Blog Archives
The Snack Report: Lay’s Do Us a Flavor Finalists Part 1
Yes, it’s that time of year again; when Lay’s hands their development department over to the public and lets us decide what their new flavor will be. Something I noticed the other day while in the chip aisle at the store is that the first two winners of the “Do Us a Flavor” contests were largely cheese based. The 2013 winner was Cheesy Garlic Bread and the 2014 winner was Bacon Mac and Cheese. Not that there’s anything wrong with this, but cheese flavored chips have already been around for awhile; sour cream and cheddar is a potato chip staple. Perhaps just out of chance, or perhaps out of conscious effort to not have another cheese chip win, there are no cheese flavored chips in the finals this year. Something that definitely seems like a conscious decision this year was to add location modifiers to the flavor names. This year’s finalists are: Greektown Gyro, West Coast Truffle Fries, Southern Biscuits and Gravy, and New York Reuben. Whether they did this to try and lend some sort of authenticity, to pit places against each other, or just because they thought it sounded good I am unsure.
Since there are 4 chips to review I decided to break this up into two different posts instead of making it one huge one. This week’s post will review the Greektown Gryo and the Southern Biscuits and Gravy.
Pizza Lab #33: Marshmallow Krispie Treat Pizza
There’s not a lot of universal truths out there. It’s hard to make grand, sweeping statements that are actually true. And most professional writers and college professors will tell you the worst way to begin a piece is by doing basically what I’m doing here, but hey that’s besides the point. Anyway, here goes.
I venture to say, every single person under the age of 50 has eaten a Rice Krispie Treat, in America. Really. Come on, how can you not have? They’re a snack/dessert fixture for everyone. For many kids, that’s their first venture into the world of cooking, due to the overwhelming simplicity of them. Three ingredients, no knives or sharp objects, very little heating, and no complicated cooking involved. Everyone has to have had at least one in their life at some point.
Naturally, it’s about time we turned them into a pizza, don’t you think?
Pizza Lab #32: Nacho Pizza
I think we can all agree that nachos (real nachos, not the kind from 7-11 that are just chips with fake cheese poured over them) are delicious. But they can be a bit messy to eat. Your hands can get dirty, and you can drop toppings anywhere along the trip between the plate to your mouth. Well, what if I told you that we have found a way to make nachos less messy to eat, but still just as delicious? Impossible you say? Nothing is impossible with the power of…pizza! That’s right. We combined nachos and pizza and came up with both the neatest nachos you’ve ever eaten, and also one of the yummiest pizzas.
We’ve been on a bit of a nacho kick lately here at PCFG headquarters ever since we discovered how easy it is to make homemade tortilla chips. That’s mainly where the inspiration for this pizza came from. There are some challenges, and always some risk when combining a food that stands on its own with another (lest we forget the Chinese food pizza, which to this day is probably our least successful pizza lab). But after some careful planning we decided on the best approach to this pizza, and it ended up working really well!
Pizza Lab #31: Tres Leches Pizza
We’ve come up with some crazy crossovers for our pizzas before. This pizza maybe one of the strangest. But strange doesn’t mean bad! The inspiration for this pizza was tres leches cake. “Tres leches” means “three milks” in Spanish, so as you can imagine, three milks are involved in the making of the cake. Traditional tres leches cake is composed of a sponge cake soaked in a combination of evaporated milk, condensed milk, and heavy cream after baking. Yet despite this, when done correctly the cake is still light and airy, not soggy. I’m not entirely sure of the origins of the cake, but I imagine someone dipping cookies into milk was involved somewhere, since it’s a similar concept.
How we came up with the idea for this pizza I’m not entirely sure; this was mostly Erik’s idea. But we both brainstormed out the details and execution. Obviously we couldn’t just have a mostly naked pizza that’d been soaked in milk. A pizza needs toppings. The original plan was to top it with dulce de leche. Dulce de leche is a caramel like sauce made from condensed milk. This plan eventually changed though, because despite the fact that pre-made, canned dulce de leche is a thing that exists, we could not find any in stores near us. And making it from scratch takes at least 2 hours, and quite frankly, we just didn’t have the time to babysit cans of milk for that long. So we ultimately ended up on plan B, which was to use our go-to caramel sauce recipe, which takes about 5 minutes to make. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself though…
Recipe Time! Chipotle Brownies
As some of you may know, I’m on a continuing quest to find ways to use up leftover chipotle peppers (the canned ones in adobo sauce). Even after using them in the original dish I needed them for, making chipotle butter, and chipotle ranch, I still had some left. It was time to expand my thinking. Since the combination of chocolate and spicy is a popular thing now, I turned my mind to dessert. Now, I may have mentioned before (though I’m too lazy to actually go back and check) that I’m not the biggest fan of brownies. I know, I know…I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But in this case brownies seemed like the perfect subject to turn to for my chipotle experiments. Actually considering I’m kind of a weenie when it comes to spicy it’s somewhat surprising that I’m the one who came up with these brownies. And that I actually like them! But the chipotle adds a nice subtle, smoky kick without setting your mouth on fire. So I guess the point you should take away from this is that if someone who isn’t a huge fan of brownies or spicy likes these brownies they must be really good. 
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The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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