If you have a discerning enough palate, I’ll agree with you there. I’m not one of those people. A decent crust versus a truly GOOD crust, I won’t really notice the difference. An actively bad one, as noted (so far, this has only happened with a few prebaked pies from the store’s bakery section) will have me scraping out the good (hopefully) innards and leaving the entire crust behind.
I still argue that B (or C) crust + A filling outranks A crust and D filling 
Eh, no one is “right” in this, just different preferences. I may also be biased because my M and FiL tend to buy premade deserts for family events, and with premades, you generally get sub-par crust AND super-sweet, gooey, uninspiring fillings. So you try to eat more crust to offset the sugar bomb and it’s hard shards of library paste in crust form.
So a great filling is always worthwhile - and if I could only have a good crust OR a good filling, I agree, I’d go with filling every time. But if I’m doing the cooking, like I said, easier to go for a crustless option like cobbler with a handmade crumble topping or the like!
So true!
A frozen pie, the kind you bake at home, is perfectly acceptable if unexciting. A prebaked one is nearly guaranteed to be vile (though some bakeries do a decent job, but you’re not playing the odds).
Store-bought cakes can be decent, but too many of them have “frosting” that appears to be made from some combination of lard, axle grease and plastic. I was horrified when I heard that many people use Crisco in cake frosting. WTF?? Canned frosting is its own kind of vile - the lard/axle grease/plastic kind is actually better IMO.
I’m happy to use cake mix, but the frosting has to be either homemade, or omitted entirely. So I guess that’s another bit of snobbery I must admit to. I’ve even gone to the trouble of making a Swiss meringue buttercream, which is quite a bit more involved than the basic butter / powdered sugar / flavoring sort.
Better grocery bakeries have fairly decent pastries aside from the bog-standard cake / pie offerings. I’m happy to serve a fruit tart from Wegmans, for example.
I’m a snob about bourbon and coffee.
It’s a dessert topping and a floor wax! But yes, too many stores use the most terrible ingredients in their frosting. And usually too much.
While I prefer to bake mine own cakes, sometimes schedules prevents that. We have found that the chain bakery Paris Baguette does a good job with its cakes. Their frosting is simply whipped heavy cream, and only a thin layer. Very similar to the frosting I make myself.
The food I’m snobbiest about is kimchi. You’d think a Korean restaurant would know how to make kimchi, but I guess the ingredients or labor is too expensive for some. I understand that some restaurants have mostly American customers who don’t know any better, but it’s simply insulting to serve iceberg lettuce with sriracha sauce as kimchi. Even though I don’t generally don’t care if food is authentic, that’s not the flavor profile I’m looking for when going out for Korean food.
Wow. I know virtually NOTHING about kimchee… except that it’s CABBAGE-based (and is typically fermented a while). Iceberg lettuce may be shaped like cabbage, but the resemblance ends there.
I’m a tomato snob. I don’t eat whole tomatoes except from my garden. (Canned is okay for cooking, but not for directly eating.) I suppose some farmers’ market ones would be okay, but when they come in I have enough to keep me happy.
Store tomatoes suck.
We eat fast food at most once a quarter and only under duress. We eat sit down causal (like Applebee’s) only when the power goes out. The food we make ourselves is a lot better. Now, good restaurants can make things that would be a pain to make at home, so I’m happy with them, but mostly we eat at home.
Oh man, so am I. But Tomatoes won’t grow where I live. Seriously. I’ve even tried them indoors in what is basically a green house. Floor to ceiling windows on the south side and two big skylights. I think I managed to get one tomato.
Get snobby about your tomatoes voyager and make homemade tomato soup (be prepared to use your blender a lot). I only did it once, and I would do it again, but it’s a lot of work, and my wife is not a tomato soup fan.
Damn it was good.
Really? Educate me, please. Kindly show me where you would have inserted all those missing commas into my post. And please cite the rule that dictates the placement of commas–I’m always eager to be enlightened by my betters.
Received my licorice last night.
Ate a bag of licorice last night…
Moderating:
Both of you, cut it out. This is not the forum for insulting other posters. You know where that is.
And yes, both of those posts were intended as insults, despite technically being about the other post.
Pretty good stuff. You can blame me if you don’t settle for other brands now.
I’m not sure if it counts as snobbery… but the runner beans we planted earlier in the year are starting to produce now… and fresh beans straight from the garden to the kitchen are much better than any store-bought ones, I think…
Red licorice is an oxymoron.
Licorice involves anise / licorice extract. The red stuff has neither. Not that it isn’t tasty in its own right (let’s not get into the Twizzlers / Red Vines debate though…). But, despite learning to call it “red licorice” as a child, it is NOT licorice. Just licorice-shaped.
I too prefer the imported-type licorice. Panda, Aussie (or whatever it is), and so on. They’ve ruined me for Twizzlers licorice (the black stuff, not the red stuff). I’ll EAT the Twizzlers if that’s what’s on offer, but it has an interesting and colorful effect on, well, the other end of things. Likely due to the artificial dyes it uses. Real licorice does not have that.
I’ve never had that effect with Good and Plenty, posssibly because the licorice component is outweighed by the candy shell component.
Anyone who likes the salty stuff… WTF?? You take a yummy treat, and add something to it that makes it taste like CHEMICALS???
Nobody else in my household likes any kind of black licorice. More for me!!!
I sometime enjoy salty licorice.
My MiL basically had to go with raised beds filled with purchased soil to get hers to grow here in Colorado Springs. And had to go with purchased seedlings kept in a greenhouse and transplanted to the garden (semi-enclosed in a homemade PVC frame with partially permeably covering) in which they do pretty well.
Colorado mountains and foothills aren’t known for our soil quality! I can’t imagine your challenges at your altitude and short season.
We had 2 friends over to play music today. They live in condos. As they walked to our back door they commented almost in wonder that our plants have ripe cherry tomatoes. When we took a break, we picked several dozen which they gobbled down, in a sense of near rapture. So neat to see people get such joy out of something that is so familiar to us.
Soil?
Yeah, I gave up. Even potted indoors didn’t work. Admittedly, I don’t have much of a green thumb.
I‘m not sure if my mom makes the crust or filling first. Whichever she does, she gets raves for her pie crust.
As I don’t have easy access to Crisco, I use a butter-based recipe which I mix in a food processor. It then rests in the fridge until the next day. It’s very good, but my mom‘s recipe is still the classic.
When my grandmother got older, she started using Pilbury‘s pie crust- she just rolled it out thinner. But she never used pre-made pie filling.
Oh. About salty licorice? I can’t have it in the house. I‘ll eat it until I‘m bouncing off the walls due to the sugar. And I don’t have to share, as hubby‘s not that fond of licorice itself and salty licorice is right out.
He does eat anise cookies, so those I have to share.
When we moved in, my soil was awful. Full of clay. But I brought back bags and bags of composted horse manure from the barn my daughter rode at, and it made the soil wonderful. If you have stables near you maybe you could ask if you could have some. Otherwise someone has to cart it away, which costs money. I don’t know the policy of barns on this, we were contributing more manure than we took so it was not an issue.