Last night I saw a Spam commercial where the guy fried a couple of pieces of Spam and added to it to a bowl of ramen. My stomach honestly turned for a second. Funny because I love fried Spam, but no one I know in Hawaii serves ramen (or saimin as our local variation) with fried Spam. It always has to be uncooked and heated through by the soup.
Cold fried Spam is just as delicious as hot out of the pan, but I had a unfried Spam sandwich once and gave it to my Dad, returning to ask for one with properly fried Spam.
One time on a 10 day trip to Vegas, We had comped meals because of my Dad and we could have steak and lobster and anything else we wanted every night. I bought a set of cookware there and as soon as we got home, I put the pan on the stove and cooked Spam (my Dad called home before we left Vegas leaving instructions for my sister to cook up a pot of rice). Ahhh…Spam and rice…we were home!
Not my personal stories, but from Korean TV shows. Like Hawaii, because of the large military presence, love of Spam is ingrained in the culture.
A celebrity was staying at really nice hotel room or condo and for her first meal she invited another celebrity over. Among the dishes was a plate of Spam strips which she lovingly fried and arranged for her guest. As I recall, the other dishes were American also and their meeting was the Korean version of high tea.
A Kpop group, IOI was ordering delivery food over the phone and when they ordered tteokbokki (rice cakes in a spicy sauce) with Spam. One of the members excitedly requested that extra Spam be included. It was especially funny, because despite their having just been formed, they were most highly anticipated groups because they were formed through a survival show (Produce 101) and already major celebrities.
My mother and father moved to Juneau, Alaska during the Great Depression. He was always traveling to find work, and she coped as best as she could with two young children to feed. On one occasion, when she knew he was returning, she saved up her money and bought a can of Spam. She roasted it like you would a meat loaf, and proudly served it up. He looked at it, said something to the effect of “I’ve had my fill of that shit”, and left the house. A real prince.
I’ve never been to Hawaii, but I used to love a fried Spam sandwich with mayo.
The only way I’ll eat Spam is fried. We had it fairly regularly when I was a kid, because it was cheap. Typically, we’d have fried Spam and baked beans. Not bad!
A common lunch in grade school (in the 1950s) was cold Spam on white bread with yellow mustard. Which wouldn’t have been half bad, except that my mother — on whom be peace — never removed the gelatin coating. And I would estimate that at least half of my baby teeth met their demise at the piece of gristle* which always seemed embedded somewhere in one of the slices.
*Note the time frame. I haven’t encountered a piece of gristle in years.
Did you take a look at the piece of gristle? Sometimes it’s a piece of artery (or at least looks like it) or rarely bone. The fun part is seeing it one slice and figuring out where the other half is! :eek:
One of my fave comfort foods: Run equal size blocks of velveeta and spam thru a meat grinder, (add some onions or peppers or whatever to the grind if you want), spread the resultant material on bread or english muffins, etc. Broil until golden brown on top, and serve. Yum!
I like spam, the old version not the low sodium or flavored ones. Favorite is sliced and fried in a sandwich, but the velveeta spam grill sounds interesting.
I like the individual slice in a retort pouch, perfect for the one slice of fried spam with one sunny side up egg sandwich with a single slice of velveeta on crappy white bread. Sometimes with mayo, sometimes without [but never catsup or mustard for me]
I actually keep an emergency box in my momvan during the winter - it has a dozen singles of spam, a dozen MRE cheese squeezies, a dozen peanut butter and jelly packs, MRE crackers, a 50 count box of Bigelows Earl Gray teabags, 5 12 count true lemon powdered lemon packets, 4 boxes herb ox chicken bouillion packets, 3 or 4 dozen assorted canned soups and stews, the 144 count case of fuel tabs and a biolite camp stove starter kit, and a biolite solarstarter kit. Odds and ends include a roll of contractor garbage bags, a water purification straw/32 oz bottle, waterproof/windproof matches … My dad did winter survival in the Army and Boy scouts, and figured I needed ot learn to be safe too =)
I normally travel with both a woobie and a sleeping bag, and keep a spare field jacket, combat boots, and watch cap, and other emergency gear is a sapirka/russian entrenching tool - good for digging and chopping, and a couple of the metal grates for getting unstuck, an empty bucket to haul water or snow, a wire saw and a couple spools of 500 pound braided kevlar fish line. I can do pretty much anything from digging a Saami snow tunnel to making an igloo [great fun, I swear all I did in Girl freaking scouts was learn to play contract bridge, my brothers Boy Scout troup had the best stuff, and they got to go camping!] and with the sapirka, saw and fish line I can build an adirondak shelter.
I’ve been working on my sushi skills for a long time. Five or so years ago my gf came home to a sushi/sashimi feast. There was one item on the platter she did not recognize whatsoever; it was spam musubi.
The spam had been marinated, pan fried, placed in a press, then wrapped. It was freaking delicious. She had to be coaxed to try it, and even then, although she admitted it tasted interesting, she only had one bite. She had absorbed too much spam negativity over the years.
I was a scoutmaster for a week-long campout at a large summer camp which had a competition to make the best breakfast over a campfire, which the camp staff would sample and award a prize. The other troops made extravagant skillet based meals with lots of ingredients and fancy sausages and cheeses. I had brought the stuff for the scouts to make chocolate-chip pancakes and fried Spam. We were surprised and pleased to be awarded first place.
Maybe “love” is a strong word for it, but I really do enjoy Spam and a lot of other potted meat products. I don’t have them very often, but I sure do get a hankering for them. I was dropping my dog off at my parents’ last week and when my mom was about to break out the New Years ham to carve a sandwich for me, I stopped her to ask if we had any Spam in the house. Sure enough! And I enjoy it cold and I love the gelatinous bits. I don’t ever recall biting into gristle or bone or anything like that.
The chorizo flavored Spam is quite nice fried up with eggs. That one is not so good cold. I’m not sure I’d say it really tastes like chorizo — reminds me more of what I remember Hormel canned hot tamales tasting like (and I enjoyed those, too, just haven’t had any in about twenty or so years), but others find it more reminiscent if chorizo than I do.
Spam as a mainstream accomponent to multiple dishes was a learning curve when I lived in Hawaii in the late 80s/early 90s. I knew it was an obsession when even McDs had spam in certain offerings.
The reduced fat single serve packets were also a big player for my back-country hiking days. Throw a few in one of the backpack pockets and nothing tasted better than a slab of Spam and the warm water from my Nalgene while sitting on a log.
My favorite is to mix together rice vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, and oyster sauce. Slice the cube of Spam into 1/2" slices and marinate in the marinade for an hour. Fry in a hot pan thirty seconds each side, then allow to cool. Serve on a bed of sushi rice or put rice and spam in a press, then wrap with nori.
Spam is awesome. We ate it while camping. I would also have fried spam sandwiches when I came home from school. These days we have fried strips with scrambled eggs for weekend breakfast.
I bring Spam musubi to work potlucks. I work at a very culturally and ethnically diverse place in Los Angeles, so the first time I did it, I thought there wouldn’t be much interest, since not everyone likes or wants to try Spam and there are tons of other foods available. I figured I’d be eating leftovers for days.
The platter was destroyed. Even my paper sign that said “Spam musubi” was gone.
I make it every year now, approximately 50 pieces. For the most recent potluck I did half Spam, half Portuguese Sausage (I got the musubi cut from Costco in Hawaii) and those also vanished quickly.
A tip I got from someone: as you are assembling your spam musubi, put a nice smear of ume [Japanese pickled plum] in there for super tart umami blast of joy.
I knew there was a Doper who had told this story. SPAM used to have a picture of a loaf, scored and decorated with cloves, on the can. I haven’t purchased any for quite a few years, so IDK if it still does.
When I was in college, I wrote for a zine (remember those?) and one of the other zine writers made a reference to SPAM and said, “The jellied shit that surrounds it looks like alien jizm.”
As for people totally having their fill of this, has anyone here read Dr. Gordon Seagraves’ best-known books, “Burma Surgeon” and “Burma Surgeon Returns”? (These were big best-sellers in the 1940s.) Anyway, he tells a story about some U.S. troops who opened a case of rations that IIRC had been tossed to their remote mountain “hospital” (really just a tent pitched in knee-deep mud) and several of them vomited immediately upon seeing the hundreds of SPAM cans packed inside. THAT’S pretty bad.
In recent years, I’ve seen SPAM Lite, BBQ SPAM, teriyaki SPAM, and perhaps some other flavors, on top of knockoffs like Treet.
