Out of the Can: Senora Verde's Beef Tamales

The pale- and incredibly foul-looking cylinders of evil pictured above are the contents of a can of Senora Verde Beef Tamales,  directly as emptied onto a paper plate. Some of them retained their paper sleeves as the can was tipped, others slipped from them like vile giant larvae shedding their outgrown skin. They were supposedly packed in "sauce," but that proved to be merely a watery tomato-flavored bile with a thick film of bright red grease floating on top. The "sauce" was easily disposed of, but globs of the grease stuck sort of randomly to everything else (including the plate, my fingers, and the walls of the microwave when I heated up this mess at work.)

Fast and cheap beef tamales don't have to be bad. I've picked up packages of them at the dollar store that were pretty decent. But these...things...were hideous.

Despite the illustration on the label showing a thick meaty center surrounded by a layer of corn, the tamales that actually writhed from the can were much more heavily maize-based. It was difficult to tell exactly where the cornmeal stopped and the meat began, but it was immediately apparent when I cut through the center of one that the beef filling was little more than a thin line running down the middle of each flaccid cornwobble. 

Sometimes I get a product that looks terrible, but then redeems itself with an enjoyable flavor. Not so with these tamales. Eating them only made the experience worse. The texture was disgusting - slippery and about as resilient as melty gelatine - and the greasy globs that clung to everything gave a tallowy coating to the roof of my mouth. The tallow carried through in the flavor, but there were also backnotes of rancid corn and slightly "off" canner-grade beef with the overall sourness of tomato sauce that has just started to go bad.  I managed to eat two or three bites before tipping the whole pile of shit into the bin, which is two or three bites more than anyone should ever have to eat of these goddamn yellow turds.

.

Review: Farmer's Pride Pickled Bologna

Late last week, I got a heads-up from Steve Wood, who writes Connecticut Museum Quest, a top-notch Connecticut blog that is about so much more than just museums. He alerted me to a new product at Ocean State Job Lot: Farmer's Pride Snack Bologna (which just so happened to be featured in OSJL's "internet coupon" selection.)

Holy shit, pickled bologna! How could I resist?

Lynnafred found the jars at our local Ocean State. She picked one up - it was the size of a largish peanut butter jar - and peered at the "bologna" within: they were in the form of huge, fat Vienna sausages (and according to the ingredient panel, they're composed of pretty much the same stuff.) The jars were plastic and sealed with soft plastic lids, and as Lynnafred looked through the brine at the bologna she said, "Eww. These are grey. Are they supposed to look like that?" After looking at a dozen other jars, and finding all of them containing somewhat greyish weiners sealed within, we concluded that the answer was probably Yes, they are supposed to look like that. The coupon said that there was a limit of 12 jars per family, but we curbed our enthusiasm and held ourselves to the purchase of a single jar which, at $1.20, seemed to be a fair price.

Let me start the actual review by saying that I can not believe that Farmer's Pride pickled bologna is a regularly-produced consumer good. Every single component of this product screams "DISPOSE OF CHEAP SHIT!!"  The jars are flimsy plastic, the lids seem to be made of the same quality plastic as imported dollar-store toys from China, the labels look like they were run off on a laser printer. Most of the jars at the store had sticky label residue clinging to the non-labeled areas, telling me that these snacks were probably rejected by the company which originally contracted them, leading the manufacturer to hastily peel the original label and rebrand them for the "remainder market" (i.e. dollar stores and job lot joints like OSJL.) And then, of course, there is the actual bologna itself:

That is one nasty-ass piece of tubesteak right there. Check out the gradations of coloring, from a kind of brownish-grey at the ends to rather pinkish in the middle. I swear I used no filtering or image manipulation to change those colors - that is exactly how they come out of the jar. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to capture the true beauty of the grey lines that run from tip to tip on the wieners, especially where the meat was in contact with the sides of the jar. These things are truly ghastly to look at.

At least when we cut into the wiener we found that the grey color doesn't go all the way through - once you get a little way into the surface, everything kind of turns pink again. I guess that means that they're okay to eat. Honestly, eyeballs are all we have to go by for safety, because there are absolutely no olfactory cues here. No scent of spices, no aroma of meat - nothing at all except the pungency of strong vinegar stabbing at our nostrils like fleets of aromatic daggers. The manufacturer (Monogram Meat Snacks LLC, USDA EST 795) could not possibly have made the brine any more unpleasantly sharp.

And the wieners are just as unpleasant to eat as they are to look at. The texture is firm and smooth, but there is little flavor beyond the powerful vinegar brine, which is so acidic that it actually produces a burning sensation in the mouth and throat. And - worst of all to me - the meat leaves a disgusting tallowy film coating the mouth and tongue. These things are grossly misnamed - they should be called "Farmer's Shame."

As with so many other oddball snacks we've tried over the years, Farmer's Pride Snack Bologna proved to be pretty popular with the dogs, though I didn't dare give them all they wanted due to the acidity of the pickle (the last thing I want to do is spend an afternoon scrubbing dog puke out of the dining room rug.)

So there you have it. Cheap, shitty, only marginally edible, and obviously close to the end of its shelf life - Look for 'em at a dollar store near you - and pass them up in favor of almost anything else you find.




.

Loathesome People on Extreme Couponing

Screen cap from TLC's Extreme Couponing

Says Extreme Couponer Michele from North Carolina: "Yes, I'm a shelf clearer...You should have beat me to the store. Sorry! tee hee hee"

Beat you to the store?  No thanks. It would be far more satisfying to beat you to the curb, bitch.

Steaz Organic Teaz

Anytime something is spelled wrong on a label, I get thinking.  I wonder why the hell people can't spell things normally, for starters. And I never think "Hey, that's really clever," no, I usually consider pluralizing with a z or spelling things with an initial K instead of  C to be an irritatingly cutesy (if not plain stupid) marketing gimmick for something that probably sucks.

Allow me to present Steaz Organic Iced Teaz.

Steaz bottled teas are usually pretty good, for the record. I'm not talking about Teaz® here, I'm talking about the plural of the word tea. I've had their regular black tea and it's been good, and the white tea is good enough that I don't ask myself why I didn't make my own damn tea, but as soon as they're slapping pictures of happy tea farmers on the can and adding fruit to it, something happens. It gets nasty.

Steaz Organic Fruit Teaz come in six varieties: Green tea with Blueberry Pomegranate Acai, Green Tea with Peach, Black Tea with Lemon, and White tea with Pomegranate and Lime, unsweetened Green Tea with Lemon, and Green Tea with Mint. I'll be reviewing the first four here, because that's all I could find.

Where do I even start? I'll start with Green Tea Peach. The flavor was certainly that of green tea, but Dave and I found only the barest hint of peach flavor to it. Dave actually described it as, "Like someone walked a peach by it." And that's fairly accurate. The peach flavor was there, but it was more of an "essence" than a real "flavor." My mother, on the other hand, thought that it was "very peachy." She also likes things more subtly flavored than Dave and I, so maybe we're just the wrong market for theze Teaz.

The Green Tea with Blueberry Pomegranate Acai wasn't much better.  There was the typical green tea astringency with a vague fruit flavor there, but the blueberry and pomegranate flavors just sort of muddied each other together without letting either of them be distinct enough to really enjoy.  Acai might have been in the mix, but it was indistinguishable.

Next up was the White Tea with Pomegranate and Lime. My friend Jess was over when I cracked this one open, and I let her take the first sip of it. She described it as "Gymbag Tea." This time, the White Tea's natural flavor was overpowered by a flavor reminiscent of dirt, artificial limes, and something kind of soapy. It was such a completely nasty tea that I ended up dumping  it out, and nothing of value was lost. Everyone in the house who tried it had the same expression on their face: ( ﾟдﾟ)

The best of the ones we found was the Black Tea with Lemon, but even this was flawed.  The lemon flavor was completely out of proportion with the tea, and it tasted more like a blend of lemonade and tea than a tea flavored with lemon.  Props for the tea not being heavily sweetened - there was just a touch of "evaporated cane juice" to take the sharp edges off the lemon and tea, but not enough to make a sickly-sweet Liptonesque concoction - but otherwise still not what I was expecting.


.

Skittles Fizzl'd Fruits Candy

These are, in a word, nasty.  Salty and bitter, they're like chewing an Alka-Seltzer (which is no surprise, since they're coated with a thick crust of sodium bicarbonate.)

They were good for some quick and sophmoric humor, when I tossed a handful into my mouth and started foaming like some rainbow-afflicted rabid dog.  Seconds later, I was looking for a place to spit, since the briny mess was far too disgusting to actually swallow.  (BTW, multicolored foamy expectorate is nearly as amusing as "rainbow rabies," in it's own tasteless and sort of awful way.)

.

Dollar Store Nightmares: Butter Blend Spread Solids

I swear, the refrigerated sections of dollar stores are the nutritional equivalents of stepping outside Vault 101 in Fallout3. Check out this "spread," which we are led to believe is supposed to be analogous to butter:

"Butter Blend Spread Solids." The very name sounds like something wet and vaguely chunky that got caught in an industrial filth strainer. A quick check of the ingredient list shows that both "water" and "palm kernel oil" appear near the top of the list, and "butter" down towards the bottom, which should give us all a pretty good idea of the type of thing we're dealing with here.

Also, because my sense of humor seems to have stopped developing sometime around eighth grade, I laughed when I realized that their logo seems to have been borrowed from an an ASCII representation of a penis. 8===>

Dollar Store Nightmares: Circle A Ranch Homestyle Meatballs

"Meatballs from the dollar store," my wife said. "You have got to be kidding me."

But I wasn't kidding; I had bought a seven-ounce package of frozen meatballs at Dollar Tree and was trying to interest the rest of the family in trying them. My wife and daughter read the ingredients and opted out, but the dog - functionally illiterate - was interested. I admit the ingredient list was kind of scary: Mechanically separated chicken, chicken skin added, water, soy flour, beef, and then a long list of the spices and chemicals which comprised "2% or less" of the total. Heh. Mechanically separated chicken and chicken skin. These things are basically flavored balls of food-grade slag.

I dumped the meatballs from the bag onto a foam plate and microwaved them for about two minutes, following the package instructions. The results were interesting. Far from the neatly spherical, meaty-looking "serving suggestion" on the package, the meatballs were misshapen lumps that looked like they had been made by wrapping long ribbons of extruded pulp over on itself. They smelled fascinating: exactly like leftover KFC after sitting in the refrigerator for a day or so. Moist but not wet, and not greasy, the texture was firm and consistent though quite spongy. They were a little salty but rather inoffensive - overall, they just lacked any real defining flavor other than "leftover chicken."

I never did get my wife and daughter to have a bite, but the dog was quite enthusiastic and enjoyed most of them that evening, chopped up and mixed with his kibble for supper.

Fishy Delights 19: Sunny Sea Sardines in Tomato Sauce

Sunny Sea sardines are yet another in a long line of substandard tinned fish products I inexplicably continue to purchase at job lot stores.

We can start with the can. I just don't understand why companies stopped putting "keys" on sardine tins so they can open easily. Pull tabs are messy, and standard square cans have these small-radius rounded corners that can openers just aren't able to navigate well. It's messy and frustrating.

The fish inside are thick-bodied but short; the ends of the sardines don't come anywhere near the ends of the can, and there are only four of them, swimming in a salty but otherwise very bland tomato sauce. Oh well, I've had big sardines before and the size isn't necessarily an indicator of quality, so I was still willing to give them a fair try.

But then I popped a piece into my mouth and that was STRIKE THREE. The goddamn company left the scales on the fish. I don't have words for how much I hate that.

Sunny Sea sardines are little better than dog food.

Link:
Golden Beach, Inc. is the company responsible for this crap. Click here to go to their website, where you can see photos of other products of theirs you can avoid.

CK Cheeze Kurls

Lately I've had this wicked jones for cheese puffs. Bachman Jax are my faves with Utz such a close second they might as well be tied, but it doesn't matter; I just want a handful of them when I get home from work to crunch on while I get supper thrown together. So I figured I'd give the massive 10-ounce bag of "Cheeze Balls" from Cheeze Kurls Inc. a try. It was only a buck at Big Lots!

I'll get right to the point: These things are utter shit. Very little flavor, other than salt - hardly any cheese, but plenty of orange dye to stain your fingers (hurr hurr hurrrr). And they tasted...well, not "stale" exactly. Something worse. Kind of stale and wet. I didn't really chew them, I sort of crushed them between my molars until enough of them had accumulated to stick to each other instead of my teeth, and then I swallowed the collected bolus.

Now, if that mental image isn't enough to dissuade you from buying these filthy orange spheres, consider this: Not even my dog would eat them. He took one from me, delicately holding it in his mouth, then put it down in the living room and rolled it around the floor with his nose. Eventually, he got bored and pushed it under the couch.

I did a little research, and couldn't come up with a website for Cheeze Kurls Inc. I did find a couple of articles that mentioned them as one of the biggest maker of private-label snacks in the country. That makes me a little suspicious of private-label snacks.

.

Dollar Store Nightmares: Fake Sour Cream

By now, I really shouldn't be surprised at some of the crap I find when I'm bottom-feeding at the local dollar store. But this really wins the prize: a chemical soup masquerading as "Sourcreme." (Love the label: Unreal!!! Why would anyone be proud of that?)

I really don't get it. Not even the dollar price tag can make this slop appeal to me - especially since anyone can get real sour cream at the supermarket on sale for about a dollar (and it's usually a dollar all the time at some of the discount supermarkets like Price/Rite or Sav-A-Lot.) Just about any argument anyone can make in favor of buying this can be refuted:

• It's not cheaper - As I've already pointed out, the same quantity of real sour cream can be had at the discount supermarkets. In fact, Price/Rite usually carries Axelrod or Friendship - both brands which have no added thickeners or gums - just cream, milk, and culture.

• It's not non-dairy for the lactose intolerant - there's whey protein concentrate and nonfat dry milk in it.

• It's not lower in fat - in fact, a greater percentage of this slop's calories come from fat than in real sour cream.

This kind of thing makes me wonder if allowing dollar stores to have refrigerated sections is a good idea at all.

Palm Liver Spread

I'm a big fan of liver spreads and patés, so when I saw this interesting-looking half-pound tin at the Asian market for a little over a dollar, I couldn't resist.

There is, of course, a reason why a reasonably decent tin of paté weighing one-fourth as much as this can sells for more than twice as much, and it's not because Palm is a bargain.

Made with beef liver and some assorted fillers, the texture is coarse and granular - almost gritty - and the flavor is overwhelming and a bit urinous (perhaps some kidney got mixed in there somewhere?) A few smears on a neutral cracker was all I could take of this nastiness.

My dog, however, had no such misgivings. From the instant I opened the can, he was at my side, sniffing the air and scouting out an opportunity to have a taste. I gave him a little bit of the spread, and it immediately became his favorite food.

Two ounces of the liver spread, mixed with a cup of his dry kibble twice a day, ensured that the dog belonged to The Clean Plate Club for two days running. I've rarely seen him so fond of anything from a can.

Fishy Delights 14: Roland Lightly Smoked Sardines

Lightly smoked sardines in soybean oil with a bit of salt added. These are large coarse chops of pilchard and they really aren't worth even the piddling 90 cents I paid for them at the job lot store.

The huge size doesn't bother me, nor does the minimally-cleaned abdominal cavity. I can overlook the soft-cooked bones that bristle from the cut surfaces. But even though the flavor of the fish is decent, with just the right amount of smoke and maybe a touch too much salt, the goddamn fish still have the scales on. I loathe unscaled sardines, and there is no excuse in the world for it.

Brunswick has proven that large sardine cuts can be sold without any loss in quality at all. There isn't any reason why the same can't be done by Roland.

Mr. Sprinkles

How to ruin a little kid's dessert: Invite a clown named Mr. Sprinkles to come and leave his spoor all over the kid's ice cream.

A&W Float

Cadbury-Schweppes Americas Beverages (CSAB) owns A&W Root Beer, along with more than twenty other famous beverage brands. Recently, they've introduced "Floats," a drink that is supposed to be "everything a real ice cream float should be," according to their advertisement. CSAB says on their website that "The Floats concept was one of the highest scoring product ideas from our Discovery Innovation Group. This group is challenged to find and create new product ideas across our brand portfolio."

Apparently, the Discovery Innovation Group is facing a challenge for which they are not prepared: the A&W Float beverage is such unmitigated swill that I am stunned that it was ever given a green light.

The label claims that it is "a creamy blend of rich A&W and ice cream flavor," but there is nothing - absolutely nothing - about this flat, watery dung-colored slurry that can be considered "creamy," "rich," or even remotely reminiscent of ice cream. The very name of the product is a lie, but who can blame them for that? After all, if they wanted to be honest about it, they would have called it A&W Brown Fluid Left In Your Glass Overnight After You Drank Most Of Your Float And Then Dropped A Couple Of Ice Cubes In It To Melt Overnight And Make It Even More Disgusting. If they had done that, however, they probably wouldn't have sold very many of them.

Here are some highlights:

• Hardly a delight to the eye, A&W Float pours into the glass as a thin, watery, greyish-brown opaque liquid, about as appetizing as scooping a ladle of water from a mud puddle.
• The level of carbonation is bizarre. It's nowhere near fully carbonated like a soda pop, but it isn't uncarbonated like Kool-Aid. It's much closer to what your drink would be like if you shook it up, let it foam off, and then sit open overnight. It goes beyond "flat" to just plain unpleasant.
• Artificial flavors and skim milk do not equal ice cream.
• The label actually lists nitrous oxide as an ingredient to help make the drink "foam." That's just stupid. No matter how I poured it - including ways that were recommended on the package - there was no "foam" involved other than a thin layer on top that was meant to resemble melted ice cream, I guess.
• It costs about $1.50 for an 11.5 ounce bottle. Yeah. 11.5 ounces. The company has to skim half a lousy ounce from the standard so they can squeeze out a few extra bucks.
  

I guess if I were really pressed, I could come up with a couple of good things to say about this stuff.

• They use sugar to sweeten it (no high-fructose corn syrup.)
  

Well, I guess I could only come up with one good thing to say about it.

Links:

The Floats website.
The A.V. Club hates it as much as I do.

Hebrew National Breakfast Sausage

My local supermarket had Hebrew National's new Beef Breakfast Sausages on sale, and the manufacturer was trying to drum up interest by sticking an "instant coupon" on the front of the box for $1.00 off. So I decided to give them a try.

I have certain expectations when I buy breakfast sausages. They should taste of coriander, sage, thyme, and paprika, for example. They should be at least a little spicy.

I don't know what the hell Hebrew National was thinking when they developed these things. I bet they don't know, either. The primary flavor is salt. The secondary flavor is "cheap shitty hot dog." They're pretty damn disgusting.

They don't even look like breakfast sausages. Oh, when you open the package they're the right size and shape. But they're red. As they cook, they look less and less like breakfast sausages and more and more like hot dogs. Because that's what they are. Hot dogs. Crappy little scale-model hot dogs that taste like salt and old grease.

I'm really glad I didn't have to pay full price for these.

Hebrew National should be ashamed of themselves for this, but because they're just another division of ConAgra these days, they're probably not ashamed. They're probably pointing and laughing at the idiots like me buying their so-called "sausages."

Link:

Hebrew National's website.

.

The Worst Canned Tuna In The World

Ace of Diamonds brand Chunk White Tuna (Albacore) in Water is the most disgusting canned tuna I have ever tried.

Made up of tiny bits of tuna suspended in a thick, gummy, translucent liquid, it was impossible to properly drain. So thoroughly was the fish blended with the fluid that it could not even be squeezed out, leaving me with a wet, vomitous mass of tiny tuna-shreds in a vile gummy bolus.

Worse yet, I've got eight more cans of this slop in my pantry. I'll probably end up using it for tuna wiggle, or creamed tuna and peas on toast, or some other casserole-type thing where cutting down on the other liquids will compensate for the slop this garbage is packed in. But this nasty shit is completely useless for tuna salad.

.

Beer + Clamato = WTF

I was at the package store, buying vodka for Jello Shots, and they had these "Cheladas" on the counter by the cash register. I guess they were hoping for someone to pick them up on an impulse buy. I asked the guy at the register about them, and he just laughed. "I put them there hoping someone would want them out of curiosity," he said, "They taste really bad. Plus everyone sees Clamato on the label and they're like 'Man that shit's nasty.'"

Rumor has it that "Cheladas" are popular with Latinos, but we have a pretty sizeable Hispanic population around here and none of my Latino friends has ever tasted a Bud Chelada. I wonder who the hell ever thought that this would be such a popular product that it had to be produced commercially. There are two main things wrong with it:

• Budweiser (and Bud Light) are not, despite all the money they pour into marketing, "premium" beers. They're lowest-common-denominator suds which, by virtue of brand identity, are able to command a slightly higher price for quality and taste that is not all that much better than Pabst Blue Ribbon.
• Clamato is, all by itself, fairly disgusting. Originally made by Mott's, it was once upon a time a decent drink - tomato juice, clam broth, a touch of seaoning - that made a killer Bloody Mary (called a "Clammy Mary" around here, or a "Caesar" in Canada, eh.) But those days are gone forever. Mott's was bought out by Cadbury-Schweppes in 1982, and now Clamato is made with tomato juice, "clam powder," and high-fructose corn syrup. It's not the same drink, and it doesn't taste the same.

The actual Budweiser Chelata Experience far exceeded my horrific expectations. For starters, the color is a bloody-phlegm pinky/amber. Kind of translucent, with tiny suspended reddish particulate (Bud says the can should be gently spun between your palms before opening to mix the sediment with the beverage.) There's no head. In fact, there's very little carbonation; it's a lot like soda pop that's been left in an open cup overnight. I have to admit that the smell is a little enticing: a bit briny, a bit tomatoey, a bit yeasty. So I took a sip.

Big mistake. The mouthfeel is thin and watery. The flavor is vomitous: reminiscent of rotted tomatoes in a salt flat at low tide. Gah. Horrid. I'd almost be willing to eat a bite of dogshit just to get the flavor of Chelada out of my mouth.

'Man that shit's nasty.' Yes, that sums it up quite tidily, I'd say.

Tastes Like...What?

It doesn't taste like butter. It tastes like salt and slightly rancid vegetable oil with just a hint of that sour smell babies make when they spit up.

Pampa Vienna Sausage In Beef Broth

I'm a sucker for strange-looking canned foods at the job-lot store. Sometimes it works out pretty well. Other times...well...

Take Pampa Vienna Sausage, for example. Usually, vienna sausage isn't that bad. It's not gourmet food, but it's passable for a quick lunch if I'm stuck at my desk, working a flea market, or out fishing. So when I found this big 400g can of Brazilian-made meatsticks at the local job-lot, I gambled a buck and bought it.

The label claims that "MEAT USED IS 100% BEEF." That might be true, but that doesn't guarantee goodness, either. The sausages are somewhat haphazardly tumbled into the tall can and topped with a rather thick sort of broth. They're redder than American-made viennas, and kind of bumpy and irregular, which is kind of strange when you're used to the pale, glistening, uniform cylinders produced by Armour and Libby. But it's the texture and flavor that really sets these apart.

You know how, when you set a bowl of Jell-o into the refrigerator without a cover, the gelatine develops a tough, membraneous skin? That's what these sausages are like right from the can: an al dente leathery "skin" contiguous with a somewhat grainy interior. There is an unusual and almost off-putting mouthfeel to these. Combined with the slightly rancid flavor, I can wholeheartedly recommend that you do not fail to leave these on the grocer's shelf should you ever encounter them yourself.

Fishy Delights 5: Crown Prince Yellow-Box Sardines

Crown Prince's sardines in the yellow box (marked Sardines - Lightly Smoked - In Oil) must be Crown Prince's bottom-of-the-line junk fish. They were a disappointment from start to finish:

• The can has a pull-tab opener. Halfway open, though, the top often freezes -it just stops opening. From there on, it's a struggle until the lid finally surrenders, popping off with a snap and spraying fishy soy oil everywhere (thankfully, both times this happened to me the oil didn't slosh anywhere. That would have been a lot worse.)
• Are these really sardines? They're huge!! They look like the midsections cut from mackerels. They're so big there are only three in the can.
  
• THEY LEAVE THE SCALES ON! Auuuggggh! Seriously, how goddamn lazy or careless does a company have to be to do this? I don't know anybody who eats fish scales. They feel disgusting in the mouth and they make me gag. It's fucking sick. Yet there are a handful of crappy sardine brands that still insist on packing their fish unscaled so you have to rake the damn things off with your fork. And Crown Prince is one of them.
  

Crown Price yellow-box sardines suck.