Also curious about things that are the other way around where they look really good but taste awful.
I frequently watch videos of people from outside the US trying biscuits and gravy for the first time. Every one starts with “I’m not trying that disgusting slop” and ends with “I want to eat this every day for the rest of my life”
Random pic from the Internet for reference.
This was my experience with poutine before and after visiting Canada. No one truly gets it until they’ve had it. The real stuff. Not shredded mozarella over fries.
White cheddar cheese curds/squeakers over fries with piping hot brown gravy poured directly over.
Now I live in Canada and eat it all the time.
Got a picture because that sounds awesome.
Edit: NVM I saw the other comment
I have not found a better hangover cure than biscuits and gravy.
Well, except moderation of course, but you know… the everything.
Hashbrowns covered in chili, cheese, and sausage gravy. Aka the waffle House smothered hashbrowns
Waho is almost cheating, everything there is great hangover and drunk food
Rendang
Used to eat it as often as I could when I visited southeast asiaThat plating in particular looks like a stainless steel prison toilet
That’s how it’s traditionally served.
Its in a wok.
One of the most delicious dishes I’ve had as a fan of curry though I’ve only ever eaten it at a Malaysian restaurant and not homemade.
This is a pretty normal aesthetic for food in South and South East Asia so it looks amazing to me…Seems like the appearance of food is very culturally subjective.
Is it easy to make?
I am by no metric an expert, hell I am barely proficient, as I found a recipe online after I got back from Malaysia, but it’s somewhat simple. It just takes a lot of time and a lot of ingredients that isn’t easy to find where I live.
That is the problem I find with a lot of more complex Asian dishes. It’s impractical to stock a bunch of ingredients for 1 meal that I otherwise won’t use for anything else. Obviously got soy sauce and curry powder though.
But I have loads of rosemary and sage as that grows in my garden. Goes nicely with roast potatoes.
I mean, it looks like any Indian or curry dish, in terrible lighting. I’m sure something could be added to make the color more appealing. And yeah, that plate looks nasty.
It reminds me a bit of the “mud porridge” that we liked to make in a concave tree stump in the schoolyard when I was in preschool.
For the looks good but tastes awful category I’d go with fondant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_ghanoush
Looks like slop, tastes like a party in your mouth.
Babar Ganesh!
So we can add hummus and… probably lots of other sauces / dips as well.My candidate might be guacamole, which looks like it could almost be toxic ooze at first sight.
Honestly a lot of Mexican food looks kind of rough. Molé sauce looks like something you’d have to eat during a fraternity hazing. Birria, looks greasy and almost violently red. Nachos even, are not the most appealing food. But they’re all amazing. So much flavor. The texture is exquisite despite appearances. Largely we’ve learned to maybe adapt our visual palates, I feel.
I honestly believe that the Mexican cooks invented the burrito because everything inside, especially mushed together, looks fucking gross. But if you wrap it in a tortilla so you don’t have to look at it, it tastes fucking awesome.
There’s a Mexican place that opened very close to me, and I’ve been a bit bewildered by the general lack of flavor in their stuff. Examples would be their barbacoa, birria, pastor, chicken tinga, and carnitas. Funnily-enough, they load up the spices in their ground beef, so that’s most usually my protein filling. 😕
I really don’t know quite what to say in trying to suggest to a Oaxacan-style restaurant that their meats need more spices…
Because you don’t speak Spanish?
Hablo bastante castellano, pero ese no era la problema.
The founders spoke perfectly fine English, but at least one of them seemed sensitive about the issue, so I didn’t pursue.
Next up is Steven Babaganoosh!
Right you are, Ken.
Tell them about today’s mystery fluid….
So good!
I once threw away baba ghanoush that was intended for dinner because I thought it was discarded remains. I thought I was being helpful, but I was not.
Kebab:
I do t know where you got that, but change place. Doesn’t look like kebab at all.
legit looks like a fat greasy turd, not sure I could physically go for it
Dude, that’s poop… from a butt.
Open up, here comes the airplane…
Not generally, but this one takes the turd.
This is a shitpost.
Most curries look like vom slop and taste HEAVENLY
Feel the same way about hot dogs and hamburgers. Must depend on what you grow up with.
What are you puking up that it comes out looking like a fully formed hamburger or hot dog?
Obviously not in a pedantic sense, just that they also don’t look appetizing on their own, it’s the flavor that’s associated with them that makes it work.
If we’re being honest a hamburger looks like a smashed turd and a hot dog looks like fluorescent factory meat.
Now that I think about it a regional American dish that comes to mind is the garbage plate (named aptly for being a hodgepodge of leftovers) which looks like someone unloaded on a tray of french fries part way through their colonoscopy prep and then blew their nose on top of that:
Flavor is suprisingly solid.
Another would be oatmeal which can taste quite hearty if done right but looks very much like snot in a bowl:
Garbage plate looks like the fucking Kennedy autopsy but I’d crush it
That’s interesting, and I agree. My parents didn’t let me eat hamburgers until i was like 15 or 17 and they reinforced this idea that they were just magically really unhealthy because places like mcdonalds sold them (i also met other
peoplekids who were given the same programming lol).They therefore looked pretty gross to me, and i remember at 11 y.o. telling my parents in disgust that I saw our neighbour eating a hamburger at lunch. It genuinely symbolised greed and disregsrd of health to me that much. I think that was probably the first time they realised they went overboard with the health programming.
Hotdogs are undeniably quite gross-looking if they’re the packet brought plastic-y stuff. But I LOVE THEM.
As for curry - I didn’t get offered it until I was 11 and it was a little hard to get past how it looked but luckily I was in the “I’m going to stop being a picky eater!” Phase. Nowadays the smell of food matters way more than the look, and curry is obviously perfect for that.
Hotdogs are fucking gross. Look and taste
I love em. Favourite food as a kid, the cheap packet ones. As a teenager I realised you can have authentic sausages of that length so I usually get those when I buy hotdogs, nowadays. Try and get a deli hot dog for instance, or bratwurst.
I had the same type of programming, that just because you’re grilling or pan frying some ground beef and egg, it’s somehow unhealthy. It is if you fry it in lard, but it’s just a beef sandwich. Don’t eat a ton of fries, maybe even leave some, and it’s really not very bad, calory-wise. Salt may be a different story.
Agree, hamburgers at least taste good even if at their worst they look like compressed excrement between buns. Hot dogs can often be flavourfully dubious while also appearing as artificial factory processed mystery meat, but there are definitely exceptions!
My guess is many users are American so it will be hard to relate to but at least we can acknowledge that the appearance of food is very culturally coded / subjective.
You can both be right
Absolutely! It’s important to remember it’s a pretty subjective / lighthearted topic and not to take it too seriously. I can definitely see how curries can be seen that way from a different perspective. There’s an interesting history that plays into these cultural perceptions, which may explain why other meat in ‘gravy’ dishes may not come to mind first for some – such as meatloaf and gravy which can only be described aesthetically as a spurt of diarrhea on top of a sliced turd.
There seemed to be a need for a greater diversity of foods being pointed out here so thought we could broaden the horizons of this discourse, make it a little more inclusive and maybe even learn a little something about how a perspective is, at the end of the day, just an arbitrary amalgamation (kind of like the garbage plate I posted above) of subjective views. Tongue firmly in cheek, of course.
Pretty much all seafood. Shrimp in particular tastes fantastic but looks like something you’d try to flatten with a shoe.
Yum, ocean bugs
Shrimps is bugs after all.
Oysters. Snails. Mussels.
Mussels look like tiny brains. I like them, but very often I pass on the brains.
Usually that is only in their unprocessed state though. You don’t put whole prawn and crab in a sandwich
In Nice there’s a kind of swisschard gnocchi that’s called merda de can (dog’s shit) because of its appearance.
Judge by yourself (image taken from here).
The shape can be different depending on how you make them, but it always looks a bit suspicious.
I think the dogs in Nice eat too much grass.
Invented in Nice, called dog shit in Italian.
“We’d never eat French dog shit!”
It’s not Italian, actually, it’s Nissart.
Oh cool, TIL. Haven’t heard of many different French dialects, historic or otherwise.
Damn that has to be amazing
If think it’s pretty good! I can’t find any where I live, unfortunately, I’ll have to try to make it myself one of these days. Chard is awesome.
Poutine tastes a lot better than it looks
I’m sure poutine tastes great but this picture just looks like a bowl of human teeth to me.
I thought it was mixed nuts. Like peanuts and pecans.
Maybe you should see a dentist?
Okay? Its not a bowl of nuts either.
Maybe you should see your nut guy?
For sure, but good cheese curds are amazing.
Do… do you smoke?
I can see how it looks that way. The cheese curds don’t melt the way regular cheese would. If the cheese curds don’t squeak, it’s not done right!
Looks amazing to me
Looks somewhat like cheesy chips with gravy
Looks nothing like chips to me, but it does look delicious. I love fries with cheese curds & gravy!
There’s a pie in that soup, isn’t there - digger?
Somewhere. Its not the best example.
I’m going to say Sviðasulta með rófustöppu. You take sheep head and turn it into whatever this is and serve it with a mashed orange beetroot and it’s A+ category food.
Jesuschrist, looks like the texture wasn’t applied correctly.
Sheep’s head, or sheep’s brain?
The former is fine.
The latter screams spongiform encephalopathy.
Spam. When it comes out of the can, it looks like a disgusting gelatinous blob. But when you cut it thin and pan fry it, it’s actually pretty tasty.Pretty much any canned meat. Ever seen a whole canned chicken? Although most canned meat doesn’t taste nearly as good as fresh. But there really isn’t a “fresh” spam. So I think it fits the question. https://c8.alamy.com/comp/CW0NEJ/luncheon-meat-on-plate-CW0NEJ.jpg
The first time my hawaiian friend fried the spam my mind was blown. No one I knew had ever cooked it, and we all thought it was nasty.
From Hawai’i here. I recently learned a new trick from a Filipino woman in regards to Spam: fry it until it screams. You put a thicker layer of oil in the pan and fry it until either the bottom side takes on a kind of yellow hue or you can hear a little whistle come out of it. This causes the fat to render and brings out the meat flavor in the Spam. Plus it gets crispier. Makes GREAT Spam musubi.
Spam, egg, and rice is a favorite of my kids (and me). Can get it at McDonald’s here. Also good on pizza.
Fried spam with some cheap yellow mustard was a regular Sunday lunch. Usually with some boxed waffle mix topped with watery mapleine homemade “syrup”.
Spam is great. Straight up looks and smells like dog food before cooking though lol
The dog thinks it looks and smells like dog food at any stage of the cooking process.
Vienna Sausages are similar. I love those things, but you have to rinse the slime off before eating.
I prefer spam to sausage on my breakfast sandwiches.
it’s also amazing fried on white bread and mayo.
Haggis
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Poutine
As a Canadian: fuck, no.
Poutine isn’t visually unpalatable in the least. It’s just fries with curds and gravy. Unless the kitchen did a total hash of the dish and fucked it up six ways to Sunday, there ain’t no way it looks bad.
It’s even better with extras in it, like pulled pork, wiggly bacon chunks, or chopped onion greens.
A good split pea soup, for sure.
Edit: and macarons look super pretty but taste…meh? Imo. Like if you were to imagine what Barbie food tasted like, it’d be a macaron.
I dunno who your macaron guy is but I’ve had some absolute bangers.
Agreed, Barbie is a meringue at best.
Yep, I was gonna post this.
Split pea soup just actually looks like literal vomit or diarrhea, has a very, very weird texture to it visually…
… but if you do it right, it just tastes amazing.
Dutch Pea Soup is the absolute best. My girlfriend calls it fart juice
Macarons are awesome. That light airy slightly crispy “bun” things plus the creamy middle. Based on the comments I wager I put a lot more emphasis on mouth feel than a lot of people here.
To be clear, you mean the French sandwich cookies, not macaroons, right?
Yes. Coconut macaroons are S-Tier cookies, especially when the bottoms are dipped in chocolate.
