Super Bowl pork-off

It's no secret I love to look into Super Bowl food.

In past years I've pitted Dunkin' Donuts' coffee against Starbucks', cooked special soup, and cooked foods from each participating teams' host city. In fact, for the last several years my wife and I have made an effort to try a new recipe representing each Super Bowl participant — clam chowder for New England and Seattle dogs for the Seahawks last year, for example. I just haven't always written about those cooking adventures.

That changes this year with a great combination of recipes representing the Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos. In the Panthers' corner we have Carolina barbecue boneless ribs, following a recipe from porkbeinspired.com, the official website of the National Pork Board (yes, this really exists). In the Broncos' corner we have a Denver green chile recipe from the Denver Post. 

That's right. It's a good old-fashioned battle of the other white meat. A pork-off, if you will.

Both I and the official wife of Rick's Food Critique prepared different parts of the dishes (although she ended up doing more of the work and therefore deserves more of the credit). Then we sat down to try them out before the Super Bowl. Here are the results. We'll see if they predict the outcome of the game.

Let's first start with the Carolina barbecue ribs. They weren't much to look at because we adapted the recipe from grilling to slow-roasting, but boy were they tender. They also came with a nice tangy zing owing to the combination of molasses, apple cider vinegar and cayenne pepper in the sauce recipe.

Boneless pork ribs aren't much to look at without grill marks, but the flavor is what matters.

Truth be told, I'd probably like a little more cayenne in these, though. They were hot but begging for just a little more punch. The sauce was also pretty watery, while I prefer a stickier barbecue sauce. In the future I might experiment with reducing it and adding some starch to try to bring out a bit more body.

Also waterier than expected was the Denver green chile. But that wasn't its only surprise. It proved to come out of the pot more red than green.

Despite the color, this really is Denver green chile.

Despite any color and consistency concerns, the green chile proved to be outstanding. The heat is there thanks to the five jalapenos. The pork is tender and flavorful thanks to a long simmering time and previous browning with garlic and onions. We tried it both alone and with rice to sop up some of the juice, and it was great both ways.

As good as our Carolina barbecue was, the green chile was exceptional enough to blow most foods out of the water. Four sporks for the barbecue and five out of five for the chile.

I guess that leaves Denver fans hoping my taste buds have predictive value and Carolina fans hoping I have no culinary crystal ball. Either way, enjoy the game!

The 2015 Super Coffee Bowl

There's nothing quite like a good Super Bowl-themed food face-off, and this year's big game is perfect for a java joust.

Two of the country's biggest coffee brands come from the cities that are squaring off in this year's football game to beat all football games. Seattle and its Seahawks have their Starbucks. Meanwhile New England and its Patriots have their Dunkin' Donuts, a company based in Canton just outside of Boston.

I don't pretend to be impartial when it comes to these coffees. Starbucks is one of my favorite food brands, while I swore that Dunkin' Donuts was dead to me back in July. One unfortunate franchise ignored my order of a bagel with cream cheese, opting instead to only serve me a plain toasted whole-grain bagel. I discovered the error when I was five miles down the road in the car and had no other option than to lament the dryness of it all.

Who orders a plain toasted bagel? Who serves one?

Dunkin' climbed back toward my good graces by finally deciding to serve their dark roast hot, however. For years now you've been able to get it iced or bagged to brew at home yourself, but the restaurants refused to go beyond that. It was infuriating, since Dunkin's regular blend is basically watered-down Folgers — coffee for people who don't like coffee.

All things considered, I decided to bite the bullet and order cups of Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts dark roasts on my way into work over back-to-back days this week. Which one was tastier? Which one provided the better buzz? Read on to find out.

Dunkin' Dark

If I'm doing a drink competition involving Dunkin' Donuts and anyone, you can count on Dunkin' being a dark horse at best. But the place's dark roast is a truly enjoyable experience.

To start, the scent is much richer than what you'd expect. It screams full body and depth of flavor. Sipping the drink is much the same thing, with a ton of toasted caramel coming out before a smooth finish. 

I'm not a big fan of Dunkin's foam cups and bulbous to-go tops, though. It's like drinking from a sippy cup that's bad for the planet. We can do better.

Starbucks Espresso Roast

Starbucks rotates their dark roasts regularly, so my goal was to sample whatever the flavor of the day proved to be. On Friday at my local outpost, it was Espresso Roast — not as good as the complex Christmas Blend or the deeply infatuating Gold Coast Blend in my opinion, but still a solid drink.

The scent wasn't nearly as noticeable with this cup as it was with the one from Dunkin', a fact I found very surprising. But there's a lot of caramel here, so it's probably a good option to face off against the Boston-area brew. Espresso Roast is very sweet, but it has a lot of roasted tones to balance it out. This is rich coffee.

And Starbucks cups are just heads and tails above Dunkin's. Not only do I feel like an adult drinking out of them, but they're tapered at a more comfortable angle, too. Yes, some people sneer at you for being elitist when they see the Starbucks logo, but it's better than being sneered at for not really liking coffee when you're holding a cup of Dunkin'.

As far as other factors go, Dunkin' was a few dimes cheaper than Starbucks, but there's not a huge price difference going on here. Both coffees were served adequately hot. If you're looking for a better caffeine boost, the Espresso Roast probably did the trick a tad better.

At the end of the day, Dunkin' Donuts made a surprisingly good run of it. I'm awarding Dunkin' Dark a very impressive four sporks out of five. It was just edged by Starbucks Esspresso Roast, which I'm giving a quarter of a spork more due to a combination of its better cup, deeper flavor and my better past experiences with the brand. 

Really, though, you can't go wrong with either of these coffees on Super Bowl Sunday — or any other day, for that matter.

Super Bowl rice-off

Can we call the Super Bowl rice-off the Rice Bowl? Has someone trademarked that?

Hard to believe it's been a week since the Super Bowl, isn't it? In many ways, the last seven days have been nothing but an extended blackout brought on by the overabundance of good eats on party platters for the NFL's championship game.

No matter how quickly things have gone, I find it's best to clean my plate of Super Bowl write-ups within 168 hours of the event itself. Already I fear this review is pushing the boundaries of timeliness -- the Grammys are under way as I type, for chef's sake!

As I recall, I owe you all a rice-off pitting Zatarain's against Rice-A-Roni. In my Super Bowl smorgasbord, Zatarain's represented the host city of New Orleans while Rice-A-Roni came from the corner of the eventual runner-up San Francisco 49ers. They weren't the teams competing in the big game. But that didn't stop me from seeing which one was superior.

First, let's talk about my Zatarain's. I opted for the New Orleans style jambalaya mix, as it seemed the most authentic. The box told me to add a meat of my choice, which I did with some spicy sausage.

On the Rice-A-Roni side, I chose the fried rice flavor. The San Francisco treat only suggested I add meat to make it a meal, something I declined to do. Not only did I already have a meaty Zatarain's, I wanted to compare the foods at their most basic suggested preparation.

Basically, neither of these two rices goes against the grain. Both boxed products smelled scintillatingly savory on the stove top. Both took a surprisingly long time to cook. And both were saltier than a Morton barge crashing in Utah's most famous lake.

Beyond that, you'll no doubt be surprised to hear that the Zatarain's with its added meat was more of a meal, while the Rice-A-Roni played side dish. The Zatarain's also had some little flecks of red and green that may have been intended to represent peppers of some sort. Meanwhile, the Rice-A-Roni took on a road-worker-yellow color that was no more befitting of food than it is basketball jerseys.

Flavor wise ... there's not much to say. The Zatarain's may have been a little spicier. Or that difference might have just come from the accompanying sausage. We'll just move along.

Neither of these boxes is going to bankrupt you. The Zatarain's cost a reasonable $1.49, not factoring in its accompanying meat. Depending on what you decide to throw in there with it, you could add anything form another $2 to upwards of $5 or $6, although I have no idea why you'd waste something that expensive on rice in a box. The Rice-A-Roni proved to be much more reasonable, costing just 42 cents.

Low prices will always buoy otherwise mediocre fare, no matter how unnatural its color. Rice-A-Roni nets three-and-a-half sporks out of five. Incidentally, that ties it with its Zatarain's competitor, which I'd also score at three-and-a-half sporks.

I suppose I told you I'd pick a winner, though. A slight edge goes to Rice-A-Roni owing to its lower price and recipe that doesn't think outside the box. Take heart, San Francisco! At least you won something this week! As for you, New Orleans, don't hang your head. Zatarain's had enough power to keep me coming back for more in the future.

Potato and scallion Super Bowl soup

The consistency of my potato and scallion soup wasn't bad for a guy without a blender.

We'll continue my Super Bowl recaps today with a bit of a "souper bowl" rundown of the potato and scallion soup that came out of the pot piping hot.

Remember this soup is a slightly modified version of a Food Network leek and potato soup discovered by the official fiancée of Rick's Food Critique. I didn't have leeks on hand, but I did have a fair share of extra scallions left over from my Baltimore imitation crab cakes. Those scallions had to go somewhere, and a soup seemed as good a place as any.

Preparation started out with no major hiccups. I sliced my scallions, started cooking them in butter, and turned away to finish chopping up potatoes. I'd already peeled the spuds, a time-consuming endeavor that left me feeling a little lazy, like Beetle Bailey.

Laziness can be deadly in the kitchen. In my case, it almost led to a scallion disaster. When I returned to my little green onions, I found brown butter that was starting to smoke and vegetables best described as "well done."

To put it mildly, this posed a problem. Since I used excess scallions for my soup, I didn't have any more available for starting over. Going to the store was an option, I suppose, but I didn't consider it an attractive one. Then I would have had extra scallions, saddling me with the very same issue that led me to attempt this soup in the first place.

After a moment of panicked stirring, frantic burner killing and thoughtful reading of my ingredient list, I made a decision: carry on. The scallions didn't seem too badly toasted, and there would hopefully be enough vegetable stock, cream and buttermilk to cover up any unpleasant flavors.

About 45 minutes later -- after I'd poured in the potatoes and stock and set it all to simmer -- another challenge presented itself. This time the recipe called for an immersion blender, a little piece of equipment with which I wasn't blessed. Somewhat embarrassingly, I didn't even have a regular blender handy. So I pulled out the potato masher and whisk and did all the blending manually. Fortunately it proved to be easier going than mashed potatoes, which I often make by hand.

With some dairy products and seasoning, the soup was complete. All that was left was tasting it. And what a taste!

My potato and scallion soup turned out to be roughly akin to a liquid baked potato. It had a substantial savoriness to it, which I'm attributing to the well-done scallions. My theory is that it wouldn't have tasted as good without that happy mistake.

Having said that, there are two potential improvements I'd like to try with this recipe in the future. The first is the introduction of bacon into the soup. The second is a dollop of sour cream and some shredded cheddar cheese on top. With those ingredients, it really would be a baked potato in a bowl. And that's something that could pick up some yardage in culinary circles.

Super Bowl XLVII preview

Super Bowl XLVII is tomorrow, and the unofficial American holiday that is the National Football League's championship weekend is in full swing. The Internet is awash with stories previewing the big game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens.

There are in-depth strategic and statistical previews. There are two-and-a-half-minute video previews that somehow say nothing. There are even stories written with second-grade sentence structure about drugged-up reporters at Super Bowl Media Day!

I won't be getting into any of that, though. Especially the drugs. This blog strives to be more family friendly than your average Super Bowl halftime show. And unlike the Super Bowl halftime show, this blog aims to be something you can pay attention to without wanting to vomit or put your head through a wall.

To that end, today's Super Bowl XLVII preview takes a hard look at the foods I'm planning to cook for Sunday night. My idea is a simple one: put together a meal representing the cities battling for the Lombardi Trophy.

Baltimore posed no problem for this quest. The city on the Chesapeake Bay is nearly synonymous with crab cakes. San Francisco, on the other hand, proved to be a bit more of a challenge. Maybe it's because I'm on the East Coast, but I never associated any food with the Bay Area except Rice-A-Roni. And I wanted something more challenging.

Eventually, I settled on bread called San Francisco sourdough. You probably guessed its basic formula. It's sourdough from San Francisco. So, armed with printed blueprints for bread and crab cakes, I set out for the grocery store last night to purchase the required ingredients.

As is often the case in this imperfect and unpredictable life, things did not go as planned. It was all sunshine and rainbows as I made my way through the produce section, successfully purchasing scallions, a jalapeno and chives for the crab cakes. I even picked up the panko -- Japanese bread crumbs -- without issue.

Then I came to the seafood section and the sticker shock it brings. Have you seen the price of crab lately? It's enough to make anyone crabby! I think something fishy is going on with the seafood industry, where the suppliers, fishermen and grocery stores are swimming together to scale up the price of crab meat.

Buying crab will put you in a financial pinch.

... Sorry about that last paragraph. It's just too hard to resist fish puns. The fact remains that I was faced with a serious problem, however. Crab meat came with a price tag of $28.99, which was awfully hard to swallow. And it was even harder to force down the gullet when I noticed the pack of imitation crab lurking a few shelves down for just $3.49.

If you don't know which option I went with, you haven't been reading this blog long enough. Into the cart went the fake stuff, and my plot for Baltimore crab cakes suddenly became one for Baltimore imitation crab cakes. The change probably won't be noticeable what with all the seasoning that goes into the recipe anyway, right?

Right?

Another problem popped up in the mustard section. I was 99 percent sure I had the Dijon mustard required for the crab cakes sitting in the refrigerator at home. Alas, that level of certainty wasn't good enough, and I had to pick up a whole new yellow bottle. (Returning home I would find Dijon mustard tucked safely in the door of the fridge, so if anyone has some good recipes that use it, I'm all ears.)

Ah, mustard! Present in the fridge, if not my memory.

Those crab cake issues were nothing compared to the challenges posed by San Francisco sourdough. I'd shrewdly used the Wegmans website to look up the location of yeast before I hit the store. It told me to search in the dairy section. Which I did. Unsuccessfully. After about five minutes of perusing, I gave up, resolving to circle back after locating the rest of the necessary baking goods.

Then I couldn't find any sourdough starter to save my life. After the yeast's refusal to rise into my field of view, this was too much. Like an overworked stay-at-home parent, I had to scrap my idea for homemade bread and turn to a box of Rice-A-Roni to save me.

Next to the Rice-A-Roni, I spied some Zatarain's, which claims to be a New Orleans tradition since 1889. New Orleans happens to be the city hosting the Super Bowl this year, so the Zatarain's went into the cart beside the San Francisco treat. A new plan came to mind, one pitting the prefabricated rice dishes against each other.

As I wrapped up my planned shopping, I realized I was going to have a lot of scallions left over from my crab cake cooking. Scallions, in case you were unawares, are similar to leeks. Therefore, I decided to do a riff on a potato and leek soup, too.
A quick phone-call assist from Deb, the official fiancée of Rick's Food Critique, gave me a list of the other ingredients I'd need. Yukon gold potatoes. Heavy cream. Buttermilk. Vegetable broth. Just like that, after 90 minutes, my pre-Super Bowl grocering was complete.

There's your preview of what I'll be eating on Super Bowl Sunday: Baltimore imitation crab cakes, Rice-A-Roni, Zatarain's and potato and scallion soup. A balanced meal it does not make, although I'd wager it will be tasty.

This is also a preview of the blog posts you can expect in the coming week. While time won't permit me to reflect upon my culinary successes and failures on this site tomorrow, you'll see new posts on each of the foods in the following days. Currently I plan one post covering the crab cakes, another swishing around the soup and a third declaring a winner between the two boxes of rice.

I hope you get a kick out of all of them. And enjoy the game!

Stuffing in the flavor with the BK Steakhouse

Still stuffed from the Super Bowl? Or is food starting to sound appetizing again after your big-game binge of chips, dip, brats, chili, wings, pizza and everything else you found at the gridiron gorging party?

I'm betting on hunger starting to take the place of NFL-led indigestion in your belly. But last night's heavy food probably left you feeling sloth-like, so you'll probably want to head out for some fast food. Lucky you. Burger King is pushing a mouth-catching burger.

I speak of the Jalapeno and Cheddar Stuffed Steakhouse Burger, a meal with a name that needs little explanation. You could argue that the burger isn't stuffed insomuch as it is mixed -- little bits of pepper and cheese are sprinkled throughout a ground-beef patty rather than inhabiting a pocket at the center -- but we won't go large with this complaint.

Lettuce and tomato top the burger, as does something Burger King calls "spicy poblano sauce." Poblanos are typically a fairly mild pepper, so the adjective was necessary to tip us off to the fact that the sauce has a little bit of heat.

The whole burger is best described as having a little bit of heat, actually. The spice of the jalapenos is largely swallowed up by the mishmash of cooling cheddar and greasy red meat, leaving the poblano sauce to deliver most of the zing. The sauce does admirably, imparting a taste that is both zesty and smooth. So smooth, in fact, that it's almost cheesy.

Don't make the mistake of thinking the jalapenos are worthless, however. They add a nice texture to the burger. I'd be lying if I said they were crunchy -- and you wouldn't believe me -- but they definitely add some interest to the normally mundane world of overly processed fast-food burgerdom.

Those stuffed chunks of cheese pop up from time to time as well, although I found them less satisfying than the pepper pieces. You can go several bites without getting a lump of cheddar big enough to add any flavor, then you're overwhelmed when you bite into a behemoth. I'd prefer to see a slice of cheddar laid over the burger for better balance.

This burger isn't about balance, for better or worse. It's bold, beefy, and stuffed with entertaining flavors. While those flavors don't always work in perfect harmony, the eating experience is interesting enough to net four sporks out of five.

I would, however, recommend a roll of Tums. While the Steakhouse isn't spicy enough to merit heartburn, you can never coddle your tummy too much in the days after the Super Bowl.

Don't wing it this Super Bowl

No doubt you've heard the fuss about the supposed chicken wing shortage coming just days before the Super Bowl. High prices and the United States' largest wing supplier's bankruptcy filing are threatening to destroy the great event by eroding the snack food-foundation upon which it rests!

... Or not. Reading past the headline of any of these reports clearly shows that while you might have to pay a few cents more for your wings this year, you won't have any trouble getting them. But the hysteria that nearly swept the nation was well founded nonetheless. We need our snacks for the Super Bowl.

Therefore I would like to suggest a few alternative foods. Even if the grocery store has wings, these foods should jolt you from a ho-hum same-as-last-year Super Bowl culinary experience into a new world of unhealthy enjoyment.

• The Bacon Explosion. This roll of bacon and sausage looks like the greatest creation man hath ever wrought. I'm not sure whether to start my mouth watering or gag when I look at it, which means it must be a whole new level of unhealthelicious. This is as close as you'll get to a heart attack on a plate -- perfect for Super Bowl, the gluttonous event of all gluttonous events.
• Bratwurst/Sausage. They give you more meat for less work than a chicken wing. You can even get a range of flavors if you're willing to try out a cheddarwurst or spicy sausage. Plus, they don't dirty fingers like those sticky, messy wings, meaning your guests won't leave red marks all over the sofa. They'd also be a great warm-up for a Bacon Explosion main course.
  
• Ribs. If you must have some messy finger food, go with some barbecue spare ribs this year. Take all of those "wing shortage" stories in the media as an omen that you should eat another sticky finger food. If you miss the idea of dipping a spicy wing into blue cheese, go ahead and slather the buffalo sauce on the ribs and dunk away. Maybe you'll discover a new family recipe. Or maybe you'll wish you had made the Bacon Explosion.
  
• Chips and dip. Turn the old stalwart into something special this year. Make some spinach and artichoke dip or whip up some homemade queso. Load up the chips and you won't even miss the meat ... until you smell the Bacon Explosion on the grill.
  
• Or you could just go with pizza. But even if you throw some bacon and sausage on it, it's not going to be the Bacon Explosion. In fact, it's probably better to just skip the pizza this year unless you're going to roll it around a Bacon Explosion. That would one-up the overrated turducken. Take that, John Madden!
  

In case you didn't get my drift, make this year all about the Bacon Explosion. I don't want to get into the discussion about who invented it and when. What's more important is that it hit the big time (on the Internet, at least) this year, in time for the Super Bowl.

I can hardly wait to try a Bacon Explosion. Hopefully I'll even live long enough afterward to review it.