Strange combinations
 

Top 10 Unusual Food Combinations

10. Carrots and Sugar
While it may seem strange to add sugar to vegetables, it is a very common method of preparing carrots in France. The technical term for this dish is Vichy Carrots, in which you combine Carrots, Salt, Pepper, sugar, and Vichy water (a sparkling water from the Vichy region) and cook them down until the carrots are glazed. The sugar heightens the flavor of the carrots and the end result is a stunning dish of brilliantly orange vegetables.

9. Coffee and Salt
Add a touch of salt to coffee to heighten the flavor - this is a very common use of salt as it is used in virtually all dishes (including sweet dishes served for pudding). Just a pinch is enough to make a brilliant espresso.

8. Tomatoes and Sugar
Use sugar, not salt. Tomatoes are already acidic and the addition of salt just increases that acidic flavor. Sugar sweetens and increases the tomato flavor. Tomatoes are fruits after all.

7. Chocolate and Coffee
When baking with chocolate, add a little coffee - it strengthens the chocolate flavor without adding a strong coffee flavor.

6. Meat and Aniseed
When stewing meat, throw in a star anise - you can’t taste the aniseed but the flavor adds a deep richness to the meat. This is a trick used in all meat dishes by Heston Blumenthal the owner of the Fat Duck (3 Michelin stars) - voted the world’s best restaurant for three years in a row.

5. Cooking tomatoes and Foliage
Throw in a tomato branch - the branch contains all of the flavor that we love in tomatoes - pick a leaf and smell it and you will see what I mean. Simply throw in a small stick of the tomato plant and it will give your cooked tomatoes a much stronger tomato flavor.

4. Potatoes and Nutmeg
Add nutmeg - just a little - it adds a depth to the potatoes that people won’t recognize, but will definitely like. This is true of virtually every potato dish.

3. Chili and Chocolate
Add chocolate to chili. It deepens the meaty flavor of the chili while giving a strong base note to the peppers. This is a trick well known in the South where Chili bake-offs are common.

2. Apples and Vanilla
Apples are very acidic and normally require some sugar in their cooking. Most people add nutmeg or cinnamon to their apple dishes, but vanilla extract adds a deep layer of flavor that most people won’t recognize but will certainly appreciate.

1. Strawberries and Pepper
Strawberries (fresh) are usually served with a sprinkling of confectioners sugar, but the addition of very finely ground pepper (from fresh corns) heightens the flavor.

I make carrots and sugar all the time. DH prefers them with honey glaze, but I like a touch of brown sugar.

Chili and chocolate -- that's OK but I like cinnamon in mine.

Lindt makes a Chili Dark Chocolate Bar that is magnificent. The chilis add a bit of bite, but don't overpower the chocolate flavor. (Not all of the Chili-Chocolate bars are that good ... some are too gritty.)

thanks, bruce. that is knowledge. and knowledge is power. now ....I am more powerful.

but you used time to read it, and time is money. Money is power. So you lost power reading it.

drat!

It might have been a wash, who knows?

It depends on the information density.

Fresh homemade still-hot yeast doughnuts rolled in sugar, and beer. I kid you not.

many of those combos are well known; carrots and sugar, chili and chocolate, and chocolate and coffee--come on! that's classic.

I'm going to try the nutmeg in potatoes thing.

What?

I could go for pretty much all of those (especially chocolate and chili!!! Habenero hot chocolate is my favourite)...but isn't tomato foliage mildly toxic?

My grandmother once made me a peanut butter and mayo sandwich, and while it sounds horrifyingly disgusting, I was shocked that it was pretty good. They used to also get bread, spread butter on it, and sprinkle sugar on it.

so thats what happened.

They forgot the vodka with the strawberries and pepper.

Yes, they are members of the nightshade family and contain glycoalkloids... or something. It's didn't say to eat the stick though, just to add it to cooking tomatoes.
You're not supposed to eat green tomatoes for the same reason, but lots of people do and seem to live thru it.

I ate it, and later I shared this combo with my wife's cousin. He likes it too.

My mother-in-law eats peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. She says they're great.

I can tell you first-hand that these are, in fact, pretty good. We used to do "food expreiments" with my dad, to find previously undiscovered combinations by trial-and-error. We also played a game where you closed your eyes and someone would put one of the "experiments" in your mouth, so you didn't even know what it was. That really taxes the synapses, scrambling to recognize and decipher these new signals.

i remember doing that at Paul Bidez's house as a kid.....one of the big hits was two chocolate chip cookies with mayo and yellow mustard between them. I haven't tried that again since........it sounds nasty, even though i remember liking it

You were probably stoned at the time.

i was like.....11....I am pretty sure it was the year the Eagles lost to the Raiders in the Super Bowl. was that 81?

So you were stoned... yeh that was January 25, 1981

You should try a peanut butter and tomato sandwich with lots of salt and pepper. Very yum.

Weird? A friend of mine swears by his dad's chicken stewed in a mix of coke and vegemite. I haven't tried it.

I heartily recommend one part wasabi to three parts honey. Yummy.

I like toast with marmalade and cheese, grilled. A foody friend of mine freaked out, he's never heard of it. What do you peeps think, is that normal or wierd?

It's weird, but I think it'd taste pretty good. We have honey and cheese sandwiches or jam and cheese. Those are yummy.

I'm gonna give those a try this weekend Zengum and Aliantha....except for the vegemite stuff. I've never seen it and only heard of it in a Men At Work song.

What do you put the wasabi with honey on? A sandwich?

I'd be dipping sashimi in it.

When I make sushi at home we always dip into sweet soy and wasabi. That's a really nice combo with salmon or tuna.

I used it in soups, but I guess it's a general purpose condiment. Anything that you'd use wasabi on ... sushi or sashimi especially.


ETA: Strange combinations? I nominate The Cellar. Anything that has UG, Radar, TW, Dana and the rest of us, and hasn't exploded, surely counts.

You know it's silly, but I've always been curious as to who invented certain food items that suddenly appeared.

I know who invented the Buffalo wing, but who came up with the idea first to mix peanuts and chocolate or honey and mustard?

I like peanut butter and Frank's Red Hot. On a toasted onion bagel.

Or green peas and A1 steak sauce.

1. Mashed tatters and Worcestershire sauce
2. Chocolate or whipped cream spread liberally and seductively on my wife's erogenous parts...yumm

I love all three of those things...onion bagel...check...peanut butter...check...Frank's Red Hot...check. Put 'em together....WTF?!?

I like peas and corn mixed with my mashed potatoes, but never tried 'em with steak sauce...on purpose. I mean if I'm eating a steak, and the veggies roll into the sauce I'll still eat them.

Man that is a huge coincidence. I also love Chocolate or whipped cream spread liberally and seductively on your wife's erogenous parts!!
;)

Well who Doesent radar !!

This is a strange one I came up with myself. Now my wife loves it too. I'm not sure how many of you eat Vietnamese food, but I'll describe it.

A bed of sticky broken white rice, put 2 over easy eggs yolk side down on top of the rice and cut up the eggs so the yolk gets all over the rice, pour fish sauce (Vietnamese put it on everything), and go to town.

The Vietnamese normally eat this dish without the eggs. It's called Com Tam Suon. I felt like it needed something and the combination of the fish sauce, rice, and egg was terrific with the pork chop.

That dont sound to strange , Ill pass on the fish sauce but would try it

Chili and chocolate are the two main ingredients of Cincinnati chili. Now that's good eats.

The head chef at the restaurant I waited tables at in high school told me to add a dash of salt to each bag of coffee I made so I guess that's been around for a while.

When I was a kid, my Mom would make me banana and mayonaise sammiches. Deeee-licious! I still make one every now and then.

A little hot pepper in fudge or brownies -- just enough to notice. Goes well with dark-roast coffee.

It's Mexican. Try a similar approach with mole poblano.

Particularly sweet pickle.

Not so different from grilled cheese+peanut butter+sweet green relish. The relish moistens everything, so the peanut butter can't stick to the roof of your mouth, not that melted peanut butter does anyway. Cream style peanut butter is fine, but we rather preferred chunky for its crunch.

Radar, get Vegemite either at some Brit boutique where they sell all things British for the expat crowd or a similarly themed Australian shop. Another place to look is health-food stores.

Nowhere will it be exactly cheap. A little jar of the stuff runs about five dollars, next size up ten or twelve per. But if you use it as you should it'll last.

Spread it thinly on toast, or you'll hate it. It has a strong, heavy, dark-brownish flavor and is very salty. I like to butter the toast first; YMMV.

As far as vegemite goes. Try vegemite, cheese and lettuce sandwiches. They're quite good.

Cross posted from To Those Who Are Serving Or About To Serve:

Somehow it has to be the sage dressing: bread cubes, butter, turkey juice (eventually), chopped celery, ground sage, pepper, a little salt to taste. Other dressings are lots of fun as dressings but not so satisfactory in this kind of sandwich.

grape jelly and cream cheese omelet.

Oh man, I'm of the opinion that cream cheese is the most underutilized ingredient out there. I've been on a huge cream cheese recipe kick.

You might like this then Clodfobble. During the years I was working for Bank of America (Satan), I was working in their credit card processing building in Pasadena. It was a 6 story building without any windows. It was like a giant cement block. I'm convinced that they were scared of snipers due to their own poor customer service. I actually heard collections people call someone's neighbors asking them to tell someone to pay their bill. I heard them telling people to go collect aluminum cans. I had a "customer service" person look at me with a straight face and say, "They (the customers) need us, we don't need them. They need to borrow money to buy cars, houses, etc." I had to remind them that there is more than one bank in America...

Anyway...back to food.

Since I was in I.T. and not part of either customer service, or collections, I was deemed impartial and I got to be a judge in the annual chili and salsa contests.

The very best of all the Salsa's was a bowl of fantastic salsa with a nice kick and it had cream cheese in the center. This is a wonderful combination.

Was that a long enough story to tell you about this combo? LOL! Sorry, sometimes I get carried away.

My evil ex used to have cheese on sweet popcorn. He'd wait til the popcorn was shovelled in, then say with a cheeky smile, "could I have some cheese on that?" The servers were so weirded out that he was never charged extra - whereas if I wanted extra cheese on my jalapenos I certainly was!

One Valentine's day I sent him an arrow, which you could unscrew for a personalised message. He didn't know who it was from (which tells me a lot!) so thought it best not to mention it to me (which tells me more). It was only a couple of days later, stuck on a call at work, that he realised it screwed open. The message read, "We're not a perfect match..." on one side and, "... like sweet popcorn and cheese" on the other,

My dad's bachelor pad snacks at the time.
I guess He was probably starving. It was either than or horse food. At the time I thought it was just strange.



Peanut butter and pickles on crackers. (ok)

Peanut butter and mayo sandwich.

Creamed corn with crumbled crackers.

Stewed tomatoes with crumbled crackers.

Smashed turnips and parsnips.


Bob's French fries dipped in strawberry shake ( good )

my combinations

Doritos Nacho cheese chips with cottage cheese as a dip.

I agree. Cream cheese on Oreos is delicious.

Spread cream cheese on Lebanon Bologna, and roll up a sweet gerkin pickle in it. Yum.

I used to eat peanut butter and bologna sandwhiches. Now? No way.

What do Americans mean by bologna?

Baloney?

It's like Spam for the Uppercrust.

Not really. It's "meat" and meat by-products. Think hot dogs all flattened out.

Bologna sausage (pronounced /boˈloʊni/) is an American sausage somewhat similar to the Italian mortadella (a finely hashed/ground pork sausage containing cubes of lard that originated in the Italian city of Bologna). It is commonly called bologna and often pronounced and/or spelled baloney. US

Bologna sausage is generally made from low-value scraps (trimmings from steaks, roasts or other meat cuts) eww


the origin of the slang word baloney, meaning "nonsense"

lol @ nonsense

I like to eat my oatmeal with cottage cheese and blueberries....and with some slivered almonds thrown in for crunch.

bold mine

OMG...is your dad Our Lord and Savior?:eek:

Pussy and Redi-Whip.

Is this in the right thread :eyebrow:?

Yeah, cause that combination is not really strange...is it?

HAGGIS!

Peanut butter maybe? Anybody want to try it out and let us know? :nuts:

That's not weird, that's dressed up. You could probably find sixteen variations on that idea at Mister Breakfast's site. He tries to be comprehensive, and you'd probably like half a dozen of them.

I sometimes butter my oatmeal -- cold-day kind of stuff. Works with brown sugar. I've never gone as far as to start the day on buttered brose: oatmeal, an ounce of whisky stirred in, and buttered. With or without brown sugar, which in the auld lang syne would have been a luxury good the eaters of brose might have hesitated to buy.