My first thought was grilled cheese, with French toast close behind, but that’s because when I think of croissants I think of them as the bread for a nice sandwich.
The iberico bacon is totally pretentious, because as Ben said, making it into bacon is absolutely unnecessary. Iiberico ham itself is not pretentious, but making it into bacon feels like it's just so people can say "Oh, it's not just bacon, it's Iberico bacon!"
Ben makes a good point. While most of the ingredients aren't pretentious, you're really only buying them for a spectacle dish (for a dinner party for example) but in a quantity that leaves you with more than you need for that dish. So once you've made that special meal, where do you use the rest of the ingredient? In your breakfast/lunch/mid-week dinner? If that makes any sense.
I keep four bottles of soy sauce. A general grocery store sauce, for general asian inspired dishes, a more pricy but still affordable sauce that is rich and thick. I use this for any higher e d dish im making, or dipping sauces. Then i have white soy sauce, which is a pretentious as heck things, that imuse when i dont want to add color to my dish. (It is mostly clear. Like tea where all the ice melted, but you can see it had tea). And finally a bottle of japanese sauce, that i pick up when im there once a year. Its around 400 yen a bottle. One of the five year aged, 500 year old tradition types. I use it almost exclusively over white fish, sometimes on cheese, etc. Literally the soy sauce is the point here.
Normally, I don't venture to make a comment...but the croissant cube can be found in South Korea. There is a bakery here that makes them but instead of what Ben and Barry got...well imagine that cube having layers of maple syrup or chocolate inside it. I was gifted one from one of my students....being able to just pull apart the layers and getting maple syrup with each bite....heavenly!!!!
That Kamebishi soy sauce is three times the price on the UK that it is in Japan. Over there it costs 1500 yen (200 yen more if you want the box!). This is more of a "Brit/Euro" pricing than it is the product being super expensive.
I see too many people agreeing with Jaime's pronunciation of poulet (poo/lay) which is correct. However! the product in question is called poulette affinée (mature hen) which is prounounced (poo-let). Ben is correct on this particular example
You guys should do a series that is the opposite of pick the premium. Like you taste test budget friendly versions of food that are typically considered to be gourmet or exclusive. I think it would be a great way to showcase that you don't have to break the bank to have great tasting food.
Repeating that part where Barry stumbled on his words asking if Jamie has offended the food team upon seeing the monstrosity presented in front of him. Hilarious!
😂 Never ask a rhetorical question unless you want a geeky answer from Ben. 🤓 I thought the potatoes were the pretentious Ingredient because there's a potato called 'La bonette' which sells for up to £400 per kg. I was going to suggest for Poppy when she does 'Pretentious Ingredients'. 😊🥔
£55 to NZ$112.30 for a chook, even an over inflated organic one, IS not only pretentious but pure craziness!! A standard free-range organic chook here averages out at NZ$18...and I'd pay that no problem for a celebration meal 😊
So are those fancy chickens also allowed to just wander around outside? Because that means that they also eat lots of bugs and other stuff, which is actually a really good thing as chickens are not herbivores.
As someone who has a bachelors degree and currently pursuing a master’s degree in poultry science, hearing the story of the chicken and the diet they are fed made me cringe. I am well aware of the myths and stigmas that follow the poultry industry but most of which do not have a scientific standing. I would be interested in seeing the farm’s research that backs their claim of all of the herbs and cows milk. Knowing how chicken distributed fat in their body compared to other animals it is hard for me to believe that feeding them cow’s milk will change the way they distribute fat into their muscle. If anyone at sorted has any of the research backing this please share. I would love to read it.
You normally don't put soy sauce in (or on) a Chawanmushi though. The basic understanding of Chawanmushi is to bring out the taste of the broth and the ingredients with as few disturbances as possible. It would have been great to see the soy sauce tested with a more befitting dish - why didn't they just get the the sashimi... T_T
Chickens mainly eat insects with a bit of seed/grain. Feeding them all grains is why they lack flavor in industrial sized farming. To take that even more extreme is exceptionally pretentious. If you've ever had a farmed raised chicken that's NOT given supplemental grains, they're SO much more flavorful.
Hmmm... that soy sauce I'm assuming is more of a finishing seasoning like finishing salt rather than something you'd throw into something as an ingredient during cooking?
I think some of these products are a bucket list try, but to pay 55 pounds for a chicken, no thanks, and I'd say when trying the others it would be a special occasion 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🦘🦘🦘🦘
The chicken seems similar to Kobe beef. The highest process, the best conditions. Do we feel it's pretentious BECAUSE we feel chicken is a cheap meat? Because it's chicken and not beef?
Hate to say it but I think the food team is really struggling without James C. Ben really summed it up with his comment to Jamie about offending them when he saw those 'Croissant' creations.
I don't find the soy sauce a horrific price at all. People spend £30 on wine routinely and that doesn't last anywhere near as long. If you're a regular sushi eater, why not?
So while Canadian dollars can't be compared 1:1 with the pound due to conversion rates, looking strictly at the median income in numbers, the numbers are pretty close to equal, 35k pounds to 40k CAD. A bog standard air chilled chicken here is $15-20. You CAN get them on sale for closer to $8, but that's the normal price. The higher end organic free range chickens are in the $35 range. Then if you look at organic, free range, local chicken from a butcher or farmer's market, it's coming in at $50 per chicken. I can't imagine what this pretentious chicken would cost us.
Given Ben's comment at the end about resetting what is considered normal, I'd be interested for these guys to go back over what they had previously said was pretentious, see if they still agree with themselves.
We need an episode with help from Hailey, Sortedteam get her to bring in real ingredients from Barry's kitchen and have him review them in the video but don't tell him. See if he admits it that he owns them as everyone else in the video slates them as the most prestigious of pretentious
It's an interesting question of "what is pretentious?" The bacon in of itself isn't pretentious, Barry serving it as part of his wine and canape party on a salt block is pretentious. There are a lot of very premium ingredients here. Then there is the chicken, which is so disgustingly pretentious I nearly gagged. Ben, if you won't call a chicken fed on 25 special botanicals and essential oils pretentious we need to get James back, because you've gone off the deep end and we need some Scottish sensibility.
Yes, completely agreed. The number of BS arguments for such an overpriced chicken ticks all the boxes for pretentiousness. The only thing that it missed is the packaging, which was somewhat lower standard than I am used to for chicken to be delivered in. But everything else about it screams pretentious.
I actually don't think the chicken was pretentious. To me a pretentious ingredient is something that is expensive for no real reason. The chicken is expensive because it requires a very specific environment for being raised and that environment fundamentally changes the finished product.
I agree that the chicken may be pretentious, but it's not like the earlier episodes. Most of these are just expensive. Ben's right, pretentiousness comes with the packaging, the claims, and the marketing. These ingredients are just expensive and some of them are rightfully so but even then, they aren't packaged that way. Where are my ingredients with diamond dust or gold foil or the ones with claims to extend my life or align my chakras?
The chickens are 100% pretentious, with all the faff about a diet of "wild herbs", "milk finished", and "essential oils". There's nothing even special about dandelion, horsetail, nettle, etc; they're literally just weeds.
I think it's a bit pretentious if it doesn't really outperform the regular thing. I don't really like bacon that's extra fatty so that's worse in my opinion. And the guys didn't mention it tasting much better either.
It's kinda interesting that a lot of these things are getting into more of the novelty territory (like the mustard ball and the Croissant Loaf), which can be pretentious, but usually aren't. I like how this whole series helped me differentiate what really is pretentious, crap, novelty, or just a high quality ingredient. The chicken is DEFINITELY pretentious AF.
I think what pushes the chicken into pretentious for me is that last diet of herbs and cows milk. My sister's chickens will eat a snake like a spaghetti noodle. Chickens aren't herbivores and giving them unnatural end of life food and then calling it better feels weird.
I've watched free range chickens raid a bin and eat a chicken carcass. They drop fabulous eggs and taste great. Essential oils? Almost as pretentious as Barry.
@@fingersfinesilver I’ve never seen a chicken do that before but I could for sure believe they would. Growing up we had free-range chickens and I whole heartedly agree that the eggs were great, even the green ones after the chickens would eat a bunch of alfalfa.
@@saulemaroussault6343 All herbivores will eat meat if an opportunity presents itself. There are countless cases of horses intentionally chomping on chicks and things like that. But I wouldn't suggest that they do it on a regular basis...
I love how I stopped the video when I saw the cube and went "CROISSANT LITERALLY DERIVES ITS NAME FROM ITS CRESCENT SHAPE" and then felt very vindicated when Ben confirmed my annoyance over this :D
You have a chicken fed with essential oils and Ben gives it a grade of "nearly pretentious"? If that isn't pretentious then I'm left to wonder what could possibly make him say something is pretentious? Maybe we should have a competition, the normals bring in the most pretentious ingredient they can find, anyone who can get Ben to admit that it is pretentious wins a free pass on one round of a future poker face video
To me, a big factor is the marketing vs. what is actually delivered. The sales pitch for the chicken (and the bacon and soy sauce, too, IMHO) had a lot of the pretentious vibe to them, but if they ultimately deliver a superior product (like the bacon and soy sauce), then I feel it's okay to say they are not pretentious. The chicken is more difficult because it sounds like all of the special processing yielded a very different product from run of the mill chicken. If the stand out adjective of the resulting product is "different" vs "superior", perhaps that's where it might risk getting labeled pretentious, especially if it's surrounded by a bunch of hype or buzz words. Having said all of that, I'd be curious if they would have recognized it as chicken had they not been told it was chicken in advance. :) Perhaps that could be some kind of new series, given how many things supposedly taste like chicken (and, apparently, how chicken can be prepared to NOT taste like chicken). Instead of "Pick the Premium", "Pickin' the Chicken". ;)
RIGHT! They are all foodies. If any of my mates bought a £30 bottle of soy sauce I’d mock them for the rest of their life. Their nickname would become ‘soy boy’
@@PeachyJohnson I'd buy it if it came in a half size I could use just for poke and sushi. But I occasionally bring home sashimi so that might make me a little different
I can't tell if "essential oils" means like "lavender and eucalyptus" or if it's more like when something contains "essential nutrients" and they just mean upscale stuff like sunflower and olive oils. Cause if they literally mean they're feeding them the stuff humans put in diffusers... that's usually poisonous? Doesn't seem great for keeping chickens alive.
@@AnnikaOakinnA Thats what I'm wondering about. However good quality oils (like levander, rose, eucalyptus etc) should not be toxic. Especially cold pressed one, they shouldnt contain any chemicals that can harm you. Its difficult to decide online when someone mentions essential oils as in the US its so burned in the language majority of people use it for the fragrant oils, while scientifically they mean completely different things.
Pretentious is the STORY you have to tell to justify a product being different than it original form. You put chicken on the dinner table you don’t have to tell the family where I came from, how it was raised, the food it ate, etc. You spend $55 on a bird you WANT to validate it with an explanation!
How's that any different from the soy sauce or the Ibérico bacon? Whatever processes are involved in raising that chicken are clearly making a noticeable difference in the final product. Ben and Jamie admitted it tasted unlike any other chicken. Either all three products are pretentious, or none of them are. The Ibérico, especially, is a straightforward comparison. Both products emphasize the special feed and non-standard husbandry of the animal to justify the price. And, the soy sauce people just really want you to know that their descendants aren't going to get other jobs until they've surpassed Japan's royal family record as one of the longest uninterrupted dynasties. (Please don't take unwarranted offense at what is just a cheeky, harmless joke.) Extrapolating your definition of pretentiousness to other products, you should also be able to put bacon or soy sauce on the table without feeling the need to tell everyone about how the pig was raised, what food it ate, or how a particular family has been making your soy sauce with a 250-year-old recipe for 17 generations. Ketchup or mayonnaise weren't invented yesterday either, but if Heinz decided to leverage their heritage in order to sell you oak-aged ketchup for ten times the price of regular ketchup, I think it would be unanimously declared pretentious. The bacon, chicken, and the soy sauce are, respectively, using "squirrels pray to be reborn as our pigs" or "ready-to-cook Chicken Kiev" and "we're the source material for ancestry.com" as selling points for the same reason. They are statement pieces, meant as ingredients only for premium restaurants. The regular person is only ever going to put them on their dinner table to show off to their guests.
I feel like some of these foods are just more "premium" than pretentious. To me the definition of pretentious is "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" and therefore the croissant bread is definitely pretentious 😂
See, I interpret pretentious, as contrasted with premium or quality or innovative or whatever, on the basis of whether they are selling the narrative of the effort expended more than the result. Monkey scat coffee, anything gold-leaf, etc. The croissant bread seemed the opposite to me, the baker trying to port the desirable qualities of a traditional croissant to a more easily handled and utilitarian shape. Speaking from personal experience, I enjoy croissants but for everyday bakery consumption I opt for something flat and toaster-ready [loaf bread, bagel, English muffin, etc]. I don't see what's pretentious about trying to adapt the croissant's attributes to that particular market segment.
I agree on the 'premium' vs 'pretentious' one - but a lot of the time it comes down to the use imo. Like, the iberico bacon one - there's a time and place for a super high quality bacon - but if it's just thrown in on appetizers and the party host says "Oh, this is *iberico* bacon, the best one out there" it's pretentious. For the croissant bread, I don't think it's pretentious - though as a french person I don't see the appeal of it :P . But having different shaped pastries with croissant techniques is just... more options, I guess.
@@JohnLee-ue6gy Croissants are really meant to be something you buy the day of, imo - or for more special occasions. It's pretty easy to heat up in the oven if needed, but yeah - they don't exactly fill the "flat/toaster-ready" approach.
@@JohnLee-ue6gy completely agree. Though I'd add, as Ben mentioned, sometimes the story or history/tradition of a products exceptional nature, i.e. the soy sauce, requires some factual retelling as explanation and therefore rather necessary to share in celebration of that product and tradition as well as justify it's cost. Thus, the story alone does not make it pretentious if it is, in fact, a premium product, especially when what makes it so is a process of tradition, etc.; however, when all they are selling is a story or unnecessary hype, i.e.- feeding chickens milk and tonics and using that as a means to overcharge for what is essentially a backyard hen, or they unnecessarily wrapped anything in gold leaf, or put it in some ridiculously lavish and unnecessary packaging to try and trick us consumers by making it seem 'special' and/or boogie they've then edged a possibly premium traditional product into the pretentious in efforts to capitalize on money powered snobbery.
That chicken was ABSURD. It isn't expensive to raise a perfectly content group of chickens. You can probably get a better quality just by spending how much that one chicken cost to raise like 10 normal chickens.
Hi! Spaniard here. Ben is absolutely right about iberico flavour being best as is. In Spain we have something "similar" to iberico bacon. It's basically a cube of iberico fat cured in salt, and my favourite way to eat it is veeeery thinly sliced and on a piece of hot toast, so that it melts a bit on the bread and it's DELICIOUS
8:26 Barry, come to Germany on a sunday morning. Everyone and their nan go to the bakery on sunday mornings to buy fresh breakfast bread. You'll feel like you live in a fairytale every weekend here haha
@@SortedFood It IS! Germany is Bread-Land! 😋 And the price of normal food is half of yours... EIGHT POUNDS STERLING FOR A CHICKEN?? How can folks in the UK afford to EAT??? 😱
Jamie suggesting Barry shouldn’t have any more cholesterol containing food for three weeks after eating the cube croissant bread toastie sounds like great balance. 😁
I feel like there was a bit of a disconnect on the soy sauce part. The fancy ingredient was clearly dark soy sauce which is a distinct and different style of soy sauce to light or regular soy sauce which is commonly used in the west. So when you have the bit where y'all are comparing the fancy ingredient to the normal sauce you use in the kitchen you are comparing apples to oranges. They are different styles of sauce rather than being different qualities of the same style of sauce. There are readily available cheap dark soy sauces which would have made for a more accurate comparison. Lots of the comparisons they make between the two soy sauces are actually differences between all dark and light soy sauces rather than between cheap and expensive dark soy sauce. If you wanted to compare something to the normal soy sauce that you use everyday perhaps you should have found an expensive light/regular soy sauce. To make a comparison to a western food it's kind of like if the pretentious ingredient were a fancy port or sherry and you compared it to your normal table red or white wine. They are related but not enough so to compare the quality rather than just the differences between those styles of wine.
Yea i was baffled too. I love dark soy sauce and the idea of comparing it with normal soy sauce seems wack, ones an ingredient, ones a condiment. Tho i think Sherry and table wine isn't a good analogy, those can be the same product but worse quality A beter analogy i think would be normal and balsamic vinegar.
It isn't dark soy sauce. The dark soy sauce you are referring to is the type where sugar and/or caramel is added to. That expensive soy sauce is just aged regular soy sauce. The light type.
@@TsLeng yeah on further research I think you are correct. I was only familiar with Chinese styles of soy sauce in which aged soy sauce 老抽 is called dark soy sauce in english (often they add molasses or something but it's not necessary it can just be aged), so I assumed since this was an aged sauce that it was dark soy sauce, I was unaware that japanese styles of soy sauce have a whole different making and categorization process. And the sauce they use is Japanese, so I'm out of my wheelhouse when talking about it.
That soy sauce is perfect with fresh mochi! We bring it out every year along with other high end ingredients and dip freshly made mochi into it, so good!! Especially when you crisp up the mochi •chef kiss• I look forward to it every year. It’s definitely a once a year soy sauce! You said it best: application is key with an ingredient like that!
That sounds so much better than Chawanmushi!! I have never heard of Chawanmushi with soy sauce anyway - You want to taste the Dashi in those, not soy sauce. Made me sad for the soy sauce and the Chawanmushi hahaha.
We do dark soy sauce with jambus here. It sounds totally odd to put soy on fruit but it is sooooooo good. Also, a good fried egg with some dark soy sauce with freshly steamed rice is all one needs for a good meal.
@@carolin9697 Eh. Chawanmushi has actual flavour. Mochi is pretty much flavourless and really chewy (and yes, I've had some incredibly high quality mochi; it was incredibly boring for the price).
@@tams805 I know Chawanmushi has flavor ;) But as they wanted to test the flavour of the soy sauce, our argument was: anything simple, such as sashimi and mochi, might enhance and bring our the flavour of a good soy sauce a lot better than something like Chawanmushi that is usually not even eaten with soy sauce/or doesn't contain anything, BECAUSE it's got its own flavour of dashi broth, the egg and so on
The Cube thing even as a cheese sandwich would be or might be quite good if was just two slices with some cheese in between. You wouldn't make a multilevel cheese sandwich with regular bread so don't do it with the cube crescent.
I have to admit I missed James for this. His reactions to "potentially-pretentious" ingredients were always entertaining. Frankly, I think they were all pretentious as none of them are really necessary. First two were luxuries perhaps, like if you can afford it, why not? kind of thing.
Love the video, this was definitely a swap from the usual grab bag of "Which of these does Barry own already", and some of the prices here, OOF! The croissant cube definitely seemed like it would be super tasty! I was wondering btw, are there any plans on releasing the Live Pass it On's to the channel at some point?
@@kgrindon Then you might want to subscribe for their Twitter channel too, because it was broadcasted over and over that you could rewatch the Live Shows for a couple of days.
@@kgrindon That's a bummer. Not sure about the website, but I also got emails about this. Could have been because I already bought the tickets though. Anyways, onwards and upwards, for the next live event you'll be prepped .
I think I've said this in each of the last 5-6 "Pretentious Ingredients" videos but it feels like the Sorted crew has strayed from the original intent of their series and lost track of what pretentious means on a measuring scale.
Forcing an animal to eat a special diet to fatten them up and “distribute” that fat, probably isn’t great for the bird. Would love to read more about that aspect.
Cornish cross are bred to be slaughter ready in 8 weeks. Many of them die not long after the 8 week mark because their bodies get to big, causing strain on the organs, and sometimes just being unable to move. A lot of US homestead people grow them because they get more chicken for less cost. That said, milk finished poultry isn't uncommon in non-factory farmed poultry. The milk is left in pans to curdle (not the same as pasteurized milk) and poultry will eat the fat and protein rich curds. It's one way to reduce waste on a farm, if you happen to have a milk cow producing more than you can use.
If it’s worth anything, i agree with you with most animals, but chickens in particular will literally eat anything if left to their own devices. Including their own brood if one shows a sign of weakness or illness, or has otherwise gotten harmed (and that’s while still having full access to food otherwise - when I raised chickens I was constantly making sure everyone was growing at a same rate and healthy, then quarantining any chicken who was looking smaller or sick until they got better/bigger both for the sake of the other birds and for the sake of itself). Traditionally chickens have always been fed a lot of byproduct scraps around the farm, including (but not limited to) veg scraps and byproducts deemed not fit for human consumption. I have no doubt the milk thing started as a means to use up those byproducts, or just some slightly rancid milk, and someone started to notice a difference in the chicken meat following the process, and then decided to market off of it.
The soy sauce was definitely worth a purchase. I can't imagine buying any of the bacon or the £55 chicken, and I'm willing to pay for better meats. The croissant cube was off-putting because of that hideous cheese toasty. The episode itself was beautifully shot.
I have some better soy sauce and it is absolutely worth twice cheap soy sauce. I am not pretentious and don't buy lots of premium things, but some nice soy sauce is awesome and it lasts for an eternity so you can't waste it. Not for mixing in fried rice or whatever, but for drizzles and dipping etc. There is a kind called "white soy sauce" that I could find on Amazon and it was delicious. Even Japanese made Kikkoman uses Alcohol as a preservative vs. Sodium benzoate which is in the American version. You can even taste the difference in that and I don't really care about "chemicals" and whatnot.
To me, the difference between high-quality (thus expensive) and pretentious ingredients is just how likely you're going to go out of your way to make sure other people know you have the knowledge, taste, class, wealth, etc to serve up the ingredient in order to impress others. If you find yourself tempted to keep something out on display during the meal rather than put it away when you're done with it like the more common version of the ingredient, or are explaining it's backstory to get across how much better it is than the common version, it's probably pretentious.
Yeah I think that’s why the chicken would be pretentious and the other three weren’t, but the bacon got close. Like I would probably buy the croissant if I had a use in mind for it or the bacon and soy sauce if I wanted to make something a bit higher quality. But the chicken didn’t seem to taste better than the regular high quality one so if I wanted to splurge on chicken I would not go for that one unless I was purposely trying to show off.
If you had either that soy sauce or that bacon, you'd definitely be letting everyone know. They are clear, statement pieces. All three of them, the chicken, iberico and the soy sauce only have a place in elite restaurants or on the dining table of a person trying to impress their guests with their refined and premium tastes. So, either all of them are pretentious or neither of them are.
Ben is on superb form today. Shady right out of the gate, with a generous side of super-geek info, flights of French fancy, and a sprinkling of Bennuendo to spice things up 😂
As a chicken keeper... That chicken is disgustingly pretentious. Clarification, I don't have a problem with feeding chickens meat, or herbs or wild plants. Like... Mine get all that. That's not fancy that (and the grain) is simply normal. The milk isn't something I feed regularly, but it does end up in their diet occasionally from kitchen scraps. So not even much issue there. It's the essential friggen oils that's fecking pretentious! And the marketing. Most of that listed diet is a normal healthy diet for well kept chickens.
When I managed a goat dairy, the hens were basically the disposal and pest control system. Excess garden veg, fridge scraps, whey, milk, grain that the does turned their noses up at - the hens ate it all. Only roosters were eaten. They were delicious.
@@karjis891 Depends how much bacon you put on there. imo, if you are putting the same amount of bacon on a BLT as you would if you were just adding it to a normal sandwich you are doing it wrong.
I live at the border between France and Spain, my grandparents served us iberico almost every week end (grandpa retired butcher with connections) it's just amazing
Was it tho? It didn't pretend it was the next step in croissant making or smtj, it wss just a well known food in an interesting shape sold for a logical price
