I just bought a little beef jerky. Haven’t had any in quite a while. It was supposed to be spicy. What I got was something sweet, rubbery and gummy, with barely a hint of heat. (In the US) W.t.f.
When I was a kid, jerky was dry AF, thin, salty, tooth-rippingly tough sometimes, never sweet unless you specifically got a teryaki flavor or something. If you wanted spicy, it was covered in pepper and your mouth would be on fire after just a couple pieces. It was awesome.
Now it’s sugary and chewy. Why people gotta put sugar on everything? Can’t find that dry, thin, peppery stuff anywhere.
What food of yours has disappeared or been wrecked in order to appeal to more people?
Cadbury Creme Eggs were one of my favorites as a kid in the 80’s. Soft chocolaty shell, with creamy goodness on the inside.
Now it’s a chalky brown husk with a nasty grainy gritty paste in the middle. 🤮
Truth. Cadbury used to be great back in the day. I liked their candy shell milk chocolate eggs too. It’s crap now.
I’d go with junk food generically. While some of it has to do with changing tastes as I get older, most junk food has gotten so bad that it’s not even tempting. Now ice cream is trying to join that mess, but there are still a few brands worth enjoying.
On the other hand, Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups are truly amazing, in a way Reese’s could never even dream
We prefer the milk chocolate cups, but they’re both good. I think TJ’s has changed the filling formula a little sometime in the last few years. The filling used to be a little denser and faintly crunchy if I remember right. Now it’s very smooth. I liked the previous filling better.
Basically all of them at this point
Entenmann’s chocolate cake with the black and white frosting. You can still get chocolate cake but the icing is just not the same.
Drake’s Devil Dogs. There used to be so much cream filling that I could run my fingers down each side and still leave plenty in the middle.
Last time I had Oreos was about two years ago. They must have changed the recipe for the cookies because it tasted so bad — even when I dunked it in milk… If anyone lives in Japan, Noir is a way better alternative.
Cookie dough ice cream, without chocolate chips. Maybe it was a limited time thing, but I remember having this at an ice cream shop similar to Baskin Robbins in my youth. It was just plain vanilla ice cream with cookie dough in it and neither part had chocolate chips.
I get that I’m likely one of very few people this would have sold to. But, I really do wish I could have this again.
CHOCO TACOS
IMO ice cream in general has really gone downhill. The flavors are all worse and more artificial, the ice cream is lucky to have any real “ice cream” in it anymore, and it’s all areated or “fluffed” with air to reduce the actual amount in the carton.
We kinda laughed at some ice cream one of our kids had left partly unfinished and it melted. Well, sorta. The liquid (whatever it was) drained out of the remaining ice cream and we were left with this lump of rubbery foam sitting in a pool of whatever.
Probably one of the last decent ice creams that can be bought in a normal (not tiny Ben and Jerry’s or other botique priced grocery store ice creams) container is Costco’s Kirkland brand Vanilla.
Thankfully ice cream is something that can be easily made at home and the jump in quality makes it well worth it. Frozen drum type ice cream machines end up in thrift shops all the time, but are also under $100 new. I don’t eat any ice cream that isn’t home made now, it’s completely spoiled me. I use light cream, whole milk, sugar, my flavoring of choice, and add a little alcohol (the equivalent of a tsp of wine per serving) to keep it soft. I really can’t recommend it enough!
Ice cream nerd here!
Start by looking for “super premium ice cream” on the label. Super premium is a category of ice cream that will be 14-18% butterfat and no more than 50% air by volume (this amount is called overrun in ice cream manufacturing).
You also want to check ingredients as with all foods - real cream, milk and sugar, high fat content, high calorie content. Fat and calories = good ice cream.
Finally, pick the dang thing up. Is it heavy and dense? That’s a good sign. Is it expensive? That’s also a good sign. Good ice cream isn’t cheap and cheap “ice cream” isn’t good.
Kirkland is a super premium brand. I also like Haagen-Dazs, Turkey Hill, Ben and Jerry’s, and great regional brands like Jeni’s or Chocolate Shoppe if you have them.
This is my problem with American products. The standards are too low! Sugar is replaced with corn. The cream in ice cream is replaced with oil. Chocolate is replaced with unrelated fats. And it’s all legally allowed to be sold as what they’re a facsimile of!
At best, there are names like “chocolatey”. Bullshit.
My least favourite alternative that Nestle loves is just leaving what it is off the package. So here in Canada, it doesn’t say ice cream. It doesn’t say anything unless you look for the fine print.
But it’s in an ice cream carton sitting a metre away from real ice cream. This is false marketing by omission. If I wrote the laws, this would be illegal.
To be fair, at least currently (until the government fucks this up, too), to be legally called “ice cream”, it has to have minimum milkfat and butterfat percentages. Otherwise it has to be called “frozen dairy dessert,” or whatever.
Ice cream’s composition standards focus on dairy content, specifically minimum percentages of milkfat and total milk solids. The finished product must contain a minimum of 10% milkfat, also known as butterfat. This fat must be derived exclusively from milk; other fats are excluded, except for incidental amounts naturally present in flavorings.
The product must also contain at least 20% total milk solids, which is the combined weight of milkfat and nonfat milk solids. Nonfat milk solids, such as proteins, lactose, and minerals, must constitute at least 10% of the total weight. If a manufacturer exceeds the 10% milkfat minimum, the required nonfat milk solids percentage may be slightly reduced based on a defined inverse relationship.
The FDA allows for a reduction in these minimum percentages when bulky flavorings are added, such as fruits, nuts, or chocolate. In these cases, the milkfat content cannot fall below 8% of the finished weight, and the total milk solids must remain at or above 16%.
You’re right; I just don’t think the law goes far enough
Thanks for the pointers. I knew some of those, but the “super premium” is helpful.
Edit: just went to the store. No “super premium” available. :(
We used to get Trickling Springs Creamery ice cream from a local farm store. And it was really good ice cream. But, they had some problems and shut down. I’m not sure what they did to make the ice cream so good, but I’ve not found anything since which compared.
I’ve never heard of that or had that, but it sounds absolutely perfect to me. Maybe there are dozens of us.
Vanilla coke. The older version tasted like proper vanilla and now it tastes just bad.
when I was a kid I enjoyed sneeble’s pocket tarts. they had fun flavors like tweegy, slemo, and ptolemy.
I wish you could still find them, but for one reason or another they just vanished overnight.
Snelgrove’s burnt almond fudge ice cream. It was a revelation, and now it’s gone forever.
You might want to check if there’s someplace nearby that sells biltong. There’s a local butcher shop in my area that makes and sells it and it’s like the jerky you describe from when you were a kid.
I used to enjoy puffed corn snacks called Monster Munch. Apparently they’re British-produced and still available over there. An expat friend who goes to Gencon* every year likes to take a few packs of gherkin flavour Monster Munch to horrify his American friends.
*Maybe not this year… or ever again.
Healthy food.
Affordable healthy food.
Also on the opposite of healthy, I miss cheap grocery store lemon crème cookies. Fuck those lemon Oreo rip-offs.
I highly recommend purchasing a dehydrator and making one’s own beef (or other) jerky. You can get a good ehyrdeator for like $100 or so. The only downside is how expensive beef is, currently. That said, you’ll still save a massive amount of money per pound, and it’s amazing.
Hershey’s made a smores bar decades ago. Despite not liking Hershey’s at all, I loved that thing. Had the perfect ratio of chocolate, marshmallow, and Graham cracker, wasn’t too sweet, and it was easy to eat unlike the messy real deal. I still crave it from time to time.
Butterfingers used to be my goto, up until they changed the recipe a few years ago to be more nutella-like. They’re horrible now.
I still remember butterfinger bb’s, would risk diabetes for a pack of those right about now
I had one of my kid’s Butterfinger bars from their Halloween stash last Fall. It was awful. I remember that chocolate-crispy-peanut brittle flavor being so much better. Instead it was waxy sugar.
