"GrossFoods" news and stories

If you really want to make your Halloween party guests squeal, raise the gross-out factor of the foods.

This Halloween concoction, meant to resemble kitty litter just might take the cake with the gross-out gourmets. And don't worry, those are Tootsie rolls.

Photo: Sarah LeTrent

Professional chefs prepare and enjoy a huge variety of different foods, some familiar to the rest of us, some beyond our usual pantry options, unless you're prone to stocking huitalacoche ( aka corn fungus), beef cheeks and tomato foam.

But even though they possess adventurous palates and have the opportunity to try ingredients and dishes from far and wide, that doesn't mean they like everything they eat. They all have one or two foods that just don't do it for them, their own personal food Kryptonite.

Slashfood asked some of the country's top chefs which edibles top their "thanks, but no thanks" list.

Rachael Ray
The ubiquitous Rachael Ray is famous for transforming all kinds of foods into 30-minute meals, but she has a serious aversion to mayonnaise. "Mayo is a four-letter word to me and I avoid using it when I can. It's all about that texture. I even make a no-mayonnaise potato salad is perfect for picnics since you don't have to worry about spoiling."

Photo: Amazon

For me, it's cured fish or perhaps cold, leftover dark-meat chicken, gnawed bare-handed and shared with my minimally patient dogs.

For my husband -- who can't tolerate the smell of the pickled herring I down like a rabid porpoise -- it's almost inevitably the nearest Chinese joint's chicken and mixed vegetables sauteed in brown sauce, chased by a bourbon Old Fashioned, muddled from the unpretty orange that tags along in the delivery bag. The cocktail, I can fully support. The gloppily sauced crinkle-cut carrots have featured prominently in several of my nightmares.

These are rituals of a chosen solo cuisine, and Deborah Madison, author of "What We Eat When We Eat Alone", says it's not at all unusual that we're so diametrically opposed.

Deborah Madison: People eat what their spouses don't like a lot of the time. A number of men said of blood sausages, 'My wife doesn't like blood sausage, so when she's gone that's what I cook.'

Slashfood: How did you get started on this topic?

DM: Many years ago, I was invited to go with Oldways Preservation and Trust -- which is a food think tank out of Boston -- to a lot of Mediterranean countries. I got to bring my husband, who's an artist, and he was just a little awkward, I think. He didn't really know people but knew of them so he started asking this question kind of as a way of breaking the ice. He kept a little notebook and I never knew about this until I found it when we were moving a few years later.

SF: So many of the people you interviewed have common experiences -- they'll make a big steak or have herring. And then there were some that didn't fit the mold. What was the strangest thing you heard?

Read more about solo toast, herring and margarita mix after the jump.

Perhaps this is just indicative of the sort of folks with whom I keep company, but I've known at least half a dozen people who've used a brain can as comedic decor, and it's certainly been the butt of jokes around the blogosphere. I cannot, however, recollect any of 'em actually popping the top and feasting. My husband's Aunt Frances, though, couldn't get enough of them as a kid in Plymouth, NC, and told me how she'd hover right by her mother in the kitchen so she could gobble down brains and eggs straight out of the hot skillet.

Who am I to argue with Aunt Frances? I picked up the can in the picture above at Harris Teeter over Christmas in North Carolina, and fixed myself some brains and eggs for breakfast this morning. Picture after the jump.

From 60 Ways to Serve Ham (1930), Armour and Company

I'm interrupting the semi-regularly scheduled Midnight Sausage series to share molded food images and recipes from my personal collection of early-to-mid 20th century cookbooks. There will be aspic. There will be mousse. There will be various gelatins. All will be semi-solid and of debatable degrees of edibility.

Please feel free to shimmy and shake your way to the comments section to share your very own magical, masticable molds of yore.

Previously - Jellied Veal Salad