Tag: bread

Ketchup Catch-Up

At the Communion rail in our pre-COVID, in-person church days, my wife and I would sometimes laugh at the size of the hunk of bread they’d tear off the loaf. The pieces were so big I’d often be chewing all the way back to my seat (and think I should’ve asked for seconds). On the other hand, today’s “drive-in church” Communion amounts to hermetically-sealed plastic capsules handed gingerly through the car window. Peel back the plastic to reveal the tasteless wafer and half-swallow of grape juice inside. No, it’s not breakfast by any definition, but at least we’re still achieving the higher purpose.

Communion and ketchup are strange bedfellows but I’m about to explain why they belong in the same sentence.  If you’ve followed the headlines lately, you know – just below the latest details of the Myanmar conflict – we’re all worried about whether there’ll be enough ketchup packets for our next take-out meal.  That’s right, the world is currently lacking in – not ketchup – but ketchup packets.  If we don’t address the situation soon, buildings will burn and looting will run rampant.  Even worse, we might have to top everything with mustard instead.

It’s the pandemic to blame, of course.  As soon as traditional sit-down restaurants shifted to pick-up and delivery, their demand for packeted condiments jumped up to the level of Wendy’s and McDonald’s.  In fact, Wendy’s and McDonald’s removed ketchup packets from their front counters, not because customers were taking too many, but because other restaurants were raiding their supplies.  Yep, it’s gotten that kind of desperate out there in burger land.

Heinz, the undisputed king of ketchup, recently committed to increasing packet production by 25% to fend off potential mayhem in the streets.  125% of Heinz’s typical annual production amounts to, well… let’s just say there’d be enough to place a packet in the hand of every man, woman, and child on the planet.  Dang.  That’s a whole lot of processed tomato spread.

Speaking of processed tomato spread, here’s my favorite ingredient in ketchup: mustard (powder).  It’s true.  Go check the ingredients list on the bottle I know you have in your refrigerator.

Will there be enough to go around?

But I digress.  Let’s get back to the global packet shortage.  Call me highbrow but I’m having a hard time caring, because honestly I can’t remember the last time I used a ketchup packet.  The restaurants of my choosing always bring the bottle to the table when you ask for it.  Furthermore – burgers aside – I don’t have a lot of use for ketchup.  Not on my fries, not on my meatloaf, neither eggs nor hash browns.  And while we’re at it can we all agree: mustard only on a bratwurst or a hot dog?  It should be a cardinal rule.

But I digress… again.  FOCUS!

If I don my eco-friendly hat for a moment (and don’t I look sharp?), the last thing I want to hear about is Heinz upping ketchup packet production to 12 billion a year.  That sounds like enough plastic to Ziploc a small country many times over.  But I get it.  In these times of please-pass-the-virus (or better yet, don’t), we demand individually wrapped one-and-done solutions.  Like ketchup packets.  Like Communion elements.

Handy host

Good things come in small packages, so the saying goes.  Yeah, well, they come in big packages too.  Like ketchup from a bottle instead of a plastic packet.  Like Communion from a loaf of freshly baked bread instead of hole-punched from a sheet of Styrofoam. And seriously, who uses just one ketchup packet?  Picture a baby burger you can balance between your finger and thumb and maybe it’s enough.  Anything larger and you’re grabbing packets by the handful.

Let’s wrap this topic on a personal note.  If ketchup packets disappear, my granddaughters won’t understand a really good bedtime story, the kind where they’ll giggle every time they talk about it.  You know the story, the one where my buddies and I pocket ketchup packets from our school lunch trays, take ’em out to the playground asphalt, and stomp on ’em to give some unsuspecting kid a tomato facewash?  Oh please, drop the mock horror.  You know you were out there on the playground too, doing the very same thing.

Some content sourced from the 4/8/2021 CNN.com article, “America is facing a ketchup packet shortage”.

Banana Ranting (again)

Take a good look at this photo.  My wife and I have this weird assortment of foods on our kitchen counter right now.  Store-brand hamburger buns.  A half-loaf of “artisan-style” marble rye against the backsplash.  Below both, a package of ready-to-use French-style crepes.  To the right, a spaghetti squash and a handful of wrapped Lindor truffles.  To the further right, an oft-visited plastic container of peanut butter pretzels, fronted by a watermelon just itching to join a fruit salad.

These foods are not “still life” waiting to become paint on canvas.  They’re not even past-due items from the back-of-store sale rack.  They’re just random samplings from trips to the grocery store; items kicked to the kitchen curb instead of the pantry or frig.  Two questions, then.  If you were given this lot on “Top Chef” could you whip up something appetizing?  Would you even care to try?

artwork courtesy of Alexi Talimonov

More importantly, I made it to the third paragraph before mentioning the pair of bananas taking up prime real estate front and center in the photo.  I HATE bananas, be it look, feel, texture, or taste.  Bananas need to go back to the primeval jungle from which they escaped.  In my world, bananas should be called “no-passion fruit”.  If I were starving on a desert island, shadowed under the gently waving fronds of a banana palm, I’d nosh on the fronds, then the tree bark, then the tree itself before tossing its worthless bananas into the ocean.  Hell, I’d choke down sand before eating bananas.  Put a gun to my head (or a banana); I still wouldn’t eat one.

For Pete’s sake though; no matter the magnitude of my banana hate, the yellow curvies still find a way to remain relevant.  Take this pandemic for instance.  Stuck at home means more time in the kitchen.  More time in the kitchen means comfort food, and comfort food includes baking bread. Sourdough. Pizza dough. Baguettes. Challah. Naan. Sadly, we rookie bakers discover the ingredients in our pantry are as past due as our bills.  Way past due.  Flour tastes sour.  Honey ≠ sugar.  Past-its-prime yeast does not make the loaf say, “All rise!”  Even with fresh ingredients we butcher the recipe by feeding, kneading, and reading too much into every step.  Instead of baking bread we’re breaking bread.  We need a no-brainer no-spoiler kinda baked good.  Banana bread to the rescue!

Banana bread is easy; it really is.  Call yourself a breadmaker with as few as five items – none of them “yeast” or “starter”.  Sift together flour and baking soda.  Whisk together eggs, butter, and mashed bananas (mashed bananas?  Isn’t that what I threw up regularly as a kid?)  Combine in a loaf pan, bake, and voila – banana bread.  You’ll find the first four ingredients in your pantry already and if you also have bananas, they’re probably overripe (i.e. perfect for banana bread).  Just like the bananas on my kitchen counter.  I made the mistake of picking them up when I took the above photo.  They’re so ripe they feel like half-filled water balloons.  Or half-filled hot dogs.  Or Twinkies submerged in water for a few hours.  You get the idea.  Ewwwwwww.

Now for the irony/paradox/contradiction/twist/flourish of today’s post (take your pick).  I like banana bread.  I’m on the fence of almost loving banana bread.  Slice a thick piece, warm it in the oven, slather with butter, and it’s pretty damned good.  As I admitted almost four years ago in my post Banana Rant, bananas work inside of bread like figs work inside a package of Newtons.  As a standalone they’re a horror-filled rubbery package disguised as one of Mother Nature’s edibles.  Downgraded to an ingredient they stand on the fringes of the vast arena known as “food”. 

Enough with the spotlight on bananas already.  Trust me, I had better topics to blog about this week.  My pandemic-born obsession with Netflix.  A lamentation to Major League Baseball for a season that’s never gonna start.  A keyboard pounding to the heavens for dumping several inches of snow on our neighborhood this week (for God’s sake, it’s June!)  But no, I chose to discuss the best use of “water-logged Twinkies” instead, keeping bananas a front and center topic.  Kind of like walking into the grocery store and the very… first… thing… in your field of view is an acre of bananas grinning their pathetic yellowy smiles.  They should go back to the jungle where they belong.  I’ll make do with soury-dough bread instead.

Some content inspired by the 4/20/20 Wall Street Journal article, “Forget the Sourdough.  Everybody’s Baking Banana Bread”.