I knew an Italian exchange student that kept whining that nothing tasted good and nothing tasted as it should up here in Scandinavia. Then another exchange student (from Thailand I think) got tired of him and told him ~“the rest of the world isn’t your mother” and it was a literal moment of realisation for this dude.
Wow, a rare good tasteful Your Mom remark
the rest of the world isn’t your mother
Nah but it’s way closer than it should be
Zing!
I’m Dutch and I think this map is completely unfair. It overrates our food significantly
The Dutch chartered an enormous company to trade spices, but never used them.
That’s just common knowledge, dealers never dip into their own product.
As a Belgian, I agree!
I wholeheartedly support culinarily disrespecting Italians, honestly.
Dudes trying to convince us that they are presenting ancient traditions when their precious dishes are invented in like the 60s
Also, many times they will say some isn’t an authentic way to do something, and then you will learn it is authentic for like, a few towns over.
You should see how Italians debate their own food when two of them are from two different towns. It’s bloody epic!
Cappelletti vs Anolini probably caused a few deaths
Dudes trying to convince us that they are presenting ancient traditions
Ancient traditions
Look inside
Post Columbian exchange vegetables
Post-columbian fruit is underselling just how new at least posts of it are. Carbonara was invented by US soldiers in the 1940s, literally made using bacon and powdered egg from their rations.
Tiramisu is unclear, but 1939 seems to be the earliest of the possible candidate, the earliest actual document is from 1969.
Pizza as we know it today was reimported from the US.
I love Italian food, but it’s much less traditional than people pretend.
tourist traps are everywhere. nevertheless Italian cousin remains top notch. fact
Must be a freak in the sheets.
Spain and Portugal should be tier 1 or 2
Madrid’s food scene is amazing
Also no way Switzerland beats France here. Italians 100% prefer french food than Swiss food.
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.
cubed Water
Ice blocks??
I, too, am really curious about the cubed water.
Maybe ice is simply more available than liquid potable water in Finland.
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
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 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.
Tbh I find Italian culinary traditions underwhelming. Like they just gave up 10 minutes in, no work at all because it’s too hot.
To be fair, the further from coastline, the better the Italian cuisine - more herbs, more variety, more complex recipes (e.g Ligurian braised rabbit)
I saw a really good documentary recently, hell if I can remember the name. It covered actual Italian historical dishes. They were explaining that most of the really old stuff was region specific. Like one dish in one area had nothing to do with the same dish in another area. They actually went through kind of a food reimagining or Renaissance after one of the wars. Basically they were saying that pizza as it is now is not that old. Prior to the rush into America they had flatbreads that kind of but didn’t really approximate pizza, and it wasn’t until the Italian Americans repatriated that they started honing what they consider they current concept of pizza.
The concept of nations as well as their culture and cuisine are relatively young. Medieval cuisine was both highly local and also quite similar across a shared biome.
Italians have a couple of great hits and a lot of duds.
I feel like France, Greece, and Spain are gonna have some pretty strong objections.
RIP Portugal
Well, I’m from Northern France, and “fattening” is kinda accurate. Still tasty tho
You know what’s strange. I can buy French cuisine, Mexican cuisine, Canadian cuisine, I can even find elements of UK in Germany
I’m not even aware that Spain has a cuisine. I just looked up the entry on Wikipedia and I’ve never seen any of those dishes really.
Chorizo, tapas, and paella are all pretty popular and well known.
I should have included Greece on that list, it’s food is more well know in North America.
I assumed chorizo was Mexican, I’ve actually made that before.
I’ve had paella but it was on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.
I’ve heard of tapas but I’ve never actually seen it.
I’m not really an expert.
Tapas are like dim sum, a category of sharable appetizers, rather than a specific dishOK, Kudos to you. After your post, I looked up Tapas recipes, realized that I had enough on hand to make a few, and tested them on the fam. I managed to impress both the wife and the 7-year-old.
Tapas is genius way to charge people a lot for not enough food.
Bro youve just described appetizers in general 😭
Not from someone from the South-East of France.
Cannes and Nice are apparently the only places in France with real food 🤣
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.
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.
Lovingly described! Thanks for the tips.
As someone who’s lived Italy, this does sound like something an Italian would say lmao
Food in Portugal is delicious
Spanish and Greek food beats Italian. Heck Polish food is way underrated. Also American pizza is better.
American pizza made by Italian immigrants. ftfy
This is Funny if you think about it because Modern Pizza originates from the USA and Pasta from China
Naples. Modern pizza comes from Naples.
That dish was then taken to New York where shredded cheese was used in place of the slices used in Neapolitan pizza.
Pasta on the other hand, does descend from a Chinese dish. Sort of. The Proto-italians actually invented some types of pasta dish themselves, notably the precursor to lasagna and ravioli.
If you wanna be pedantic, Italian pasta is actually the knockoff of Chinese noodles.
Also, Greek food is fantastic!
If you really wanna be pedantic, almost everything is a knocknockoff of something
Yes, it is, and, yes, it is!
u wot m8?
We’ve got Greggs Sausage Rolls.
All you’ve got is pasta and tomato sauce for every meal, and think different shaped pasta makes it a different dish!
That’s like thinking beans on toast is different if you put it on different shaped bread.
As an American who just had some glorious fake pizza last night, I thought I hated pasta until I had good Italian, and then I realized I just hate Americanized Italian food. Except pizza, we do it better.
Pasta still isn’t my favorite, but I’ll take it if it’s authentic. My SO makes some great aglio e olio and carbonara, often with shrimp.
As someone who makes pizza from scratch every week, I love all forms of pizza from fast food US pizza (like Dominos), to “drunk” US pizza dipped in ranch, to NY pizza, to Chicago deep dish, but what I make at home is always simple Italian pizza with just a few ingredients: dough, a sauce made from San Marzano tomatoes specifically canned for pizza with some salt, fresh oregano, mozzarella cheese, and olive oil. Sometimes I add a ton of arugula on top too. What’s nice is that pizza is also kinda healthy actually.
Wait can you explain the difference between Americanized pasta and Italian pasta? Isn’t all pasta just… pasta?
It’s very common in the US to just plop some pasta sauce on top of noodles for one thing… You gotta cook the pasta in the sauce real quick! If any American reads this and doesn’t do that I promise that tiny change will already improve your pasta experience.
You’re obviously not Italian…
Starting with the pasta itself (not how it’s prepared), they use different ingredients. Italian pasta is usually made from high quality duram wheat, whereas American made pastas use a variety of flours, and usually includes eggs (rare with Italian pasta), which results in a softer cooked product. That leads to cooking differences, where Italians prefer firmer texture (al dente), whereas Americans tend to have it softer.
And then we have sauces. Italians usually keep it simple with a handful of ingredients, and Americans add milk/cream, sugar, cheese, or anything else that sounds good. Americans also go overboard on the sauce, so you get a lot less of the pasta flavor (yes, pasta has flavor, y’all need to add salt to the water).
And that’s restaurant quality pasta dishes. It gets wild when you look at what’s in those prepared meals in the freezer section.
I give pizza a pass because I don’t like bread much (yes, I’ve had good Italian pizza), so loading up on toppings works really well. But I just don’t like the mushy mess that is American-style pasta.
And then we have sauces. Italians usually keep it simple with a handful of ingredients, and Americans add milk/cream, sugar, cheese, or anything else that sounds good. Americans also go overboard on the sauce, so you get a lot less of the pasta flavor
What the fuck Americans?
(yes, pasta has flavor, y’all need to add salt to the water).
Wait do Americans not do that? In that case I have to thank Italian Reunification for giving the Middle East real pasta.
Most pasta in the US suggests to salt the water when you boil it, I don’t think many Americans do. My mother didn’t, at least.
This may be a result of the war on salt that came from heart disease concerns of the 80s/90s.
Yeah, a lot of people just toss the pasta in bong boiling water and pull it out when it’s soft. Sometimes they’ll add oil to stop it from sticking (due to overcooking already soft pasta), and they’re shocked when I tell them they need to add salt.
Starting with the pasta itself (not how it’s prepared), they use different ingredients. Italian pasta is usually made from high quality duram wheat, whereas American made pastas use a variety of flours, and usually includes eggs (rare with Italian pasta), which results in a softer cooked product. That leads to cooking differences, where Italians prefer firmer texture (al dente), whereas Americans tend to have it softer.
How many times have you had pasta in America?You have some good points with the rest of your comment but this paragraph makes sound like either someone over overcooked your pasta or incorrectly used egg noodles, which are totally different and for different dishes though they look the same at a glance. I would only use egg noodles in soups and stroganoff. I just looked through all the pasta I have now, purchased from Walmart, Costco, and all the normie places: none of it has eggs, a lot of it contains durum wheat/semolina flour, and a majority of it is 100% durum. Some of it uses the phrase “al Dente” on the box, and I can tell you with good confidence that that is one of the few Italian phrases that American non-italians will know.
How many times have you had pasta in America?
Since I’m American, hundreds if not thousands of times. I’ve had it at home, at friends’ houses, and restaurants. My parents aren’t italian, just bog standard Americans.
You’re right that store bought noodles don’t have eggs, and that’s likely due to the IPO definition of spaghetti (and other pastas) to only contain duram wheat semolina and water.
My point about eggs comes from recipes like this or this (first hits when searching “spaghetti pasta noodles recipe”) that use trash flour and eggs. So if you’re being “fancy” and making the pasta at home, you’re likely to use eggs.
“al Dente”
Your typical American understands that phrase to mean “undercooked” or “crunchy.” It really just means “firm,” as in chewy instead of squishy. The fact that the default doneness in the US is soft instead of firm, which is the opposite in Italy (if they even let you order it overcooked), highlights this.
I think this is so the sauce sticks better, because Americans like a lot of sauce. Both Americans and Italians will agree that the secret to a good pasta dish is the sauce, but in Italy that means a handful of quality ingredients to complement the pasta (e.g. simmering a ragu for hours), whereas in the US it means adding a ton of processed crap to thicken it (cream, cheese, etc) and drown the pasta flavor out.
🤷 I’m also American and grew up on pasta, and while you’re dead on about the sauce and unsalted pasta water, most people in my experience know that al Dente means “firm to the bite” and cook pasta properly enough, often enough that when it’s not I’d just assume it was an accident.
I’m being a bit hyperbolic here. My point, however, is that soft pasta is pretty common here, and people do complain about properly cooked pasta. Not often, but people tend to lean more toward the overcooked end of the spectrum.
For example, most boxes of spaghetti say 10-11 min cooking, whereas I usually test around 7-8 min and stop a bit short of 10min. This can vary a little by brand, thickness, and probably altitude (I live in the Rockies so I’m used to adjusting cooking times).
I’m not some angsty chef or something, I just don’t like overcooked noodles of any variety because the texture sucks. So I just generally avoid pasta for the most part. I don’t make lasagna because I’m not willing to spend the time to do it well, but I do occasionally make something like aglio e olio because it’s fast and easy to do well.
Most likely the difference between handmade pasta and dried pasta but that’s not a geographical thing
But Italians eat dried pasta… lots of it.
