How can you put Spain on the same level as Great Britain? Damn Italians don’t know how to make anything other than sauce with tomatoes and they think they know how to cook.
I went to Spain for a few months and honestly wasn’t too impressed with the cuisine.
Yes, I guess that is part of the problem, in Spain hoteliers prefer to scam tourists with products of inferior quality compared to what we really eat than to gain fame and repercussion. I don’t know if that was your case, or where you were, it varies a lot from one region to another, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Yeah i was in rota for work and there were some good restaurants but on the whole there was really nothing, like, outstanding… nothing memorable, or that I’d say I’d want to eat again. Took a weekend trip to Barcelona and they had some better restaurants, but honestly I felt the same.
I didn’t see any reason to assume that the person you were replying to ate at hotels or at places the hotels recommended. I’m pretty sure it’s more common for tourists to eat at local restaurants.
Oi, we had a restaurant so good they had to stop it entering the world’s best restaurant competition because it kept winning.
Also Sunday roast is the food of kings.
What do you consider to be “roast dinner”?
Non-mediterran = toxic? Slightly biased i say.
Italians biased about food? Never!
Funny seeing this, especially from an iberian perpective, because local culinary is mostly the same as theirs. With the slight difference we actually have the balls to spice our food.
I have yet to sample an Italian arrabiata sauce that I would remotely call ‘spicy’. Though, to be fair, I’m an American that over spices everything I cook, so my palate is probably blown out at this point.
I’ve read you guys have a too sweet baseline for flavours, due to the overwhelming presence of corn syrup in everything.
Iberian cuisine, as in Portuguese and Spanish (fuck those guys; they can’t make proper bread even if you teach them!), can be spicy but adding heat to a dish serves to accentuate the underlying flavours.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a simple roasted chicken with lemon and mussels.
The chicken is just prepared by seasoning the chicken with coarse salt and stuffing it with a whole lemon, with the ends cut, and roasting in the oven. With the chicken ready, you just take the lemon from inside the bird and squeeze it over. Base flavours are lemon and salt, with the chicken fat binding everything together. You should complain the meat is a bit under salted; it means you are actually tasting it.
The mussels are prepared with white wine, salt and garlic. The garlic is chopped and slightly fried, just until fragrant, in olive oil. The mussels are thrown in, lightly salted, tossed in the base, over high heat, then the wine added and the pot covered to steam the mussels until all are open. Or can just sprinkle salt over the mussels on your plate. You want to taste the mussel.
These are basic dishes any child can eat. Not too extreme flavours. Adding a chopped chilli to the mussels base and a chilli inside the chicken will add a sligh note of heat to the dishes, embolden the overall flavours, but you will still be getting the base flavours after swallowing, lingering in your mouth.
Food should leave a memory. It’s supposed to be flavourful, not painful.
Lovingly described! Thanks for the tips.
not painful.
Ok im gonna disagree with you here. I love spice/heat and make a game of how much iocaine powder I can stick on stuff. I have a bottle of capsaicin that I abuse to make morning omelettes. You can pry that from my cold dead hands, heat is life. The only memory I live for is curling up into the fetal position from inappropriate amounts of heat. Heat is my flavor, my second family is basically Mexico they bring the pain the best. They’re the blood of my covenant fam. My regular fam is water of the womb spice levels. They have no marbles, I have only spice shame for a fam.
As a side bonus my family has banned me from ever contributing to pot lucks and nobody dares eat off my plate.
Good for you, then.
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I wonder what Italians think about our (Hungarian) fake Italian food called Milánói Sertésborda, or Milanese Pork Ribs. It consists of Milánói/Milanese sauce made with tomato sauce, garlic, black pepper, oregano, basil (if you’re not an imbecile trying to mimic Michelin chefs by only using little or no seasoning), and thyme (also often left out by the former group), pork belly, mushrooms, and either bacon or smoked ham; macaroni (the long kind); and pork snitzel (which most Hungarians think is a Hungarian food).
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Let’s not give extra airtime to that cunt.
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Any Italian noodles with tomato sucks. Chinese noodles win 99.99% of the time
I mean, it may not be the best, but this puts portugal in a very bad position when we are all mediterranean with mostly the same ingredients.
To quote a portuguese writer, very loosely: better food is served on a portuguese farm kitchen table than in the great dinning halls of Europe.
You ever had Basque pork stew? I never would have thought to put an orange in stew, but goddamn if it isn’t delicious.
Orange goes well with fat rich meats and the thyme accentuates it. That’s a nice take. But I risk the original oranges used would be bitter oranges, to give the dish an extra touch.
Try to roast some pork belly marinated in orange juice, white wine, garlic and bay leaves. Overnight and chilled. Then allow the meat to dry over a rack for thirty minutes and give it some coarse salt. Drizzle with a bit of olive oil. Low heat oven for two hours, then high heat to crisp the skin. Turn upside down midway. Bast regularly with the marinade. Slice thin, serve with finely choped onion, garlic, bell pepper and parsley, with orange zest added to it. In the fat that rendered, over high heat, sautée two chillies, add two or three sliced oranges and allow to brown at the edges. Sprinkle with thyme. Fresh bread and a strong red wine. Don’t drive afterwards.
I’m going to have to try this. This sounds delicious.
What kind of chilis though? Serrano?
Standard chili around my part of the world is this one.
Medium strong.
That sounds great, thank you! I’ll definitely be saving your recommendation for when I get to the grocery store.
Well most of ‘traditional’ Italien food is actually from the US and had been invented by Italien immigrants.
Yeah, Italian chef friend of mine once said that you use garlic, or onions, rarely both, in authentic italian food. Unless you are from one of the many places where they always use both.
A lot of people don’t realize that Italy is a relatively young country comprising multiple distinct regions and culinary histories.
correct, a lot of “traditional” methods people think are possibly ancient, are like 150 years old. Some areas are culturally diverse to the point where they are basically a completely different culture, in comparison.
About “fattening”: yes, pasta is.
Wow this is the most triggering post I’ve seen in a while and that’s saying a lot in these times
Pre 1600s: Y’all a wanta some Rotting fish juice?
Eh, half the authentic East Asian food you get has Fish Sauce as an ingredient, which is essentially Rotting Fish Juice. Hell, Worcester Sauce in the West is similar but different.
Source: Unmilitant vegan that is peeved that fermented fish product ends up being the secret ingredient in many authentic dishes.
Fair point. Although a lot of South Asia also had shitloads of herbs and spices.
Italian cooking before tomatoes came to Europe looks quite depressing. (Probably still pretty tasty tho)
Don’t knock it 'til you’ve tried it.
True comedy has no roots in ethnocentrism.
Fake pizza, sure, but doesn’t imply it’s bad. Plus ironically, you can find Italian style pizza in the US if you look for it.
That said, I’ll still apologize for Dominos, Pizza Hut, et. al. for fast-foodizing the concept of pizza.
Bruh, Giovanni isn’t getting his ass outta bed at 1am to whip me up the drunkenness abolishing disaster that is a late night Domino’s order, including all the extras of course I don’t just want a pizza I want lava cake and bread sticks and cheesy bread and maybe a pasta bread bowl. I’ll take a few bites of everything and pass out on the couch to wake up in the morning pleasantly surprised that drunk me was thoughtful enough to order us pizza for breakfast.
Domino’s looks like pizza but it’s terrible. I’d rather never eat pizza again if Domino’s were the only option.
I’m just under the line of “toxic” in Finland and you could drawn the line a bit further south.
Finnish national dish? Traditional version? Here you go, the entire recipe;
Pound of beef, cubed
Pounds of pork, cubed
Water
A spoonful of salt.
Put meat in pan with water.
Take pan off heat after enough time.
Done.
That’s literally the Finnish national dish “Karelian stew”. Obviously nowadays it definitely includes black pepper as well and bunch of other things, because the traditional version is literally just a bunch of boiled meat without any spices.
edit haha enjoyed that but yes, the formatting was off, although you could obviously used water cubes in a pan as long as you still put it on hot. Actually, it might be an interesting experiment to put a pot on a hot stove / flame with beef & pork & ice. Insofar that maybe a tiny bit of the meat would brown before the ice melts and becomes water idk. At least then there’d be browning resulting in some taste. The classical one has none.
I made lohikeitto for the first time recently and that was pretty damn good. Almost like an American chowder, but thinner and with nice, tasty dill (I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that, but other readers might like to know).
Oh no, you don’t have to tell me.
Some people make an excellent lohikeitto, and it’s damn fine.
There’s a restaurant I go in my city for a good one.
But I’ve been on a gluten and dairy free diet. I’m sure I could replace rye bread with decent alternatives and cream with a vegetable one, but lohikeitto has been hard for me to get right.
Any fish foods actually. Fish is such delicate meat I find it hard to get a proper grasp on because it varies so much from fish to fish, especially when its different species of fish.
Meat from large mammals is rather easy, usually uniform. Fish, just… I need to learn it better.
Thank for reminding me though, I think I’ll learn to make lohikeitto next. I’ve been learning to cook a bit more, had porkchops today which I marinated myself with rum and garlic and lime and chili and rosemary etc, have made horse meatballs. Deer stew. Elk fry up. Reindeer ragu.
Mmm.
It was at least a decade, definitely a bit more since I made meatballs. But I think they turned out nice.
Gluten fre spaghetti. I hate to have to have it, but Rummo brand has actually been pretty nice. I tried like a half dozen others before. So sad I can’t have real spaghetti anymore but this is a decent enough alternative, and I make up for the poor spaghetti by improving what goes with it.
Denser fishes like salmon and cod are the easiest to cook. You can overcook them, especially salmon, but they’re both really delicious and generally easy to work with. I would recommend going with salmon for the extra flavor, but if you’re concerned about over cooking, maybe cod instead.
Edit: I used this recipe, but with less dill because that’s a crazy amount.
https://skinnyspatula.com/salmon-soup-lohikeitto/#mv-creation-223-jtr
Yeah salmon isnt’ too hard and cod goes pretty easy in fishsticks basically, but I don’t know how to optimise it. I don’t get the feel for the meat like I do with when I cook, for example, steaks and want them rare. I mean yeah I do use a digital thermometer with steaks to get them optimal, but my point is I wouldn’t even know with fish what the optimal is.
Like salmon and cod, yeah, easy enough and you find things at the store. But once I tried making soup out of this pike we caught and it was just… way overcooked. I messed it up, totally.
So I’d like to get that sort of intuitive feel and understanding I have for mammalian meat to fish meat as well. Like I understand with mammalian meat if it’s fattier it’ll cook differently, if it’s this or that it’ll affect it this way or that, but I don’t know shit about fish, you know? Like if I was a millionaire, I’d hire a high-grade sushi chef to teach me about fish or something.
A sushi chef would be a poor choice to teach you about cooking fish!
But I understand. It really just takes practice.
Try a handful of different recipes with the same fish and you will start to get a feel for it. Then try a handful of recipes with a different fish. Etc. After getting the hang of a few of them, you’ll be more comfortable with judging how and how long to cook the fish based on the filet or steak that you’re working with–how thick or delicate the meat is.
For me, I was wary about chicken for the longest time when I first started cooking, afraid that I would undercook it. Same thing. It all just takes experience.
A sushi chef would be poor in teaching me about cooking fish, yes, but I believe I know cooking more than fish, and a sushi chef would be very good to teach me about fish.
You see? I can’t communicate how amusing it is for me to stay "you see? " to you but I will try; you are Drusas, who one commented about my chosen nickname, as it was similar to yours.
The reason this amused me, or is ironic, is that my name is “Jussi”, which sounds sort of like “you see”. And the thing I like to do is mansplain. So… you see?
Nominative determinism.
I do always have a bit of a double-take when I see your username. It makes me think you have good taste, even though I don’t know its origin.
But you’re right that a sushi chef should be well acquainted with a variety of fish.
cubed Water
Ice blocks??
Could work? I edited the original, but thanks for the laughs :D
I mean, if it’s the most traditional form you’re aiming for, the Finns in certain regions/seasons might have historically had more access to ice than fresh water
I mean, you usually have both. Because while lakes freeze over, ice fishing is very much a thing.
Also, streaming water doesn’t freeze.
I would say there’s sometimes (often, even) a lot more snow than there is water. So idk, do you count snow as ice? I guess technically, because it is ice crystals.
And especially before the industrial revolution, you could just grab a bucketful of snow and put it on the stove if you’re too tired to walk to the extra 10 steps to the well. You still don’t have to go far into the woods and the snow would probably be more or less edible (it definitely is, but like per regulations idk), but especially before the industrial revolution it would’ve been ultraclean.
And also if you’re taking it from pine branches you’ll get a nice piney sort of hint of a taste. (I ate snow from the trees as a kid, just don’t eat yellow snow)
I, too, am really curious about the cubed water.
Haha it’s a formatting error.
I only used one line shift on Sync and formatted it wrong. I’m sorry.
But that’s hilarious though because I genuinely can’t tell if people can’t tell
Maybe ice is simply more available than liquid potable water in Finland.
