Pizza rolls and the meaning of midcentury food
snackstack.net
snackstack.net
Beatrice is my aunt! (And the inventor of said egg roll machine, Eugene Luoma, is my uncle. He also invented the zip-it drain cleaner and all sorts of other clever things.)
Beatrice kind of hates talking about Pizza Rolls. She'd rather be known for her many cookbooks and other culinary work, not that trash. Jeno merely paid her an hourly wage to come up with different egg roll fillings and pizza was one of the ones she tried. No royalties or anything.
I love pizza rolls, though.
1. contents erupt from the corner like a volcano in the microwave
2. burrito unrolls itself during heating
3. mostly ice cold inside (although some ice cold spots will still happen in #1 and #2)
4. Learn how to use the power setting of the microwave to ensure even heating.
with pancakes, while you don't want it tooo too hot, you do want a hot pan to sizzle fry some crispy edges on there. i like a little "crack" of the crust, not a steamy on the outside cake.
Tl;dr - Put cold bacon in cold oven. Turn on oven to 400°F. Cook 17-20 min.
Your pancakes can sit at 325F for a long time before they burn, and that alleviates the fear of burning that leads you to flip that first pancake too fast.
[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20First%...
So a bought a hand-held laser-pointer-temperature gun at the hardware, wow, it's fantastic. Now I know what temps are for what (it's remarkably similar to the oven, 325 to 450) and I know how to find them and how quickly on my stove.
*what is with Miele appliances, they all suck, range, convection oven, microwave. the UIs are impossible.
325's a good number but I prefer a 350 to 375 with a little urgency, it better gets that "deep fried crispy" around the outside, and stops the already flipped side from just getting steamed to death.
Also, if you've never tried a recipe with vinegar and baking soda you need to.
Mouth be damned.
Do you think I could get rid of my electric stove in my kitchen, then use that plug and buy a 4000W microwave to get it to heat up even faster instead?
They’re commonly called “speed ovens”. I have one and it’s a nice thing to use for various things.
1. Position burritos on plate so the fold is on top and facing out
2. Microwave on high for 1 minute
3. Turn burritos over so fold is on bottom and facing in, so that if the fold busts it stays on the plate
4. Poke three sets of holes in top of each burrito with fork, evenly spaced
5. Microwave on high for 45 seconds
I have fine tuned my microwave burrito skills over the decades to have a perfectly microwaved burrito that is both not cold and doesn't burst. Problem is, there's no 45 second button on the microwave, so I usually press 2 for two minutes (if I give it a few seconds it'll start on it's own) and I try to make it back in time. I don't always get it and the ends might bust just a little bit.
Just turn down the power to 70% or 80% for one minute - it is equivalent. Varying power levels is microwaving 101 for heat control (especially for getting heat to the middle of cold things).
Aside: buy a microwave with knobs for timer control and ideally power level too (or a slider would be an even better UI for power level but I haven’t seen that). Buttons deeply suck on every microwave I have ever used. Think like a software UI designer when buying appliances: most appliances have horrific UIs, but with a little effort you can often find at least one model out of 50 with a usable UI (and sometimes the cheapest too). There is a branding opportunity here for a startup: the Apple of appliances would sell even at a high premium.
Also, the UI and buttons don't seem horrible on most microwaves I've used. Not sure the issue there.
They also sell them with various additional fillings, such as cheese and ham, mushrooms, mozzarella and tomato (becoming something like Pizza rolls, I guess)… i always wondered why there’s really only one type of kaassouffle, really.
Today they do not even include cheese in the box.
I wish they would sell the sauce with the mini pepperonis in a jar by itself.
80s? I don't know, wasn't like that for me. I knew some kids maybe where it was like that for them, I felt sorry for them.
From my perspective, obviously a limited perspective based on the time I grew up, the 1970's was the best time to be a kid in the history of kids.
We roamed the streets, 10 years old, running wild in the streets.
So latchkey kids could also roam the streets.
My Mother's pizza is famous amongst my friends and family. It is started from the chef boyardee pizza kit and surprisingly little has changed in her version.
My brothers and our childhood friends are all in our 40's and 50's now, have had pizza all over the world, and momma pizza still ranks.
They were super excited and insisted we go.
The conversation went like this "This pizza isn't really that good." "I know! That's the great thing about it!"
Imosholm syndrome is real.
With imos you can't go in expecting anything, just enjoy it for what it is.
It was definitely "different."
Also, most things come with some sort of cooking instructions, like pasta or rice or whatever.
Is it unusual that my parents (and pretty much all my friend's parents) made sure we grew up knowing how to cook and eat really good food? Maybe it's a UK vs US thing, maybe it's because the nearest "convenience stores" were a couple of hundred miles away.
Yeah, I overstated the reality for rhetorical effect, but it also would depend on what part of the US. Gender roles have changed in some places, but not so much in others.
> until I reached high school and football practice got in the way
That says a lot about US culture right there.
I received similar pushback for taking both Home Ec classes. It was really the only way out of the latchkey kid diet, which, yes, was primarily sandwiches, Steak-Umms, and so on.
"But you'd be the only boy in the class, everyone else in the class is a girl!" was the general objection from the staff doing the timetables.
Yes. That is rather the point, isn't it?
Anyway I did Technical Drawing instead because either they couldn't see what the plan was, or they could see it all too well.
When I had to do some photography on appointment and sometimes videography, well, nervous people can mess up their clothes. A number of women were surprised when I whipped out a needle and matching thread to briefly repair a tear in their clothing when time was tight.
I felt pretty annoyed at having to defend these kinds of choices, and a surprising amount of the pushback came not from boys my own age, but girls and women.
I credit this with why I know how to cook as well as I do. We grew up poor by most standards in the US, but my uncle was a butcher, both grandparents were farmers, so the one thing we had access to was fruits, vegetables and good meats.
Its also why I think i never learned good portion control as a child and still have trouble maintaining a healthy weight (among other reasons I won't get into here), we made very good savory food all the time because its what we had. We had to cook, as take out wasn't an option, and frozen foods weren't cost effective the same way for us (due to familial professions, we had access to things most people don't in this way).
That's the irony. I feel like I grew up with blander foods I'd be less inclined to eat them so much growing up, feeding a long habit of food being comfort.
So my mate would go round to his grandparents and find his grandad stirring a pot of chilli and a pot of stew and a pot of curry each roughly the size of a dustbin, and be greeted with "Oh hello, young lad, I wish I'd known you were coming, I'd have made you some dinner!"
Wtf does medium heat mean? How about simmer?
They're great if you've got a basic understanding of cooking, but not for getting that basic understanding.
If you're functionally literate, you can figure it out in no time.
No classic cookbook describes how to listen for medium versus high heat.
"Medium heat" is when the ring is half-way up. "High heat" is when the ring is all the way up.
I knew shit like this when I was nine years old, because I knew what words like "medium" and "high" and "heat" meant.
This whole thread is just reinforcing the impression I have that Americans are just permanent children, forever eating scaled-up versions of the children's menu.
Sure you can hack around and get something ok regardless, but...
> maybe it's because the nearest "convenience stores" were a couple of hundred miles away
Gosh, what a wild idea that that would lead to a difference! Combine that with parents without enough free time to be home much in the first place, the rapid availability of processed food that lasts longer and is ready faster, and advertising campaigns that innundated people with these and didn't mention the downsides of the new shit... why are you being so smug about just happening to grow up in a different environment?
Gas or electric? Small or large burner? Cast iron or steel pan?
Kudos to you for being an exceptional nine year old cook, but it's objectively true that most cookbooks are written assuming basic cooking knowledge, the kind one would get from a parent who had time to cook with a child.
This hasn’t been true anywhere I’ve lived, except my current house, where I adjusted the gas. In Cupertino, high barely summers. In New York, quarterway turned will sear and instantly burn dry powders. (Also: I grew up overseas.)
This is incorrect.
Medium is when the surface of the pan is around 350°F. High is when it's around 450°F. (Low is 250°F.)
How to get and then maintain the surface of the pan at that temperature is probably one of the trickiest skills there is for people to learn. Because obviously if you put an empty pan on the middle of your gas burner dial and just leave it there it will quickly heat up to ultra-hot (550°F+). While if you dump a bunch of watery vegetables in there to sauté it will just go down to like 150°F and not heat up further.
In the end setting the right burner strength to maintain your desired temperature is a crazy nonlinear function of heat, pan temperature, pan material (both conductivity and thermal mass), food quantity in pan, food temperature, food water content, and lid on/off. That you learn through just a lot of trial and error, involving a lot of listening for sizzle and seeing bubbles and browning and feeling for radiant heat with your hand. Not by setting the dial to a particular setting.
If you want to know why so many people have difficulty doing something so "basic" as frying an egg, this is why. If you want to know why part of the interview to cook in a restaurant is also quite often... just to fry a single egg... that's why. (It's "fizzbuzz" for cooks.)
Also, please don't do things like insult entire nationalities here. It's very much against HN guidelines.
The trash can was actually the biggest part of the lesson, don't be afraid of failure.
Which is weird, because I never used one as a kid. Toaster, yes. Toaster-oven, no.
Sure, I know you do...
Some of the recipes remind me of the matpakke video. "But not too exciting or tasty!" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JlNmeVK_zLg
Americans are scared of flavour.
People who like soccer were exposed to it.
People who like working on electronics were exposed to it.
Rarely does anyone do stuff independently. You saw someone else do it and that’s what got you into it. It has never mattered that libraries existed. Libraries are mostly for researching something that you’ve already taken an interest in. A library is literally massive.
If you and your parents emphasized cooking, then that’s good. But you know, a really rich family would expose their kid to everything while a poor one wouldn’t. And what you get exposed to determines your life’s path, so that’s how the cookie crumbles.
We look back and say "I'd just go find a book, read it, and then try some practice runs."
To an 8 year old, that sequence of events in response to not knowing something is completely alien.
My parents didn't keep non-frozen and non-boxed food in the house.
Do Americans just not like food, or something?
I could have made a salad, but not many 8 year olds would choose those over bagel bites.
Similar to what you would get from a butcher for frozen philly cheese steak sandwiches, but not the same.
Pop tarts are also a bastardization of some other more traditional food but I don't know which right now.
If you look at how they apply the icing you can clearly see how they started putting less and less on each pop tart. I don’t buy these things because I want to eat the crust!
Then, on a more recent whim, I bought some store branded toaster pastries from my local grocery store, and they were exactly the Pop Tarts I remembered.
They're also producing products in almost every aisle of the supermarket and gain an economy of scale on things like only needing a single one of eg house style for every product.
There certainly wasn't anything at the scale of Walmart, Aldi, Kroger, or Publix these days.
Consequently, it was easier for General Mills et al. to use economies of scale to sell quality, profitable products.
Now, it's the grocery stores that can do that.
Fortunately they’ve changed the recipe lately, to make them better for air-fryers, and now I don’t feel the same urge to deep fry them.
The rise in pizza popularity post WWII was a harbinger of cultural globalization that has now started to feel like homogenization.
I’m fascinated by the interplay between individuals, societies and consumerism. Be unique like everyone else!
Still that feels like a weak take. Where’s the line between lemmings and spreading best practices?
Home refrigerators were still fairly new. A quick google indicates that "a refrigerator in the home" became a standard thing in the US in the 1940s. 1960s seems a bit slow (maybe the war got in the way?), but not every innovation is instant, and in this case the "innovation" is not the refrigerator itself, but the "frozen pizza rolls", second-order effects, the structuring of new products around the common availability of the home refrigerator. The platform precedes it, just like you don't have a mass-market app store before the iPhone.
Are the pizza rolls structured around the availability of a freezer, or of a microwave?
A lot of food we think of as being from a small place and then globalized is sort of marketing. A lot of stuff was created after WW2, associated with a country, and globalized.
Not to pick Italy but carbonara is an example of this. Invented by Italian Americans. The first accounts of it existing are in cook books published in America. Old Italians have no recollection of it pre-war.
But it was characterized as “authentic Italian” and it soon became the national dish of Rome, and modified to its current state today. Before recent times people were not killing enough pigs to make pork jowl universally accepted as the “authentic” protein in the dish.
Potatoes, Tomatoes, and Chili Peppers were unknown to Europe and Asia before exploration of the Americas.
I then moved to Canada where Totino's does not exist and mourned my loss for years, because that specific type of "tiny calzone with egg roll container" didn't seem to exist up here. Only in the last few years have I seen an equivalent Canadian pizza roll from Pillsbury (Pizza Bites) and they happen to be decent. And if Canadians are reading and confused, I am not referring to those gross "pizza pops", they are not the same.
In response to the article, I'm shocked to learn Totino's didn't invent the idea and they existed all the way back in the 60s. At least from the 90s, I don't recall any other brands being available besides Totino's except Great Value?
And easier for little kids to eat.
As they're pretty strictly meant to be eaten at home the need for a plate of them isn't a big deal.
Seen here as part of the broader family of snack-rollas, which had other fillings that weren't as good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBW1HQmxgIo
They stopped making them decades ago.
What sets the US examples apart is the “entrepreneurial” aspect of creating an entirely made-up food category, resulting from the availability of industrial machinery and marketing trends. There is little connection to to street food or concerns about authenticity.
Most microwaves have "sensor" modes these days though and you don't need to suffer that experience anymore if you're willing to wait a couple more minutes.
To quickly defrost I will usually stick a bag of pizza rolls in some hot water in the kitchen sink for a minute and if I want them crispy I will finish them in a toaster oven or air fryer.
Anyway my point was just that as an adult capable of basic food prep it seems silly I ever burned my mouth on pizza rolls even though the microwaves were dumber back then.
https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/pul...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger
https://ideas.time.com/2012/09/07/the-myth-of-bootstrapping/
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/3/29/alissa_quart_bootstra...
People who participate in lotteries are statistically poorer.
https://journalistsresource.org/economics/research-review-lo...
https://themillionairenextdoor.com/2011/09/any-economically-...
Read the linked material. The metaphor of bootstraps was an impossible and Quixotic feat like perpetual motion that became coopted as a celebrated mythology of "self-made". There is no such animal, friend.