Regional foods you once ate, but now can't get...

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Le Baron
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Re: Regional foods you once ate, but now can't get...

Postby Le Baron » Tue Feb 21, 2023 8:05 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:Slowly getting the hang of it. Sunday morning I brewed a cup of tea that reminded me of my trips to Ireland.

I've always had trouble getting tea in that style outside the UK/Ireland. Eventually it got to the point that people here thought I preferred coffee because every time I was out or at someone's house and they offered me 'tea or coffee?' I chose coffee. The real reason is that I couldn't bear to get a glass with tepid hard water and stuff floating in it, and teabag with paper like blotting paper. Much easier to just take the coffee which is at least well made.

A girlfriend of mine, without telling me, investigated tea-making English style and when I stayed at her mother's house she made me a cup of tea which was very good indeed.

At home I use loose tea, but as well as that the key ingredient is the water filter to soften and decalcify the water. It makes a hell of a difference to the flavour and appearance. I come from a soft water area and tea made with this water is like liquid velvet. Later I lived in the Ribble Valley area and at some point (though I don't know how far up it reached) they connected the north's water supply to North Wales, which is a hard water area. This itself must have been connected to a real hard water area and this altered the quality significantly.

Water where I am in Utrecht is not soft, but not overly hard. Without a filter it leaves magnesium/calcium deposits and makes the tea dull and a bit metallic. In north-west England where my grandparents lived they didn't need to filter the water and it left no deposits in the kettle. The tea was divine.

Tea in the East and south of England, where the water isn't filtered, is horrible.
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Re: Regional foods you once ate, but now can't get...

Postby zac299 » Wed Mar 06, 2024 2:37 am

Man, this thread had such high hopes but mostly turned into pining for long lost childhood familiarities.

Let's kick it off again and share some interesting/exquisite stuff you've personally encountered on your travels which aren't as easy to find back in your home base!

For me, top of the list of good ol' pastel de choclo. It's just about the national dish of Chile and you'll find it in any decent restaurant.

Sticking with Chile for a moment, we then have the "mother's home cooking special" known as charquican. In incredible home-cooked beef mince stew with corn, potato, peas, onions, some chilli, cumin and a sh$t tonne of their own special paprika.

With luck, during my uni days, I shared a house with some Chileans, 1 a chef. He taught me a few of his country's dishes, but charquican is the one I return to cooking for myself every other month.

I'll come back and update this post with a few more examples in the next days when I have some more time...

But c'mon world travelers of the forum, inspire the rest of us with some unique foods you've encounters which would almost force us to close down our computers and rush to the closest restaurant serving the plate of food you've just mentioned.
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Re: Regional foods you once ate, but now can't get...

Postby emk » Wed Mar 06, 2024 2:43 am

zac299 wrote:Let's kick it off again and share some interesting/exquisite stuff you've personally encountered on your travels which aren't as easy to find back in your home base!

Hot churros dipped in hot chocolate sauce. Had 'em in Barcellona long ago. Nobody in my part of the US seems to have figured out the sauce.
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Re: Regional foods you once ate, but now can't get...

Postby jeffers » Wed Mar 06, 2024 10:25 am

One food that I once ate but which is now unavailable is the Amul tinned cheese which you would get all over India in the 1980s. The Amul dairy still makes cheese, but they don't have the old tinned cheese anymore. It was white, processed to the nth degree. It wouldn't even melt when baked, but just get harder and darker. Basically it was like plastic. But the taste of it in an omlette was something I just loved! One time in the late 80s, when I was back in the USA, my parents returned from India and at Christmas they gave me a tin of Amul cheese. Unfortunately they had already opened the tin and by the time they gave it to me it was covered in mould. I nearly cried! Now Amul makes a white cheese spread, which has a similar taste but isn't quite right. And their current cheese blocks are not the same either.

Another food I miss is Pepsi Kona, a coffee-flavoured Pepsi which was tested in a few markets in the USA in the late 90s. Most people thought coffee flavoured cola would taste awful, I think because they were expecting it to be like mixing milk with cola. But everyone I know who actually tried it, loved it. After around 9 months, the marketing people at Pepsi decided it hadn't done well enough and they pulled it from the market. When I could see it was disappearing I bought a few cases of 20 cans, and slowly drank them over the next couple of years. I have always wondered if I could make my own version somehow, but the only thing I've tried recently which is a decent facsimile is mixing the new coffee-flavoured Kraken rum with cola. It's quite nice, but as it's an alcoholic drink it's not something you can drink as and when you feel like it.
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