Fruits & veg disguised as junk foods

[pulledpork]

I want to find ways to disguise fruits and vegetables as junk and processed foods. Things such as chips, french fries, biscuits, cake, baked beans, turkey dinosaurs, chicken nuggets or other processed meats. 

 

I've thought of trying agar agar to make a spaghetti out of a veg juice. Not technically a junk food I know.

 

Any other suggestions?

[liuzhou]

If you want to disguise a vegetable as crisps or French fries, try using a potato! For baked beans, use that well known vegetable, beans. Bake them.

 

See the spiralizer topics for ways to make vegetable "pasta".

[Thanks for the Crepes]

Trader Joe's offers freeze dried salted green beans. They are kind of expensive, but because I don't own a freeze drier, I sometimes buy them. They are so, so good. I LOVE these things.

 

They also offer ridiculously expensive kale chips in a bag. Something like $15 a pound.  Dunno how good they are, because I know how to buy a 99 cent bunch of kale, rip it into chip sized pieces, toss it into a clean recycled produce bag with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, then spread out on a couple of cookie sheets in a 400 F oven until dehydrated and crispy. My husband who despises anything he perceives as health food devours my kale chips.

 

Roasted cauliflower, when done correctly, is also crave worthy, but perhaps not marketable as a packaged snack, if that is what you're looking for @pulledpork.

 

"Turkey dinosaurs"? Okay, I give up. Do tell, what in the world are they?

[Deryn]

A little further clarification, please. You want to use fruits and vegetables IN a food you might make at home that resembles a commercially marketed 'junk/processed' food? Or do you want to shape fruits and vegetables to LOOK LIKE various junk foods? The purpose of this pursuit is .... to hide the fruits and vegetables from children or picky eaters so they get more nutrition, etc. without being aware of it? Or ... ?

 

I know there are whole cookbooks out there (and a million websites, many started by 'mommies') on how to hide the vegetables from the kids in meals and snacks. Hiding the fruit .. well .. not sure that for most that is much of an issue. If this is about kids, most like at least some kinds of fruit because it is sweet so I am not too sure that is usually a problem that most seek to solve.  

 

If you want to truly disguise one food as another, you might want to look into how Heston Blumenthal (in particular - he is a master at this) and other modernists have been doing it for years.

 

However, another 'suggestion' (based on the idea that what you are trying to do is indeed 'hide the veg' from kids) is ... beets in chocolate cake.

[liuzhou]

38 minutes ago, Deryn said:

A little further clarification, please.

 

I agree. Some clarification as to why you want to make fruit and vegetables look like other foods might help, especially as some of those foods you list are already vegetables.

 

Chinese vegetarian cuisine often tries to emulate meat dishes. They mainly use konjac and wheat gluten. The results look like meat, but taste nowhere near. I don't get the point.

 

I have written extensively on Chinese vegetarian food here.

 

 

Edited May 5, 2016 by liuzhou (log)

[pulledpork]

Turkey dinosaurs must be a British thing, i used to love them growing up... and Turkey Twizzlers.

 

Basically I am looking to 'truly' disguise fruits and veg as (or in) processed foods a la Heston. It's for adult picky eaters. 

[cakewalk]

6 minutes ago, pulledpork said:

Turkey dinosaurs must be a British thing, i used to love them growing up... and Turkey Twizzlers.

 

Basically I am looking to 'truly' disguise fruits and veg as (or in) processed foods a la Heston. It's for adult picky eaters. 

I don't understand this. If they're adults and they don't want to eat fruits and vegetables, well, that's their choice, no? I think most of the "disguised" stuff for children is heavily doctored with sugar. There are things like brownies made with beans or beets. I'm not a big fan, but many people seem to like it, and the whole point is that you'd never guess the secret ingredient that makes it "healthy."

 

 

[liuzhou]

14 minutes ago, pulledpork said:

Turkey dinosaurs must be a British thing,

 

Well, I've been British all my long life and never heard of them.

 

I'm still dying to know why you want to disguise vegetables as chips*/fries. It doesn't make any sense.

 

*I take it you are using 'chips' in the British sense.

 

i still don't know why you are proposing doing this. They may be picky; that doesn't mean they are stupid.

Edited May 5, 2016 by liuzhou (log)

[Alex]

6 hours ago, pulledpork said:

I want to find ways to disguise fruits and vegetables as junk and processed foods. Things such as chips, french fries, biscuits, cake, baked beans, turkey dinosaurs, chicken nuggets or other processed meats. 

 

I've thought of trying agar agar to make a spaghetti out of a veg juice. Not technically a junk food I know.

 

Any other suggestions?

 

Is this a school project? It sounds like you want to make fruits and vegetable more appealing to those who normally wouldn't eat them.

[liuzhou]

You know, Heston doesn't disguise one food as another in order to deceive picky eaters. He does it to surprise and amuse and justify the huge prices he charges.

He works in very expensive restaurants that have more chefs/cooks than customers, with millions of pounds of hi-tech equipment. Are you able to reproduce that?

 

Again, you tell us what you want to do, but never tell us why. Or the setting.

 

Yes, sounds like a school project.

Edited May 5, 2016 by liuzhou (log)

[liuzhou]

And even if you were to pull off making something that looks like junk food in order to placate fussy eaters, your audience would take one bite and know it wasn't the real deal.

 

AS I've mentioned before, Chinese chefs have been doing this for centuries (where do you think Heston got snail porridge from? every cheap shack round has been serving it since Chairman Mao was but a glimmer in his grandmother's eyes) but, although this fake food looks like the real thing, it never tastes real. It sometimes gets vaguely close, but you end up knowing you haven't eaten the meat you wanted. I've tasted "beef", "chicken", "duck", "pork" yet none of them really tasted like that.

[Deryn]

As Liuzhou continues to point out (very correctly), unless you are secretly hiding vegetables in some food that a child ordinarily eats and likes, I think you are barking up the wrong tree here, even if you go the Heston route.

 

Heston doesn't really try to fool people at the taste level usually - he primarily likes to disguise the outward appearance so they are 'surprised' when they bite into what looks like one thing and tastes like another. He may add 'smells' wafting near the plate as well to convince people that what they are about to eat is really something else - but, even that doesn't fool educated tastebuds once the food hits the palate. He may investigate the chemical composition of various foods and ingredients to further help with the 'surprise' element - but the 'surprise' element is what he is mostly about - and you are asking about making stuff that is 'no surprise' for the diner (in other words, they expect a French fry made of potato - they get something that both looks like and tastes like a French fry and leave the table believing that is what they ate - where is the 'fun' or purpose in that?) which seems quite the opposite thing. If the adult diner wants French fries made of potatoes - give them exactly that or you will fail in your stated mission in most cases I think. If they hate parsnips, why would you force an adult to eat them by trickery - and never have them know they ate them? Heston wants people to know what they ate - but only at the moment he wants them to discover that fact (at the moment they taste it).

 

If you are trying to fool an adult eater into thinking he just ate French fries made of potatoes, even if they look like the normally consumed item in colour, shape and presumably texture, only potatoes will probably taste like potatoes once you take a bite. And unless you remove the colour from any vegetable (save perhaps a parsnip which is a similar colour to a potato), even getting the fry to look exact;y like the one made of potato is going to be very difficult - not to mention that the properties of most vegetables are different so if you fry or bake a parsnip or other vegetable like a French fry/chip, they often do not match in final texture (most will be 'soggier' than potato fries/chips). Perhaps a kid who has little life 'eating' experience will buy it, but, I doubt if many adults can be so fooled.

 

p.s. If you really absolutely have to do this, it will probably necessitate taking everything down to the chemical/molecular level and recreating foods with 'chemicals' (examples might exist in the flavourings added to various potato chips to 'simulate' salt and vinegar or barbeque or chicken teriyaki tastes on the surface - most of which fail abysmally and may not be exactly healthy anyway). TVP is another possibility - soy masquerading as x, y or z - but many of us should not be consuming that stuff either!

Edited May 5, 2016 by Deryn (log)

[Thanks for the Crepes]

For any who are curious like I was about Turkey Dinosaurs or Twizzlers. The "British" was enough to find them on a search which was unsuccessful without that info. I'm surprised the dinosaurs especially never made it to our shores, because kids would absolutely love those. They could even be good if made from real cutlets instead of ground up processed ???

 

Too bad the OP failed to answer my direct question after I had tried to provide some helpful suggestions and has ignored other direct questions by other posters trying to help.  I delight in finding ways to make veggies special and crave worthy.

 

Fried zucchini will disappear at a much faster rate than zukes prepared any other way, I have found, and it does not have to be greasy. I also posted about some oven-fried eggplant that really elevates that vegetable here.

[Deryn]

'School project' seems to have hit the nail on the head I think. Very frustrating when so many of us like to help and to provide our insight but some new posters bomb in with questions which are inarticulate or are sometimes even shady/evasive about what it is they really wish to know or to discuss - and then they seem to disappear as fast as they emerged.

Edited May 6, 2016 by Deryn (log)

[pbear]

On 5/5/2016 at 1:49 AM, pulledpork said:

I've thought of trying agar agar to make a spaghetti out of a veg juice. Not technically a junk food I know.

 

If this sort of thing interests you, I'd recommend you download Texture by eG member Martin Lersch.  Free pdf and very well done.

[Deryn]

pbear - Texture is an excellent reference however the OP was (and still is, in my mind) very unclear about exactly what he wants to do and why. And it looks as though he isn't coming back again to explain himself further at this point. We are probably talking amongst ourselves (a fun thing but not helping the OP much I think) right now.

 

Making spaghetti strands out of vegetable juice may work fine as an interesting technique and 'surprise' element for the diner but if the idea is to completely fool an adult eater to ensure that person actually happily consumes whatever food product on the plate thinking they are eating 'junk food' while unknowingly eating vegetables they don't like, I am not sure that agar agar noodles will do the trick, unless they are smothered in gravy or ketchup perhaps (whatever the diner DOES like) so you can't tell what they contain as the flavouring ingredient - but then why bother? Vegetable juice tastes a lot like tomatoes - so if they don't like tomatoes for instance, ketchup or tomato sauce would not be appealing methinks.

 

According to what I understand from the OP, he wants to HIDE the taste of vegetables and fruit from adult diners (so even that suggestion of his that he make these noodles out of agar agar and vegetable juice is not going to achieve that objective). The noodles will still taste of vegetables - nothing he suggested will disguise that part and agar agar has no taste of its own - so the question still is will they eat much of it if they hate vegetables that much? The only way to disguise vegetables and fruit tastes/textures, etc. from adults is probably by looking at how mommies do it for their kids (by including small amounts in casseroles, breads, soups, smoothies and the like) and hoping that the adults he is feeding are no brighter or more observant than a child might be.

 

One also needs to better define what is meant by 'junk food' in this case. If one is primarily referring to single or few ingredient items ... like French fries or popcorn or potato chips or gum or chocolate bars .. I don't know how one might conceivably add a large amount of real fruit or vegetable nutrition (if nutritional advantage is the aim - not even sure that is the case though) to those items while also retaining their original taste (that of the standard unadulterated junk food item) in order to (ostensibly) get more nutrition into someone who will not eat those fruits or vegetables otherwise.

Edited May 6, 2016 by Deryn (log)