Alison Brie: the new food thread

[Good Intentions]

you defeat the entire purpose of turkey burgers by mixing the raw meat with whole milk ricotta before grilling

I don't know how 'mixing delicious things in innovative and effective ways' is defeating the purpose of anything.

Of course, I'm about 5kgs (10lbs) underweight.

[jess]

I just got gifted 2 weeks of a CSA—veggies and a half dozen eggs—from a grad student I do some stats consulting for. YAY.

(Will do stats for veggies.)

[Thermofusion]

Guys, what do we make of this? This is important food stuff. Does Taco Bell lose some (or all) of its appeal when it attempts to create products that resemble actual food? Is this a welcome diversification of the Taco Bell menu and, indeed, the Taco Bell brand itself?

The ingredients: Eight new upscale recipes including herb and citrus-marinated white meat chicken and fire-roasted corn salsa. A Venezuelan chef with a "Top Chef" pedigree, whose creations each bear her signature. A "like it or your money back" guarantee.

Sounds like something Chipotle might be behind. Instead, it's the doing of Mexican-style fast-food mega-chain Taco Bell -- a brand that's undergone a recent rebirth.

On July 5, the Irvine-based company is scheduled to roll out its new Cantina Bell menu, which features items such as the Cantina Burrito Bowl, nationwide. The offerings, all with suggested prices under $5, were developed since October 2010 by Lorena Garcia, a chef featured on NBC's "America’s Next Great Restaurant" and slated for Bravo’s upcoming "Top Chef Masters."

It's an "industry-changing partnership," according to Taco Bell, which will offer customers their money back if they're less than wowed. The company, a subsidiary of KFC owner Yum! Brands, is set to begin introducing advertisements for the food as it prepares to launch it in its nearly 5,600 North American restaurants.

Among the new menu options:

Black beans that aren’t refried, flavored with onion, garlic, cumin, chili powder and more
Cilantro rice seasoned with onion, garlic and parsley
Guacamole, cilantro dressing and pico de gallo featuring fresh ingredients

[davy]

This can only be a good thing, right?

[elpollodiablo]

I'd be happy if I could get something nearly on par with the food at Chipotle at Taco Bell, being that there are a million Taco Bells and far fewer Chipotles.

[Thermofusion]

What I wanna know is: can Taco Bell be trusted with cilantro? Just the right amount of cilantro can add a nice pungent layer to your dish's delicately-constructed flavor-stack and (in Tex-Mex) balance out the smokiness of cumin, but add too much cilantro and the whole thing implodes into a cilantro-y rubble. There's precision involved. Is Taco Bell capable of precision?

[jebreject]

Is Taco Bell capable of precision?

In my experience, absolutely not.

[Thermofusion]

What about the menu development engineers at Taco Bongo?

[The_Tourist]

considering the fact that the exact menu full of the exact foods is made in the same exact way at a million location by one hundred million wage slaves makes me think that precision is the only thing taco bell is capable of.

that being said, my 7 layer burrito occasionally comes with an eighth layer of beef product.

[jm]

I'd be happy if I could get something nearly on par with the food at Chipotle at Taco Bell, being that there are a million Taco Bells and far fewer Chipotles.

From my view, it's the exact opposite.

[RoyBiggins]

I like to order the mexi melt at Taco Bell, I find that no two taco bells seem to make it quite the same way.

[jebreject]

considering the fact that the exact menu full of the exact foods is made in the same exact way at a million location by one hundred million wage slaves makes me think that precision is the only thing taco bell is capable of.

Yeah you would think that it would work that way but it doesn't actually seem to

[jebreject]

What about the menu development engineers at Taco Bongo?

They're on some next level shit, don't even worry about them

[jebreject]

By the way the job title is "gastronautical engineer"

[Greg Nog]

In my experience, Taco Bell's best stuff is generally slathered in layers of salty fat, with odd sauces and melted cheeses and goopy pseudo-beef.  When they've tried to go for freshness and subtlety (like the "fresco" menu, or the fairly-simple recent shrimp taco experiment), the drab staleness of their ingredients shines through, and it becomes disappointing.

I have no doubt that these recipes would be tasty in a normal kitchen, but I do not trust Taco Bell to actually carry what they're calling "fresh" ingredients.

Of course, I will always trust them on the unhealthy goopy fatty salty stuff, because it requires pretty much no subtlety to make 'em hit the most basic junk-food taste-receptors.

[YojimboMonkey]

re: cilantro, taco bell's pico de gallo nearly turned me off of real pico de gallo for good when they started putting it on the chicken soft tacos. I don't know if it's 'cause their pico sucks or if it was just the added ingredient that turned me off though. For the longest time I thought I hated pico de gallo until I had it at a "real" Mexican restaurant. And I'm not even talking about a real real Mexican restaurant, I'm talking about a small town Midwestern Mexican restaurant.

Oh man but that place was good.

[El_Josharino]

As far as the precision stuff, I'm sure that all of that stuff will be pre-mixed en masse, and they'll just take a batch of premade cilantro rice out of the freezer, heat it up in whatever manner they do so, and drop it on the prep table next to the regular rice that was made in the same fashion.

Now when it comes to how much of said premade rice to put on the burrito at the point where you the consumer places your order, then it's up to the dunces in the kitchen.

[Greg Nog]

If this is where we bitch about the lack of precision in Taco Bell menu items, I will say that a small pet peeve of mine is when I get a burrito that has a giant clump of one ingredient in like a two-inch sphere, rather than throughout the length of it.  Like, a bite that's nothing but rice, then moving on to a bite that's mostly bean, etc.

Of course, I'm well aware that this kind of thing is like complaining that it's raining and How Dare They, I Never Expected To Get Wet

[YojimboMonkey]

I'm talking about a small town Midwestern Mexican restaurant.

You know the kind of place I mean, the kind that puts the chips and salsa on your table and they have the white nacho cheese sauce you can order. This place had something called a "Cheese steak" which was basically like carne asada and onions and some shredded white cheese folded over in a griddled flour tortilla with some of the white cheese sauce ladled over the top and then topped again with pico de gallo. Served w/ spanish rice & refried beans of course. but holy crap it was good. basically anything doused in that white cheese sauce was aces.

[El_Josharino]

If this is where we bitch about the lack of precision in Taco Bell menu items, I will say that a small pet peeve of mine is when I get a burrito that has a giant clump of one ingredient in like a two-inch sphere, rather than throughout the length of it.  Like, a bite that's nothing but rice, then moving on to a bite that's mostly bean, etc.

Of course, I'm well aware that this kind of thing is like complaining that it's raining and How Dare They, I Never Expected To Get Wet

Yeah, I hate that nonsense too, but that applies to Chipotle, etc as well. Oh, here's the giant rice section of my burrito now, ooh, 2 big bites of steak here. That's why I've switched to getting bowls instead of burritos over there, things get mixed up a little better. Also, they tend to be a little more generous with ingredients when they don't have to worry about wrapping them in a thin tortilla.

[jess]

That is why the best thing to get at Chipotle IMO is the salad. I'm a fan of lettuce, black beans, veggies, chicken, pico, green salsa, corn and guac. Then I stir it all up and the salsas and guac kind of become dressing-like and make the vinagrete superfluous. Works for me, since I can take or leave the tortilla, rice and dairy products they use.

I noticed the other day at Chipotle that they finally started labeling the pinto beans as non-vegetarian (they are cooked with pork, and have been long before that label went up). I wonder how many vegetarians were less than pleased the first time they saw that?

[Ignatius]

I like that place where you watch them toss the burrito ingredients before the fold/burrito press. Oh man when the sour cream gets warmed up an bean
ed

[Thermofusion]

I went to Chipotle for the first time in three years a couple weeks ago, in Pittsburgh's Market Square, because the locally-owned Mexican place two doors down turned out to be closed for Memorial Day. Anyway I'm kind of on a temporary no-red-meat thing so I had three vegetarian tacos, basically black beans with layers of cheese, sour cream and guac on 'em. They were absolutely disgusting, but in a good way, in the way that a dish consisting mostly of layers of fat is pretty good. My date had a salad and it looked better.

I gotta echo Nog here, in that I think Taco Bell hits its creative stride when their concept items are impish pothead juvenilia like the Doritos taco or the now-venerable Crunchwrap. I'll remain skeptical about the freshness of Taco Bell's cantina ingredients until proven otherwise. I know this "citrus herb-marinated chicken" will be sodium apocalypse like all other fast food meat, but will the fire-roasted corn and pepper salsa and cilantro rice taste fresh? Or will it just taste like it came out of a squeeze tube?

Also Jimbo I am with you on that small-town Mexican joint white queso salsa stuff. I could drink that shit.

[milly balgeary]

I also enjoy the white cheese sauce. I think they use evaporated milk. But if I knew how to make it, I'd be dead in the ground, from a stroke and a heart attack simultaneously

[YojimboMonkey]

man I dunno next time I'm in the qcy I might have to skip the world's greatest chinese buffet and hit up some el rancherito, the sauce is calling me