I like many of my food items to be burned to a crisp.
I like poultry with skin broiled black. I push my bread (of any type) down twice in the toaster till it’s completely charred. I microwave my popcorn an extra minute till ~half the kernels are black (you get a better yield on the tasty semi-popped kernels, too). I like extra-blackened redfish. I finish baking my mac & cheese under the broiler till the top noodles are black and crunchy. I like my baked potatoes semi-black (all-black potatoes just seems wrong). I like my steak broiled Pittsburg or Black & Blue: bloody on the inside; black on the outside. The list goes on, but you get the idea.
So, fess up, who shares my love of all (or some) things burned?
Hot dogs. I love a blackened and withered hot dog. Marshmallows, too, but that’s due more to impatience. Once I found out you could just stick the thing in the fire and be eating gooey sweet charcoal in seconds I never looked back.
I’m not a big fan of burned food, but I started eating bacon when I was in Boy Scouts, and I have to admit that I like my bacon well-done – crispy, and almost carbonized. If I get bacon with uncooked fat, or if it has a lot of flexibility, I find I don’t really trust it to be cooked. Maybe it’s a case of Stockholm Syndrome, but I have a gut feeling that you ought to be able to crush the bacon into Bacon Bits in your bare hands, and if you can’t, it ain’t “done”.
I’ll take a steak charred on the outside, but no more than medium in the middle. I didn’t mind the burnt marshmallows as a kid, don’t know when the last time I tried one was. Intentionally blackened dishes are fine, but once again it’s only the outside. However, if you really like burnt food my wife has some recipes she’d be willing to share.
These are the only two I can tolerate… and really only the marshmallows. Hotdogs I prefer getting to the fine line of blistered but not actually charred. Otherwise it just tastes like licking ashes.
Blackened foods are entirely different from burnt foods.
Used to enjoy open faced toaster over made ‘grilled’ cheese sandwiches which the top of the cheese was bubbling and starting to blacken. However if it got too blackened that layer would puff up and could be fairly easily removed to reveal the gooey cheese beneath, sometimes some blacked pieces remained.
But no never really was a fan of blacken or burnt foods, would throw out microwave popcorn if it would start to burn, that burnt flavor permeates the whole batch.
Also eating burnt food may not be the best for one’s health:
But then again lots of things may not be good for one’s health
Sometimes burned bits are just irresistible particularly BBQ’d lamb chops with the fat charred. My brother cooked a glazed ham at Christmas and I ate a little ham and a lot of the sweet, burned, glazed crackling.
This is my favorite way to have grilled cheese sandwiches. I will happily eat a well done one while someone else would be over the sink scraping the bread with a butter knife.
Thought of another one. Oven roasted potatoes and onions. Cut up a few baking potatoes into 1/2" chunks, chop onions into similar sized pieces, throw olive oil in a big bowl with an envelope of lipton onion soup mix, mix it all up until it’s all coated, dump onto a baking sheet covered with foil, bake in 450 oven flipping every few minutes until they’re very dark on the outside. The insides are perfect. Serve with sour cream to dip each forkful into.
This has me curious. How does one even make a toasted marshmallow that is anything but charred on the outside? Every single one I have ever had was like that and I loved them all.
For me I liked the burned crusty edge of Melted Cheese and of fried eggs but wouldn’t want my cheese or eggs exclusively burned that way.
Sometimes while frying, some of the batter settles down at the bottom of the pan and gets fried for a long time. We fish it out at the end of the cooking. This could be quite tasty, in a that-tastes-weird-but-I-want-more sort of a way.
My mom melts butter to make ghee. At the end, she adds some flour and sugar and scraps off the butter sticking to the pan. It’s apparently a delicacy (especially for her, since butter/ghee was expensive while she was growing up).
Yep. Give me the burnt ends of the brisket. Give me the darkest grilled cheese sandwich, extra bonus if there’s some burned cheese blobs attached. Mm, burnt cheese. Set your marshmallow on fire by accident? Gimme. Also, don’t throw out that burned coffee, there are times when it just hits the spot. I know, I am kinda weird.
