Just tried pouring some ginger ale in my lemonade (homemade). 10/10, much better than I wouldn’t thought
Pineapples and pizza. Yeah I said it.
So no joke, I talked shit about pineapple on pizza for years. Then, I can’t remember why specifically, but we had someone over and asked what type of pizza she wanted, and she said Hawaiian. And there was some leftover. I grew up poor, and we do not waste food, so I decided it was worth trying it.
It was amazing. I immediately felt silly for being so against it.
My wife still refuses to try it on principle (she did grow up near NYC, so she has STRONG opinions on pizza).
And peach, too!
I have a 200 item list of grazing board foods that I’ve personally mixed and sampled every single 2 and 3 item combination and curated every item to be acceptable to delicious in 3 part combos.
By far the two strangest combos to any guest are the spicy salami and the dark chocolate on baguette bread or the rum dates and stone stone-ground mustard on butter cracker.
The sweet and bitter of the chocolate mixes so well with the oilly spice of the meat, and the baguette bridges the textures to provide a comfortable mouthfeel by soaking it in.
For the second, the vinegar and tang of the mustard heighten the rum without taking away the sweet paste of the dates and the cracker provides enough texture to not feel like you’re eating sauce and enough salt to soften the vinegar and alcohol bite.
Honestly, it’s my favorite dinner even because it’s so much fun to watch people look at you in horror when you suggest they try something, then try it and see that horror melt away into absolute wonder.
I believe this is a multi choose problem. 200C2 is 19,900. 200C3 is 1,313,400. You’ve tried all 1,333,300 combinations? More actually for the items that were tried but didn’t make the cut. I want the list this sounds like a culinary masterpiece
Are you willing to share the curated list? 🤞🏻
Make your a salami sandwich with the following steps.
- Toast the bread.
- pan fry the salami slices til their a little crispy on the edges.
- spread hummus on the bread once it’s toasted.
- add the crispy salami, some lettuce, and seasoned tomato to your sandwich and enjoy.
People look at me sideways for using hummus as a sandwich spread, but it’s delicious.
This is one of those recipes that I have to stop and ask what’s wrong with the people in your life that they can’t assess hummus, a spread frequently served on breads, with the same eyes they use on any other spread. They wouldn’t think twice if you served them a board with all the listed ingredients as a grazing spread.
Strawberries and black pepper. You’re welcome.
Basically everything sweet with hot seasoning. One of my favorites: Mango with Chili! :-)
Your Hispanic is showing
My toddler insisted on putting pepper on her strawberries the other day.
I laughed and said she was welcome to try, but “start on just a couple slices so you don’t ruin all of them”.
She said it was great, but I didn’t believe her, so I tried it. And then we put pepper on all of them.
Just tried this for the first time after learning about it from your comment. Pretty good! 👍
I’d go one further; strawberry chilli sorbet. sweet strawberry, hot and cold at the same time… perfection
Chocolate and anything spicy.
Kalimotxo. It’s red wine and cola in roughly equal parts, to taste. It’s a great way to salvage old wine that’s a day or two past drinkable, especially on a hot day.
I described it once on reddit in the before times, and someone called it a “shit red wine spritzer” and I think that’s kinda apt.
A few weeks ago I poured some cane sugar coke in a half-drink glass of Port and all my friends looked at me like I was crazy when I said it wasn’t half bad
That tracks, but with port I feel like it’d be super sugary.
Oh for sure. Like a wine/cola syrup
In this same vein, cola and beer in equal proportions with a shot of amaretto tastes like snickers
50/50 Guinness and cola. It’s called a Black Velvet and is indulgent and lovely.
@Lodespawn @EvilBit that sounds like a shortcut to a bad time
The kalimotxo is actually pretty tame; half as potent as wine, so comparable to maybe a pale ale.
Can’t speak for that other madness though.
I thought that said tastes like nickers, lol.
In my country we call it bamboo for some reason.
That’s interesting and weird! Guessing from your name, is it Slovenia?
Otoh do not try mixing beer and wine it is awful. Truly truly awful.
That I can believe. I’ve only mixed them in the sense of generally making bad decisions in a night.
As a kid I remember jam (probably strawberry) and cheese (Cheddar or red Leicester) sandwiches being pretty awesome. For manifold reasons, peanut butter was not something made available to me back then, so that would be the closest our house ever got to that.
Quince and cheese on crackers is a common thing, so jam cheese and bread just seems normal to me too…
Another vote for the cheese and jam! Sweet and salty. I like it in a tortilla.
I was also a weird kid mixing jam and cheese (even grape jelly and American cheese) on sandwiches to the abject horror of parents and kids alike.
I’ve taken it to adulthood with cream cheese and Peruvian pepper jam (just a light spread) on a savory bagel.
Nowadays, if you “pair” jam and cheese on a cracker instead of bread, you can avoid the weird looks entirely and even seem sophisticated.
Roasted cauliflower and chocolate. I like to dust coco powder in the last 3 min.
Raisins and anchovies.
Mushrooms and coffee.
Garlic, chocolate, and coffee.
Blue cheese and Dr Pepper. The Dr Pepper brings out the sweetness of the cheese and the tanginess of the cheese complements the sour of the soda.
Dr Pepper is the blue cheese of soda, after all.
Salt on watermelon, and salt on pineapple.
Also, cayenne pepper on anything chocolate - brownies, ice cream, etc.
I always squeeze some lime and grind black pepper on my watermelon. It’s great!
And some dehydrated lime and chili to that salt and you’ve really got something good.
Isn’t that basically Tajin?
Both of these are established dishes, so I don’t know if I could call them unexpected, but:
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Jalapeno chocolate fudge cake, tried on a whim at a restaurant. Thought it might be a disaster, but hot stuff and sweet (and fatty) stuff works surprisingly well together. I suppose that it’s kind of closer to how the Mesoamericans used to originally eat cocoa, which could be with chilis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_cuisine#Cacao
Chocolate could be prepared in a huge variety of ways and most of them involved mixing hot or tepid water with toasted and ground cacao beans, maize and any number of flavorers such as chili, honey, vanilla and a wide variety of spices.[31]
The ingredients were mixed and beaten with a beating stick or aerated by pouring the chocolate from one vessel to another. If the cacao was of high quality, this produced a rich head of foam. The head could be set aside, the drink further aerated to produce another head, which was also set aside and then placed on top of the drink along with the rest of the foam before serving.
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Five Guys does a milkshake with bacon sprinkles that I thought sounded like it could be pretty gross, but crunchy salty apparently works with sweet fatty as well. Goes somewhat downhill as the bacon looses its crispness, though. Be interesting if there’s some sort of waterproof coating that one could put on it. (“chocolate-coated bacon bits?”)
Chocolate and chipotle pepper go together very well too.
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Chicago corn (cheddar popcorn mixed with caramel corn). Sounds weird - is awesome.
Yes! This combo is awesome!
Garrett was our favorite stop on the food tour!
I don’t think that’s that weird. Ginger + sour kicks ass. Not much different from a Moscow mule really.
As for me somebody turned me onto salting my watermelon slices. Pretty damn good
Hummus and pesto. Just dump some pesto in your hummus and thank me later. You can buy both, obviously, but you can also easily make both from scratch so it can be super cheap once you have the core ingredients. It’s basically no harder than making a smoothie.
Bonus: basil grows whether you want it to or not, at least in most climates. If you have a spice garden, you kind of have to keep basil from dominating. But it also makes an excellent, cheap gift. When I was younger, I had a basil plant that lived for a few years and got huge and I just brought clippings instead of wine (or whatever) to parties. I saved tons of money and no one has ever been like, “Get the fuck out of here with that fresh basil.”
A fried egg on top of just about anything