Monthly Archives: May 2011

degustation, eating, food, hl, reviews, supermarkets

Duncan’s Degustations – Dr Oetker frozen pizzas

12 Comments

Like a gift from the heavens, a PR person offered me frozen pizzas to sample. I’m really not the ideal candidate, but with my Duncan’s Degustations series underway, how could I resist the opportunity to add to my spectrum of likely-ick experiences?

Offered a sample from the range of four flavours of Dr Oetker Pizza Ristorante pizzas, I asked for one. To my dismay, I was sent eight (8, acht!) of Herr Doktor Oetker’s frozen creations. It was already a hard ask for me to contemplate one, let alone multiple frozen pizzas.

I can’t recall when I last (pre-Oetker) ate a frozen dough disc with topping. I mean, I don’t even buy takeaway pizza. I make my own pizza. Often. Bottom to top. Sometimes it even has pineapple on it.

Dr Oetker, well established German ingredient company (nowadays prominent in preprepared foods, basic cookbooks including one classic translated into English, plus shipping and finance), has for some reason decided to expand into the Australian market with, of all things, imported pizzas. That’s right. Your supermarket freezer cabinet contains pizzas imported from Europe. How’s that for pointless food-miles? At least the origin isn’t fudged (in fact, the packaging is distinctly international), unlike the bread and pastries at Woolworths which are no longer clearly marked.

Back to the food-tasting side of this. You remove the very flat pizza from its shrink-wrap plastic cover (tasty touch that) and pop it in the oven at 220C for 11-13mins. And out comes…

Having eight of these buggers, I had to share them around. My parents were more than a little resistant, but bravely agreed to try Mozzarella. My nice neighbours are more open to preprepared foods, so I thought they might offer a different perspective on all flavours. And Mittens and I ate the Spinaci and the Funghi. (Curiously, perhaps for quarantine reasons, there are no meat pizzas (except tuna) being imported into Australia, despite the German range being about 50% meaty.)

Surprisingly, the tasters’ opinions were very similar:

  • Assertive but not stale herb/garlic aromas.
  • A fairly pleasant but bland taste for all varieties tested.
  • A thin, crumbly pastry base (parcooked) with an unpleasant, pasty-doughy mouthfeel.

The underside before baking (parcooked base).

This is one of those rare food products which is entirely edible, but left the tasters cold. In an emergency, I would willingly eat these pizzas. Given a choice, I’d choose a chunk of cheese or an apple or a slice of toast with Vegemite instead. Surely any food should evoke a stronger preference than this, whether positive or negative? What a strange achievement by Dr Oetker’s food technologists.

chocolate, eating, food, hl

Easter goes creme-free, heathen and beany-filled

5 Comments

A gorgeous Easter in Melbourne came, lasted a little longer than usual (extra public holiday), and went, leaving us full of bready and chocolatey goodness. For me, this Easter brought memories of childhood joy and contemporary disappointment, alongside my special Hot Heathen Buns.

While supermarkets tout “fruitless” hot cross buns for Easter (indeed aptly named rubbish!) and food mags feel the need to bling up the buns – what was it in Epicure this year? Apricot and cardamom, for god’s sake – I prefer big puffy peely curranty joys of Hot Heathen Buns:

For reasons unknown, this year’s buns were free of marauding devil-chicks.

Now onwards to childhood memories… I have had a long-standing addiction to Cadbury Creme Eggs. Back in the days before they were available in Australia, I had the dubious advantage of spending part of my primary school years in the UK, where Creme Eggs were available all year round (if memory serves me correctly). Heaven. I’ve always liked food with (pleasant) surprises inside, so a chocolate egg with white and yellow fondant is quite the thing for me. In fact, this love of things with innards probably explains why I find Easter eggs so disappointing nowadays. The opportunity to crack open an egg to get at the yummies/yumminess inside is pretty limited nowadays, as this kind of product barely exists anymore except at the most stylish end of the market.

When Cadbury Creme Eggs appeared in Australia in the early 1980s it was like a gift from a higher being, albeit only once a year for a limited Easter season. This particular food-fanatic-to-be was more than a little choccy-joyful. Although I can’t remember the exact year of introduction, I clearly recall even more joy at discovering in my final year of high school that Target had discounted their Creme Eggs by more than 50% after Easter. I bought sixteen of them, consuming them in three days whilst huddled over a column heater (my parents’ house was an icebox) studying for mid-year exams.

In stark contrast, recent years have brought a waning of my enthusiasm for my treasured Creme Eggs. As my consumption of good chocolate has increased, I’ve found Cadbury Dairy Milk less and less pleasant. And so, it might be the case that 2011 marked my last Cadbury Creme Egg.

(As a side note, the southern hemisphere Cadbury Creme Eggs (they were made in New Zealand at first, not sure about now) are bit different from the Mother Egg. In the UK, the fondant in the eggs is smooth and somewhat runnier, but the chocolate is the foul British Cadbury Dairy Milk, even further removed from “chocolate” in my opinion.)

Perhaps as an attempt to find a surrogate comfort egg, this year I also returned to Red Tulip Humpty Dumpty. Never the best egg, it nonetheless always had the charm of containing chocolate beanies. I might be mistaken, but I think at one point that charm was spolit when the beanies were put in a plastic bag inside the egg… whether or not that’s a false memory, I can tell you they are now free-rattling beanies. The chocolate isn’t great, but it’s more pleasant than much other cheap Easter egg chocolate.

I wonder what I should turn to next year…