True, which is a shame since tripe is actually pretty good if it’s cooked and seasoned properly. My SO is Hispanic and I always look forward to when she makes menudo, with tripe and chickpeas being the stars of the dish.Well, McD's already puts out the McRib every year, and nobody really knows what's in that, soooo...
I remember a few years back, Taco Bell tried to be a little innovative and a tad more "authentic" with the "Cantina menu"... they had soft-shell tacos, with real meat (chicken or beef, and not that beef-paste-whatever-it-is that they typically use), with cilantro and onion and some specialty sauces... they were actually pretty good...
It didn't last very long... apparently most Americans thought it "tasted weird" 🙄
If Taco Hell were to try tacos with lengua or tripe, hell, I'd try it... but I doubt most of mah fellow Amer'cans are quite that adventurous... yet...
Make offal more popular in the USA
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You know, I've never had menudo before... but I have had pho with tripe at a couple of our local Vietnamese places...
Well there we go, making pho and menudo more popular than they are currently would help meet the challenge here.
Menudo is really good if you get the chance, it’s really flavorful and the tripe takes on the flavor of the spices you put into it.
Pho is amazing too. I’m biased though due to the Vietnamese diaspora in my city having so many around.
Nephi
Banned
I would love to be able to get chicken livers from McDonald's. I bet they'd be better than the nuggets. And healthierish.
Nephi
Banned
Well, McD's already puts out the McRib every year, and nobody really knows what's in that, soooo...
I remember a few years back, Taco Bell tried to be a little innovative and a tad more "authentic" with the "Cantina menu"... they had soft-shell tacos, with real meat (chicken or beef, and not that beef-paste-whatever-it-is that they typically use), with cilantro and onion and some specialty sauces... they were actually pretty good...
It didn't last very long... apparently most Americans thought it "tasted weird" 🙄
If Taco Hell were to try tacos with lengua or tripe, hell, I'd try it... but I doubt most of mah fellow Amer'cans are quite that adventurous... yet...
Oh yeah that was the only time I actually liked their food I didn't know they'd get rid of the cantina bowl. I think they still have that.
Real Mexican food IS the best, cheek meat tacos. So good! Put the cilantro and the onions on there. Oh man.
Nephi
Banned
Lambshanks had a stigma? That's weird, I know that the butlers cut steaks did but hammer that flat, oh damn.
Can still get livers from some of the KFC's...
Don't know if they have Chester's Chicken in your area (they're usually at truck stops around here), but their livers 'n' gizzards are pretty good...
They might still have the bowls, but the tacos unfortunately didn't last very long...
Always annoys me that I always have to ask for onions at Taco Bell... even semi-Mexican food with no cebolla is just wrong
Extensively process them and don't advertise their inclusion in your brand of hot dogs. "100% all beef [liver] hot dogs"
The number of Americans who are disgusted to know that good sausages are still made with intestines indicates that it will work.
Nephi
Banned
I've never heard of that and KFC doesn't here. Oddly. But gas stations do, and I can get battered and fried chicken hearts at one. Thats how I know how amazing they are.
Riain
Banned
Yeah sort of, I've heard people say they were dog meat back in the day. Certainly they aren't a leg or shoulder roast and have to be stewed for best results. I used to work in restaurants where they were served, they're cheaper than other cuts and take more work to prepare.
Damn, I've got a hankering for lamb shanks right fkn now! And pork knuckle too!
Yeah, I love food- and cuisine-related threads, but they always make me hungry....
Nephi
Banned
Me too, I love all that yeah they got to be cooked slowly but oh my when they are. They can be so good.
America is ranching country. There’s no way organ meats maintain popularity. Cattle was easy to raise in massive numbers compared to Europe. Cattle were moved in massive herds to the marketplaces.
And American cooking isn’t conducive to organ meats either. They require different cooking stiles.
Slightly related. Why are Americans so disgusted by brains? I loved scooping it out with a spoon from a well roasted head.
And American cooking isn’t conducive to organ meats either. They require different cooking stiles.
Slightly related. Why are Americans so disgusted by brains? I loved scooping it out with a spoon from a well roasted head.
Squick factor.
Now, I will eat, or try, damn near anything... but even I gotta draw the line somewhere
No brains, no gonads... just one of those things.
Now, there are Americans who don't have that squick reflex when it comes to brains... you can buy pork-brains-inna-can in most places, get brains-and-eggs for breakfast at a few restaurants... my grandfather rather liked brains'n'eggs...
Also I've heard there's some places in the Midwest where brain sandwiches, made from pork or calf brain, sliced thin and fried, remain popular...
I think this is doable, but it kinda depends on what you define as being offal in that it is probably going to be easier to get things like the "mainstream" organ meats like liver into a level of higher popularity than the more fringe things like, say, brains, "oysters" and "bull sausages" because of the sheer strength of the squick factor in play. Something like liver is pretty low hanging fruit (ie, liver and onions is pretty well known even if not that commonly eaten nowadays) and kidneys are probably the next easiest, as you've got steak and kidney pies over here in the UK that show a pretty good way to get it across the line into a more mainstream form of food. Stomachs seem harder (perhaps the presence of a large Scottish immigrant community in the USA manages to establish haggis as a Scottish-American food?), but the hardest organs are going to be the ones people just find weird; I'm not sure how you could get eating brains into the mainstream (maybe you could get a short lived phenomenon of it from something like a far more popular Dawn of the Dead, but I doubt it), but things like intestines, trotters and tripe are going to be an even harder sell.
I think you could potentially get a sort of PoD to get this into the food culture of the USA during something of a major economic downturn/agricultural production problem (a question I leave to others more familiar with the details of American history to figure out) where larger and larger amounts of the population are willing to buy cuts of meat that they might've never considered in order to get themselves at least some kind of protein on the table. You'd need that time period to hold long enough not just for people to start to get used to the idea of eating organs (and for their children to get used to eating organs) but also to allow the popularization of the stuff in cookbooks and the like, which'd be how you break it into the mainstream. A lot of different cuts of meat as a whole can end up being proper naff if you've got no idea what to do with them, but give them a good amount of seasoning, the proper herbs and spices and the right cooking method and they come alive. The same thing holds true to offal, which a lot of people wouldn't know how to cook properly so they'd be stuck in the dreary grey phase either til they stop having offal (and probably never touch the stuff again) or til they figure out how to cook it in a way that lifts it up and shows what it can do.
It's that second one that you need. If you can get that off the ground, you've got better chances of seeing the stuff break out. It'd never be enormously popular (I don't see Kentucky Fried Trotters or Liver King becoming a thing), but it'd still be far more popular in that timeline than in ours. Probably. Does anyone have any statistics on the amount of offal getting eaten nowadays?
Midlander from the UK: they're nice, but finding good ones can be an absolute pain in the backside. They're the kind of thing you need to go to a butcher for rather than just trying to buy frozen (which tend to have weird amounts of breadcrumbs in them and can make them look like a very sad teabag), but all the butchers around here are really, really dodgy. Like, using sauce to hide the fact that meat has gone bad levels of dodgy. They're nice, but they ain't playing Russian roulette with food poisoning nice
Probably easiest would either be another Great Depression or potentially somehow getting a major years long 3rd world war that is conventional and doesn't lead to much nuking in the US but does lead to rationing for at least a few years with most of the "good Meat" going to the troops and the civilian population of CONUS (at least the ones that go to a butcher or super market versus shooting critters) reduced to eating less desirable cuts.
In either case you'd have a newer generation who think of something like Liver and Onions or Grilled Kidneys as being a special treat in their childhoods instead of a major uck.
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