews usually around 7-10%. The ceiling on ABV is the point at which the yeast manage to kill themselves with their own alcohol production, which keeps creeping upwards as Sam Adams (and a couple other breweries) refine their mutant superyeasts.
They’re fantastically expensive and barely taste like beer anymore, having migrated to something almost like bourbon meets brandy.
The sour beer is a lambic; a beer brewed with wild, naturally/locally occurring yeast and bacteria, leading to a sour taste. Delicious!
Utopias is a high alcohol beer made in limited quantities by Sam Adams. The bottle is pretty and the beer syrupy goodness.
ETA: yeah, what he said!
And, to further explain, “a sour,” used generically, just means a beer that is either fermented wildly/spontaneously (like a sourdough bread) or inoculated with bacteria and yeasts that cause sour flavors. There are various beers that qualify as sours, including lambics, geueze/gose (which is basically a type of lambic), Flemish sour, Berliner weisse, the almost-never-seen Kentucky Common, and so on. So, basically, beer where the sour component is intentional and introduced naturally through wild yeast or inoculated with specific strains.
In the US, sours have been experiencing a jump in popularity over the last couple years, as consumers, I think, are getting a little tired of the oversaturation of hop-heavy IPA-style beers in the market. (But only a little–there doesn’t seem to be an end in popularity over the IPA styles.)
That got me curious. I just bought some Parmigiano Reggiano Stravecchio from Trader Joe’s. It was $15/pound. Stravecchio is aged three years; about twice as long as Parmigiano Reggiano not-Stravecchio. I can’t say I know the difference, because I just look for ‘Reggiano’ on the label and may or may not have had the Stravecchio before.
For most food, I don’t equate price with flavour; but there are exceptions. Sometimes I’ll want to try a ‘premium’ product just to see what it tastes like. I bought a bottle of balsamic vinegar that cost more than what I usually buy, just because I wanted to try it and it was so (comparatively) expensive that the store marked it down to get rid of it. Haven’t tried it yet. I would never have tried California Olive Ranch Arbosana Extra Virgin Olive Oil had Shayna not given me a bottle. Now I buy it by the six-pack. At $13 for a 500 ml bottle, it’s more expensive than Trader Giotto’s; so I use the latter for cooking, and COR for dipping bread in.
Most things I pay a premium for are not packaged. Meats, cheeses, vegetables… I look at the product and pay what I need to. But I try to find the best price for it. My non-cheddar and non-American cheese comes from Trader Joe’s because they have the best prices and selection. My ribeye steaks come from the little market down the street because they’re really good (and not much more than supermarket meat).
Off topic but would you describe the taste of foie gras for me? I’ve always heard how wonderful it is. I absolutely despise beef and chicken liver. Is there any chance that I would like it?
It’s nowhere near as “livery” as either of those, but there are hints of those flavors, so if you absolutely despise beef and chicken liver, you might not like it. Then again, it depends on how well prepared your beef and chicken livers were, as, a lot of time, those are just prepared terribly and horribly over-cooked.
Anyhow, the flavor I would describe as rich, creamy/buttery, and a bit earthy. I don’t know what food I could possibly compare it to. Also, I prefer the goose version to the duck. The goose is a bit more buttery and delicate, to my palate. When it comes to foods that are generally considered bourgeois “delicacies,” it’s my favorite. Delicious stuff.
Unfortunately, subtlety doesn’t seem to be valued in the US craft beer market from what I can tell.
Nobody seems to be out there trying to make the perfect Bohemian pilsner, or English-style bitter; they’re just upping the gravity and dumping in absurd amounts of hops and calling whatever it is an “Imperial” [style].
I’ve bought plenty of things out of curiosity as to whether their high price is justified or not. Some things like imported Parmesan/Grana Padano/other aged Italian cheeses are definitely worth it vis-a-vis Kraft Parmesan in the shaker can, while other things like a lot of “heirloom” produce just isn’t usually worth it.*
(* The main distinguishing factor seems to be the growing and picking conditions for most things- a very pedestrian “Celebrity” tomato that you grow in your own backyard and pick when it’s actually ripe will just about always beat some whiz-bang 150 year old heirloom variety grown on a massive agribusiness farm in some other state and sold at the grocery store about half-ripe.)
I somewhat agree with your complaint–and I’ve mentioned it on these boards–but there are certainly breweries that do great middle-of-the-road beer, and, in my opinion, it’s been swinging back a bit over the last couple years. Goose Island in Chicago is particularly good at this, but you have to visit the brewpub, unfortunately–they’re not available in stores. They often have English bitters, English milds, and other beers that tip in under 4.5% abv. (Right now they have a 3.4% Belgian table beer on tap, in addition to 25+ draft beers. I’ve enjoyed really good English milds there before that were around 3.5% with a nice malty flavor.) Bell’s, Great Lakes, New Glarus, etc., all have plenty of good middle-of-the-road beers in their portfolios. Hell, Sam Adams. Let’s not forget about them. I agree that a good American pilsener-style beer is tough to find. Victory has a good one in Prima Pils, but it definitely has its American characteristics (which I think is good), with a more forward hop profile, but not too crazily so.
This is so true. The USA craft beer scene feels more like an arms race than anything else. And while I love trying out extreme beers, I also like sipping four or five pints of something over the course of a warm evening with friends, and something that’s 11%ABV, looks like 10W40, or is so hoppy that it leaves me unable to taste my food, is right out.
There is a local brewpub here, (fittingly) called Bohemian brewery, that only makes three beers: a pils, a Vienna-style amber lager, and a schwarzbier. All three are very traditional in flavor and consistency, all three come in under 5%. None are extreme. I love it. And they come in cans. 
I’m probably way too cheap to fully experience this phenomenon at the grocery store, but when dining out for whatever reason I’m much more apt to try things on the pricier side just “for the experience.”
I recently attended a barley-wine tasting that was intense. Each participant was given two bottles of water, and if you didn’t consume your water, you were warned!
Thanks for the clarity on the beer post. As it happens I’m only a couple of hours from Belgium and a few more from Germany. I have friends in both countries and when we visit they take great delight in bringing out their latest local beer discoveries so I am a lucky boy in that respect.
The strongest regular beer I’ll drink is around the duval strength (8.6% I think) anything more or done with less subtlety and it just gets silly. I fully agree that the “arms race” described above does no-one any favours, I love my beer and wine but very quickly get to a point of feeling ill so I have to choose carefully and alcohol content overpowers flavour anyway so what on earth is the point?
I am a huge fan of the classic German pilsner style, Spaten is a classic Munich beer that always goes down well and the Steigl brewery in Salzburg also does a cracking pilsner.
And as for the taste of fois gras? **pulykamell ** nailed it perfectly. “buttery” is exactly the word I would use. It is very rich as well, you don’t need much to get the full effect and for heavens sake pair it with some good booze. Some suggest a very sweet wine but I’d go with a Gewürztraminer or even a chilled sherry
I’m assuming the OP was referring to John Travolta’s character needing to know what a “five dollar shake” tastes like. I often think of that line ironically nowadays, when five dollars for a milkshake is pretty much the norm at the yuppie diners around me!
I once bought my brother a $20 bottle of tonic water because: a) I needed a Christmas present (this was only one part of the present) b) He likes tonic water and c) I was wondering what in the hell $20 tonic water could be like. I never got a chance to try it, but, apparently, quite good and concentrated.
Similarly, I first got into IPAs back in 2003 or 2004, when my cousin and I were at a bar and there was a $20 bottle of beer available. I had no idea what in the hell a $20 bottle of beer could taste like, so we ordered it. (Well, he ordered it, since I was feeling cheap that day.) It was Three Floyd’s Dreadnaught Imperial IPA. It was one of the most amazing beers I’ve ever tasted and smelled. I’ve never come across a beer since that has won me over like that, and even the current incarnations of that beer just aren’t the same. I eventually grew tired of the Imperial IPAs (well, not completely, but my tastes have long since gone in a different direction), but, wow, did that brew just open up a whole new world of beer to me. I had no idea flavors and smells like that were possible from beer.