Fopinions February: Foods & Beverages

[extrapenguin]

Today's Fopinions February is for rheasilvia, on foods and beverages! For my opinions on beverages, please consult my icon. :P

Foods
I hate sweet things, so my favorite dessert is not having a dessert. Bar that, fruits are nice. Whenever I bake, I minimize the amount of sugar, so my various cakes etc are quite unsweet despite being what they are. (I don't bake that often, though.) Almost always the main course tastes better than the dessert. *g*

Tastes I actually like are savory and spicy, savory the most. I've listed my top 5 dishes elsewhere, but in general I like garlic, ginger, black beans, and various umami-tasting things. I also really enjoy the taste of meat, especially duck. I have on various occasions tried vegetarian/vegan food, but at least here it tends to be utterly lacking in umami/savouryness/heft in taste, so I'm not a fan. I love stirfries and rice, and find local Finnish food to be really bland-tasting.

Beverages
Again, I hate sweet things, so anything sweeter than orange juice is right out. Alcohol-wise, I like gin with tonic water or orange juice, which inevitably leads to bartenders being very very confused. Beer sucks. I hate coffee. This is the place where they revoke my Finnish citizenship. Water is nice, and I drink water with my meals.

My favorite drink of all is tea! Here, too, I prefer the more bitter ones to the tastes-like-water ones, and I'm not into white teas or any tisanes. I'm also not into oolongs, since they tend to be a bit too sweet. (When I speak of tea, I mean Camellia sinensis leaf infusions. Nothing else can compare to my one love.) I'm currently on an unflavored teas kick, and like Yunnan black teas, (incl. Fengqing Dragon Pearl), Assam black teas (which I should look at again, hmm), Zhen Mei green tea, and Lushan Yunwu green tea. I'm more into Chinese teas than Japanese ones.

My current tea setup is a liter-strong ceramic pot inherited from a great-aunt, plus a metal strainer to hold the tea leaves. At some point in my life when I will stay in one place for over a year I would like to own a gongfu set (explanation) so I can be a fancypants civilized penguin and impress any potential guests with my OTT tea obsession!

Comments

[krait]

Teeaaaaaa!! And food. Two of my favourite topics!

I've talked about my various tea preferences elsewhere, but I find it really interesting that oolong tastes sweet to you - I generally find it to taste metallic or smokey, not sweet at all! Whereas some assams have a sweetness under the maltiness that I actually like (because it cancels out some of the malt flavour, which I dislike).

Tongues are weird.

Also, duck is delicious and it is a crime that my country doesn't eat more of it/have it widely available! There's a Chinese restaurant in my city that does have two or three duck entrees, though, and they are one and all delicious. On the random chance that you're ever in my town, we will go there! More people should appreciate duck.

Tellingly, I also like lamb and goat, so "strongly meat-flavoured meat" is a definite trend with my taste buds. (I find white chicken meat incredibly bland and often dry, and only tasty if it's strongly seasoned or sauced. Your thoughts on it?)

[rheasilvia]

I love it when people talk about tea! I am also a big fan, although our individual preferences are somewhat different - which makes sense because our food preferences are also not much alike. It really fascinates me how the taste of foods is perceived so differently by different people! :-)

Interestingly enough, I also hate coffee and beer (which pretty much means my German citizenship is just as endangered as your Finnish one *g*), as well as the taste of alcohol in general.

I didn't know people drank so much coffee in Finland. Yeah, same here, too, although tea is also a strong tradition in some parts of the country. I think you would really like Ostfriesentee, which is a very strong and dark, Assam-heavy blend!

[extrapenguin]

I find it really interesting that oolong tastes sweet to you - I generally find it to taste metallic or smokey, not sweet at all!
It might be that I have only had the misfortune of tasting sweet oolongs! I've tried maybe 5 different ones, and one especially was super sweet. Or I conceptualize sweetness as tasting different? Tongues are weird, I agree.

Duck is rare here as well! Even Chinese restaurants only have two or three duck dishes. Very delicious, all of them. (Duck meat is also a freezer-section only meat here, if it's available at all.)

I also like lamb (well, hogget; it's rather large to be lamb anymore), but I haven't had the chance to taste goat. White chicken by itself is bland, but it is cheap and comes pre-sliced, so my lazy self is 100% content tossing some into the stir fry and seasoning/saucing it. Also, chicken legs on the bone are a fun experience, if only because I can pretend I'm a mighty hunter when I pick the meat off the bone. The way chicken is generally cooked here isn't that dry, though – when I think of dry, tasteless meat, what comes to mind is pork. That very often resembles the sole of a shoe.

[extrapenguin]

With tea, a large component of the taste is also the water! Finnish water doesn't have that many calcium ions etc, so it'd obviously taste different to limestone country water.

Finland is if not the top, then at least in the top 5 countries when measuring coffee consumption per capita. There's no real tea culture, beyond maybe in the very far East near the Russian border/in the regions of Karelia given away after the Continuation War.

[rheasilvia]

The water quality varies widely here depending on the specific city's water supply - fortunately I live in an area with excellent and delicious water. I used to work in a place where the water had an incredibly high calcium content (a single drop of water in the sink would leave a little crust), but we filtered the water before using it for beverages. Not perfect, but it does work. :-)

Coffee... I tried. We never managed to warm to each other. ;-)

The tea culture in Germany is regional, but very strong where it does exist - there's actually a tea ceremony, and the people from the East Frisian region actually have the highest tea consumption per capita in the world. Pretty impressive, considering the competition. ;-)

[extrapenguin]

a single drop of water in the sink would leave a little crust
WHAT WHAT NO WTF. How. I mean, I know how, but ... how. Was it considered officially legally drinkable???

I, too, have tried coffee, but it keeps tasting like how I imagine dishwashing water would.

[rheasilvia]

Oh, absolutely! We have high requirements for water safety, and the water is safe to drink everywhere in the country. In Cologne it just doesn’t taste good, because it comes from the Rhine (although it is of course extensively purified). So many people have water filters installed in their house, or use little Britta filters.

The horrid Cologne water is legendary though – it even has a hilarious satirical song that’s still very popular at Karneval – „Dat Wasser vun Kölle“ (The water of Cologne). Check it out (and ignore the scary Karnevalssitzung footage or it may traumatize you): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En-g9gLh1QM

Sung in local Cologne dialect „Kölsch“, as a response to a local politician responding to complaints by claiming the water in Cologne was good. They’re basically saying how everyone from the goldfish to the washing machine is asking god for water and all of Cologne is thirsty, because „the water is good, oh yeah“. ;-)

[chromemuffin]

Remind me to get you a recipe for this Chinese vegetarian dish that my parents make. It's savory and would do well with some meat (lol), but unlike other vegetarian food, it's just as tasty as regular Chinese dishes. Also, I'm allergic to a lot of stuff they put in vegan food, haha.

(The key to coffee is turning it into 70% sugar and milk, 30% coffee lol. Just kidding - I really hated it until a certain point in my life when I was literally nodding off at 9am and nothing but coffee would keep me awake (only later did I realize it was the non-drowsy allergy medication I took that caused this...:p). Now, it's part sugar and part brain chemistry being dependent on it, I suspect, lol...I really don't recommend it, coffee withdrawals suck.)

[extrapenguin]

Ooooohhh please do share once you dig it up! Especially if it's not tofu-based; I can deal with moderate amounts of soy, but not the amount given by using tofu as a protein source.

I was also told to start by taking milk that was flavored with coffee, then increasing the coffee concentration, but alas, I just puke up anything with milk in it, and due to psychological reasons from allergies and intolerances, associating coffee with milk would just make me hate it more.

[chromemuffin]

Ah, yes, it is a problem if you can't drink milk. I am mildly lactose intolerant, so I can't take actual milk in my coffee and suffered for it the few times I tried. I have to use dairy-free creamer.

I'll dig it up in the next few days! Strangely, I can eat a good amount of tofu, soy sauce, etc. but I am allergic to actual soy milk. I took one tiny sip once and my throat ended up itchy and swollen lol. You can put anything you want in this dish, but I remember putting vermicelli, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, and maybe wood ears? My dad likes to throw sliced fish cake in there too lol.