Fast-Food Chefs, Having It Their Way

[Gifted Gourmet]

article from the NY Times

correspondents said that they had created dishes including pancake-batter funnel cakes cooked in the hash brown fryer and tortilla pizza from the oven... pots bubbled with homemade soup made with bacon, hamburger meat, ketchup and salad dressing, among other things... deep-fry the house pecan pie at Long John Silver's — when there was fresh oil...  barbecued freestyle, mixing mustard, spicy hot sauce, ketchup and sugar from opened packets with chicken strips, then sizzling it all under the "baked muffins" setting in a McDonald's oven.

Ever consider this aspect of fast foods? when the menu gets tedious and boring, create something unique ... interesting ...

[jgm]

Somehow, the idea that fast-food employees are making their own concoctions, restores a little bit of my faith in mankind. Bravo to them!

Obviously, it's not going to produce 4-star food. But I applaud their inventiveness, their creativity, and their spirit.

[Chris Cognac]

That would be a really cool contest...what they could make using only the stuff found inside the fast food restaurant....hmmm...maybe I should make some calls!

[Gifted Gourmet]

So, a hypothetical question might now be posed here:

Knowing what you do about the popular fast food outlets, what combinations do you think might be possible?

Mixing a Horsey Sauce from Arby's with maybe a different sauce from another chain .. what might be the outcome??

Go for it! wild and wacky imaginary combinations desirable!!

[jsolomon]

Being in the military, this doesn't surprise me at all.

You would not believe the lengths gone to to make MRE's more palatable.

[chef koo]

big deal. poor college students have been doing that in dorms with the pantry bits for decades

[Grub]

I wonder if an upcoming episode of Bravo's Top Chef will feature a challenge like this?

I also wonder if an upcoming episode of Food Network's Next Celebrity Personality (or whatever it's called) will feature a challenge like this. Except, of course, instead of cooking anything, the contestants will be tasked with interviewing the cooks, and displaying their sparky personality, wit and charm.

[jkonick]

I worked at Subway for a few months and we did some interesting things when business was slow.

One thing that we always used to make was pizza - take a slice of the stale, unusable bread and put tomato sauce (for the meatball subs) and just a variety of meats and vegetables on it with cheese. Put it in the oven for about thirty seconds and voila! Subway pizza.

We also experimented with cooking the vegetables in the oven before putting them on the sandwich, instead of the other way around. You can almost carmelize onions in one of those things.

We got as much free soda as we wanted, so I came up with a lot of combinations of soda. My personal favorite was something I liked to call the "Subway Sunrise," on part iced tea, one part one part lemonade, two parts orange soda. If you got it right, the soda would stratify, hence the sunrise.

We almost fried an egg on the (incredibly, incredibly hot) inside of the door of the oven. We put oil on there, then realized a) Subway doesn't have eggs (not fresh ones, anyway) and b) the oil might catch on fire.

[Chris Cognac]

Being in the military, this doesn't surprise me at all.

You would not believe the lengths gone to to make MRE's more palatable.

←

Oh yea....I spent 4 yrs as an Infantryman with the 101st and became quite the MRE gourmet....My fav was the omellet cooked with the crackers, the cheese potatoes and then lots of hot sauce dumped in...all mixed together in the brown "big" bag....oh yea....

[Lilija]

I used to work at 7-11, and like the Subway creativity, we would get sick of eating write-off hot dogs, every single night.

Some popular meals that come to mind were the frozen burritos, warmed up, and covered with chili, cheese, and japapenos, then finished in the cookie oven till the nacho cheese got a little browned.

We'd also take those pre-made subs apart, and fix them up, by "frying" the ham and fillings, in the cookie oven (it was a small convection oven, made for baking those frozen dough lumps real fast), and putting the sammiches back together, all toasted and heated up.

Cutting up hot dogs, mixing it with frozen mac & cheese dinners, pints of Ben & Jerry's sacrificed for sundaes...

I too, experimented with beverages, my favorite combo was a half Cherry Slurpee, half Cherry Coke mix. We made "double" pots of coffee, for ourselves, using twice the coffee, for one pot...that stuff was the BEST. I still love 7-11 coffee, but nothing compared to that extra strong stuff. Another good one was the orange soda flavored Slurpee, with a shot of vanilla flavored creamer mixed it.

Many months of midnight shifts, dire boredom, and hunger, drove us to invent a whole new form of cuisine.

[rooftop1000]

Oh yeah Burger King way back when they had a salad bar....

The original "creation" was an onion ring topped with pickle and cheese run through the broiler

Quickly followed by Orange drink Syrup mixed into Vanilla shake....Creamsicle shake

We deep fried all the veggies from the salad bar especially mushroom slices for burgers...but we deep fried lots of stuff just to do it

boy do I miss the days of slipping an expired burger into the waistband of the orange polyester pants to chow down at the dumpster

tracey

Edited April 15, 2006 by rooftop1000 (log)