While the culinary aspect of my journey continues to be a source of great pleasure, there are times when certain food products terrify me. So far, I would say these things are always seperate from "traditional" Yucatecan foods, which are pretty much some sort of assembly of whole foods. What's terrifying are things with less-than-noble origins. In honor of these food products, I've decided to start a series on "terrifying food products of Mexico." This is the first entry in that series.
It's Guten! Guten is some sort of processed meat product which makes me think of potted-meat-food-product (aka Spam) in a plastic baggie. Not only does Guten come with two kinds of meat (beef and chicken) it also has a boatload of gluten thrown in to make it stick together and a vertiable cocktail of preservatives, salt, and probably MSG. Guten also comes cooked, so you don't have to bother with that pesky little requirement for eating meat. "Just add your special touch," it says. What it doesn't say - "we'll be sure to neutralize it with this flavorless cardboard, unless you add so much salt that you can't taste anything else anyways."
2 comments:
Well arent you a picky eater? ;)
Seriously though, I buy these every half a month and while the picadillo ones are kinda "meh" (though they do taste better than flavourless cardboad) the ones that really shine are the Fajitas en Salsa Tlaquepaque and the ones in Salsa Verde.
You have to give Guten some credit, they're cheap (16 pesos for the Tlaquepaque one) and the sauces they come marinated in are pretty flavorful and abundant.
When Guten came out a couple of years ago I immediately was like "WTF is this sh!t? it's cheap, made from soy, guten and meat and therefore must be bad and blah blah blah angry rant" (quite inmature now that I think of it :/ )
But then the economy went down the toilet and buying a kilo of meat for 95 pesos became an economically unwise choice, so I decided to give Guten a chance and mother of god and everything else considered Holy! They're actually pretty decent to awesome depending on which type you buy.
But if you want a really terrifying food from Mexico, try any Gonela brand cheese, they come in your favorite varieties like sh!t, diarrhea, bloody diarrhea and everyones favorite, infected pus diarrhea, mmmmmm hmmmmm, just like Mommas home cooking! (Ask Eric if he ever drove by the Gonela factory here in Merida near Fracc. Las Americas, everyday around noon this smell emanates from the factory, a smell which makes a porta-potty smell like potpourri!)
Anyhoo, nice blog you guys have here, and have a nice warm hug from your neighbors down south :D
Just returned from Cabo and was looking online to see if I could find exactly what it was that I had eaten that was called Gluten... in what I assumed was 'chicken' since there was a picture of a small chick on it. I actually that it was quite nummy. I used it in fajitis and later chicken salad on bagels. Added a little chipolte mayo, onion and a squeeze of fresh lime and it great. Don't be so hard on this little processed package of numminess!!
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