Well… Eating a Little Seizures pizza costs me as the consumer a lot more than its price at the “restaurant” (I’ve worked there, it’s disgusting, none of the ingredients actually have flavor (not even kidding). They “flavorize” all their stuff with “cheezy powder” which is a mix of MSG and nutritive yeast that’s been bred to taste loosely like Parmesan). What with the antacids, and Pepto Bismol, and the Immodium AD, and the hemorrhoid cream 
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Its actually my very favorite terrible pizza. Even as a life long New Yorker (not as in the city but that metro area), if I’m super hung over or just have to eat crap chain pizza Little Caesar’s is the only one I can stomach. I think its because it reminds me of school cafeteria pizza from when we got “upgraded” from dollar store Ellio’s knock offs to roughly triangular approximations of real pizza. But for whatever reason I find it not actively disgusting like most other chains, and it has a sort of nostalgic junk food taste that hits the spot once every 3 years. Like McDonald’s cheeseburgers, the really basic happy meal style ones. It doesn’t taste like food exactly. But it tastes good. Like childhood and self hatred I guess? Which I like sometimes. When I want to roll in my own sweat and moan.
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Ah, yeah, my go-to for that is about 1-inch cubes of pork fried in canola oil, because apparently diced pork chops aren’t greasy enough. Whenever my mom’s depression would start getting bad, that was all the meals for a few weeks until she came out of the slump, unless dad noticed. He’d pick up kitchen duties and make special mashed potatoes (instant mashed potatoes with whatever’s in the fridge mixed in). They didn’t have much culinary creativity, but they did their best. Nowadays, my dad and I have a wood pellet smoker. Probably the most amazing food-thing ever.
I swear you could run Bic pens and AA batteries through that thing and they’d come out tasting like orgasms and filet mignon of rare endangered rhinoceros.
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Say what you want about fake crab but I’ve recently gone on a high-protein low-carb diet and those sticks make for an excellent snack.
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The joys of this modern age:
http://amzn.com/B003EX2ECM
(1 kg on amazon)
or better yet:
someone able to supply 500 metric tons per month
but yeah, I agree with the consensus this is unlikely to work out as a money saver
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The only way I can see Transglutaminase getting banned is if/when some dude gets his hand stuck to his dick and the news picks up on it.
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Wow. That’s wow. But when you wrap up you end up where me and my dad are. Bonding over hard core barbecue. I’d love to toy around with a wood pellet grill, but both of our sensibilities are around pulling the most you can out of the cheapest product. So for the last 5 year I’ve been buying him first a Weber kettle. And then all the attachments toys and fun nonsense needed to make it smoke ribs right good. Fishing used to be our thing, but then the boat done blowed up so now its meat.
@tribune the fact that you can find it online is exactly my point. You had to find it online. Your first link quotes $2.73/oz. Compare that to the price of salt. Or even just flour. Shit I’ve seen beef, like the crap your making these faux steaks out of at cheaper than 2.73/lb (thats pounds not ounces) whole sale and even retail. You wont get weekly delivery of it. You’ll have to special order it. If you run out you can’t just pick some up. Yeah your using very little of it, but its the most expensive thing in your restaurant by weight. And it takes special skills to use it right! You might fuse your dishwasher’s lungs together! This king of scare mongering is about as insane as harping on how “some restaurants!” make their ice cream with liquid nitrogen. And don’t you know that liquid nitrogen is used in fracking! and bio-medical research! And in action movies full of non-vegan kicking a space mutant in the face so he explodes like BOOM!
edit I’ve had a few. sorry if that made no sense…
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Those Krab sticks have been around for quite awhile. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surimi
Some of the modern stuff uses the meatglue as short cut…but it’s all steamed and fromed into packets.
This isn’t new stuff.
Heck…lots of weird stuff like heat seaweed derived carragean to use as a binder for veggie burgers etc…because it acts like jello to bind but only jells at high heat and turns into ‘oh…tastes like meat fat’ at low temps. A “reverse” jell.
(See the vid above with the fish and veggies).
I love that.
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This story freaks me out because the first thing I thought of was someone using this meat glue powder as weapon. Aerosolize it and release into an enclosed space with lots of people and imagine horrors like something out of Fringe,
, mouth and lungs being glued shut.
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This guy is full of baloney. The thing made of blood was thrombin and nobody uses it any more. Looks like he has a pack of “moo glue” brand, which like anything you can buy these days is repackaged Activa brand by Ajinomoto. It is produced by microbial fermentation.
I don’t believe this guy’s assertion that it is used to make low price steaks. There is too much butchering labour in getting the parts to be glued together for it to be economical compared to other cheap cuts like round or chuck steaks. It does get used in things made out of meat pastes on an industrial scale like sausages and the like, but if that bothers you, I’m guessing you were already uncomfortable with sausage and formed meat products.
Some fancy restaurants have figured out how to make weird shaped but delicious cuts into steak shapes that are prettier and more fun to eat and thereby reduced food waste. How is that a bad thing?
If this does scare you, wait until you hear about the microbial enzyme that turns liquid milk into a solid product sold as “cheese”. I heard sometimes it is derived from soaking pieces of the stomachs of baby cows in water…
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I’d disagree with that statement on a literal level but do 100% agree with where you’re coming from. Some quick, back of the napkin math on how much my pizzas are costing me:
I’m now getting 5-12" super thin crusts (New Haven style, but I’m lacking in the proper oven temps) out of a 2# dough batch. Dough costs: 35 cents for flour, maybe 50 cents for everything else (tsp/tbsp type measurements of oil/butter, yeast, salt, sugar, plus a larger amount of dried seasoning blend).
Toppings for a pepperoni pizza: less than half a 5# bag of cheese for 5 pizzas (whole bag is $13 I think), pepperoni is also in the $15 range, but 5# lasts pretty long…25-50 pizzas at least? And if I’m using a fairly fancy sauce it might be $5.
Overall it looks like 5 pizzas might cost me $15 (that seems really high) or $3 each. Now that doesn’t account for my time or anything like that, but it is a labor of love
I bought a package of 4 fillets once that had 2 end cuts glued together to make one full sized fillet.
Previously:
Yeah, this is bull. Sure you can craft a ‘steak’ using meat glue, but just using the scraps for their $24 hamburger is simpler and more cost effective.
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I also don’t see the economic payoff, after working in food service over 25 years
Nature seems to do it alot cheaper
Are you doing this professionally? Pricing and cost function differently. For example pricing is tiered. Based on your location the same product in the same volume from the same purveyor can cost significantly more than others location. We’re something lik tier 6, 25 miles west of us it drops a tier and prices go down 10%ish across the board. It can make costs you see at retail, or another area significantly different from what a buisiness in another area is working with.
So we make 18 inch classic NY style pies (among other types). And the boss refuses to compromise quality to keep costs, or prices down. So for example he uses an incredible imported low moisture moz. It’s the only low moisture moz I’ve ever had that I’d want to eat cold on its own, great flavor and a texture that’s actually like cheese and not like rubber. He puts almost a full pound of cheese on each pie, and it accounts for more than half the food cost of the pie. Specialist whole sale only baking flours, both American and imported, good quality Italian olive oil, multiple top quality tomato products, and exclusively Italian meats, only air chilled organic chicken etc. I’ve sat with him while he did the numbers, I’m not a cook but this stuff interests me. Food cost on a regular 18 inch cheese pie hovers at about 5.35 . Our boxes cost .65 each, and that’s considered food/material cost. So to throw a complete 18 inch cheese pie out the door costs us just below or just above 6 bucks just in materials. Lately it’s over because the cheese has been increasing by a few cents a pound every week for over a month. Little Ceasar’s sells a 14 inch hot and ready pie for 5 bucks. So even when you make a pie smaller than theirs it costs you almost exactly what they sell theirs for.
Cooking Issues debunked the notion that people are using meat glue in a fraudulent way years ago: http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=5330.html
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