Well, you can live on tinned food, but...

In my last-but-one post, I wrote about Trump's bizarre statement about tinned soup, and how it is (according to him) bring used by protestors as an innocent-looking missile to throw at police. Many thanks to my friend and reader of this blog who sent me this fab sticker soon after! 

There didn't seem to be any evidence to back up Trump's assertion (not that he cares too much about minor details like that), but it reminded me that tin cans can be put to similar use, but with good intent - to fight crime, for example.

In a film littered with classic and quotable scenes, Crocodile Dundee includes one oft-forgotten moment, where, witnessing a thief grab the handbag of a lady on the mean streets of New York, Mick "Crocodile" Dundee picks up a tin can from her shopping bag, which has fallen to the pavement (sorry - sidewalk) in the altercation. He throws it in the direction of the fleeing assailant, and despite the heavy crowds on the street, it hits the thief perfectly on the back of the head, knocking him to the ground and thwarting his escape.

The scene features in one of the film's official trailers - I've watched the clip a number of times over, but can't make out exactly what the tin is. The flash of red and white we see on the label would suggest either Campbell's soup or Carnation milk, but of course we can't be sure. If I ever meet Paul Hogan, it's the first thing I will ask him.

There was a period where ITV2 seemed to be showing Crocodile Dundee nearly every week, though I haven't spotted it on for a while. And I haven't seen the film in its entirety for a very long time - they always seem to show a rather badly edited version on TV, which cuts out some of the less family friendly parts. Gone are the casual references to drug-taking, some of Mick's more frank exchanges with a pair of ladies of the night, and the shot where, after delivering the immortal "That's not a knife..." line, he then slashes his would-be mugger's shirt with his vastly more impressive bush-knife. 

Gone too is much of the swearing - sometimes to detrimental effect. In one of the scenes in the Australian outback in the first part of the film, Mick offers Sue a veritable "I'm A Celebrity" Bush-tucker Trial-style feast of barbecued iguana, grubs and sugar ants, which she reluctantly tries. "What about you, aren't you having any?" she asks. Bringing out a tin can of something and starting to open it with a knife, he replies, "Me? Well, you can live on it, but it tastes like shit." 

Sue gets her own back when Mick comes to New York though - taking him to a hot dog stand, she orders him one "with chilli, onions, sauerkraut and some peppers." Looking at the dog with a mixture of shock and disgust, he asks "You eat that?", to which Sue of course replies "Well, you can live on it, but it tastes like shit." 

It's a good line, and raises a smile - unless you happen to be watching the edited television version that is, in which case, it has been redubbed in the earlier scene. Instead, the meal "tastes like dung" - which just doesn't have the same comic force.

Worse still, the hot dog stand scene is edited so it just ends, very abruptly, half-way through Sue's line, leaving us with just "Well, you can live on it", which spoils the whole joke, as there isn't enough of a reference back to the previous scene for it to really register. They might as well have cut the hot dog scene entirely. It annoys me every time I see it.

If you're wondering what this all has to do with tins, well, nothing is the answer. Apart from the fact that I realised a while ago I had all the ingredients for Mick's "tastes like shit" New York hot dog in tinned form, so I felt it only right to open them all and see what they tasted like together.

First up - the dogs themselves. I've had some dealings with Ye Olde Oak before - most memorably for my Christmas special back in 2014, which used a tin of their cocktail sausages as pigs in blankets. These full-size version are the brand's American Style Hot Dogs, the label emblazoned with red, white and blue lettering and stars, but little indication is given as to what makes them particularly American. Ye Olde Oak's shiny new website refers to them as "The Smoky Flavoured One" on its Products page - "If you like your hot dogs BIG on flavour then this one's for you!" They do indeed contain some delicious-sounding "Smoke Flavour" - but so do all the other products too. Maybe there's just more of it in these. 

There is definitely a hit of smokiness to them even as you open the tin, and the flavour lends a porky note to what is otherwise a chicken sausage - "mechanically separated" chicken at that, with added potato starch and beef collagen. Yum.* But sometimes it's best not to ask what goes into a sausage - and these do taste like a fairly decent, standard hot dog. I had found YOO's cocktail sausages to be rather turgid little things, while one of their other varieties I once tried were very flaccid, with the filling seeming to barely fill the casings. These ones get the texture just about right, I think.

Next up, the chilli (or 'chili', as I believe it is usually spelled over there). I had wondered if this meant  chilli peppers, but I was reliably informed that the chilli would be what we know over here as "con carne", i.e. beans and minced or chunks of meat in a rich sauce - finally giving me the chance to open the tin of Stagg BBQ Chili with Wedges that I'd had in my cupboard for a while. It was largely the wedges that had drawn me to buying them in the first place - I couldn't quite imagine what a tinned potato wedge would be like. I didn't have my hopes set very high; sharing a tin with BBQ sauce, they clearly weren't going to be crisp and crunchy with fluffy insides, but would they be a disappointing over-coooked mush, or tough, under-cooked and making the whole tin taste of raw potato? Well, neither - they had kept their shape, perhaps helped by the skins still being on, and had a reasonably soft texture. I'd say they actually fared better than some of the smaller chunks of potato I've come across in tinned soups and stews. Just put any thoughts of the wedges you make at home in the oven out of your mind. 

The chilli itself was a mix of pink beans - softer skinned than the usual red kidney beans - and "shaped minced beef". This sounded almost as ominous as the mechanically separated chicken - what would the minced beef be shaped into? Cowboys, like the one on the tin? Wagon Wheels? As it turned out, just slightly bigger bits of mince. Which is a bit odd, but I suppose it gives the chilli a bit more of a chunky texture. The sauce was very barbecuey, with black treacle, tamarind concentrate and more of that "smoke flavour" boosting the taste.

On to the onions - a tin of Eazy Fried Onions that I'd had for even longer in the cupboard. Long enough in fact that the company had since changed its labels quite substantially, no longer featuring a photo that looks quite so much like something from a 1980s cookbook, or the placemats that my nan used to have which featured still-life images of baskets of fruit, veg and bread, and carafes of wine. Also, the new tins no longer proudly announce themselves as a Delia "Cheat!" ingredient. This harks back to the one time Delia Smith appeared to have fallen from her saintly kitchen pedestal (well, maybe the second time), with her book "How to Cheat at Cooking", which included a range of recipes using ready-made, pre-packaged ingredients such as these onions, ready-grated cheese, frozen mashed potato and so on. There is even a moussaka recipe using tinned mince, a tub of cheese sauce and frozen chargrilled aubergine slices, the last of which I didn't even know existed. Foodies of the UK were appalled, and the book didn't ever create the "Delia effect" for these products, as the people at Eazy Fried Onions were presumably hoping. 

But do you know what? Delia wasn't wrong about these - they're actually very good. I had been expecting thin strips of onion rather these chunkier pieces, and they didn't look all that appealing at first as some of the oil had semi-solidified at the top of the tin. On trying them though, it was clear that they had had a long, slow cook in the oil - far longer than I can ever be bothered to do myself - and are lovely and soft, sweet and almost buttery. And of course, it's not just the cooking that is done for you, but the chopping too - "NO MORE TEARS!", the label declares (a phrase I usually associate with kids' shampoo, admittedly). It also recommends them especially for "hamburgers, hot dogs, pies, quiches and pizza. Superb in stews, pasta dishes, onion soup and many other home made recipes". Certainly they would take an awful lot of the faff out of making onion soup. The only thing about them is that they aren't caramelized with those slightly crisped brown edges you would probably get on top of your hot dog when they've been cooked on a portable hotplate - but you can't have everything.

Next: the sauerkraut. I picked this tin up during a rare visit to Aldi - rare, I should say, because there isn't a branch very near to me, not because I don't like it. Quite the opposite in fact - I love everything about Aldi, particularly the fact that it always makes me feel slightly like I'm in Germany or Austria, a part of the world very dear to me, having lived for the best part of a year in the latter, a decade ago. So when I spotted a tin of that most German of foodstuffs in one of their frequent special promotions, I couldn't say no. I love the stuff, but I'd only ever seen it in jars before, so this was very exciting indeed. It was a big old tin though, containing 810g of sauerkraut, and so tightly packed into the tin that my fork quite happily stood up on its own when I stuck it in. This being "Wein-sauerkraut", it is tinned with a little white wine (presumably added after the standard fermentation with just cabbage and salt), but I can't say I got much of a hint of wine from it - it just tasted deliciously krauty. 

Finally - the peppers. These were the chilli peppers I had wrongly ascribed to the "chili" from Sue's hot dog order. I had therefore thought "peppers" meant bell peppers - but they don't feature at all, it would seem. Far too healthy. In contrast to the sauerkraut, this was a very petite tin of diced jalapenos, just 118g when drained of their mixture of water and vinegar. (I'm sure there's a "That's not a tin...that's a tin" joke to be made here, but I can't quite put my finger on it.) The vinegar lends the peppers a slightly pickled note, but not detracting from their heat - I was pleased to note that they certainly still had a bit of a kick to them, which was very enjoyable. I wondered whether the ones served up on a hot dog would be sliced rather than diced, but it probably makes no difference to the overall taste. Not much else to say about these really, other than they were very good - I had a couple of spoonfuls straight from the tin.

Tins opened, and a bun sliced and ready to go, it was largely just an assembly job. I heated up a couple of the hot dogs in a saucepan with the brine from the tin, and then in separate pans, some of the chilli (without the wedges - they weren't invited to this party) and onions. It only occurred to me afterwards that I could have grilled the dogs, and tried frying the onions to give them some authentic caramelised, charred edges. Never mind. 

"One dog, please."

"With chilli,"

"Onions,"

"Sauerkraut,"

"And some peppers"

Well, there's certainly quite a lot going on there - you can quite imagine Mick Dundee being a little intimidated at the sight of it. As for the taste though, it was far from Sue's description. The smoky hot dog itself, the meaty chilli, the soft and sweet onions, the cabbagey tang of the sauerkraut, and the welcome heat of the chillies - all as enjoyable together as they were individually, making for a substantial but quite satisfying lunch. Not sure I could live on it, or would want to - but it certainly didn't taste like shit. Or dung.

Having opened all those tins, I obviously had a fair amount of all the different elements leftover. With the remaining hot dogs, I harked back to a meal that was always a favourite in our house when I was growing up - a rich tomato sauce, with chopped up frankfurters and peas and sweetcorn in it, served with pasta. The tomatoes would have been the only tinned element back then; the frankfurters we had were always ones from a packet, but the tinned hot dogs were more than adequate as a replacement. 

Likewise the vegetables always tended to be frozen ones, but having found a tin of mixed peas and corn from the French brand D'aucy (which interestingly isn't a mix you often see in tins in the UK - it tends to be one or the other), I used those. Canned simply in water without added sugar or salt, they were much nicer than most tinned peas and corn. Occasionally our pasta sauce might have contained a bit of chopped up bacon as well, but that not being available in tinned form, I made do without. I did use a spoonful of the Eazy Onions in the sauce though, which was then dumped, without ceremony, on top of a steaming bowl of pasta. A simple meal, certainly, but very quick, easy and tasty, plus it felt like a bit of a nostalgic trip down memory lane.

The remaining chilli I just had as it is - with the wedges, of course. I'd like to say I heated it up over a campfire, singing songs on an old guitar like a cowboy. But no, I just did it in the microwave.

As mentioned, I liked the peppers very much, and they were  a nice accompaniment to a variety of different meals that I felt could do with a kick of heat, including scrambled eggs, cheese on toast, corn on the cob and various sandwiches. Much more recently, I have been following the antics of the 'Snack Hacker' George Egg on Instagram, who takes commonly available snacks and pimps them up with other ingredients - his suggestion of adding pickled jalapenos to improve a Greggs Cheese and Onion Pasty with is one that I wish I had seen when I had my tin open.

For the onions, I felt it was only right to turn to Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking, and one of the recipes that uses them - her Thick Onion Tart with Cheese and Sage. No good at making pastry? No worries - Delia's Cheat version uses a ready-made shortcrust pastry case. I happened to have just such an item, having picked one up at an extremely reduced price (5p!) some time previously, as it had presumably been dropped or squashed and hence had definitely seen better days. But it was only really the edges that were a bit bashed; there were no major cracks, so it looked like it would be able to hold its filling. 

Without the faff of rolling out and blind-baking pastry, all you need to do is drain the onions well (the tin does contain a fair bit of oniony juice), dump them into the tart case, pour over a mixture of sour cream, beaten eggs, chopped sage, Cheddar and Parmesan (Delia suggests you buy it ready-grated, which is certainly convenient, but also about ten times more expensive, so I cheated at cheating and grated it myself) and then bake for 35 to 40 minutes until golden and firm to the touch. I think I took mine somewhat beyond golden, but it was still good - there's quite a high ratio of onion to the baked filling mixture, so this would be a good one for anyone who finds quiche a bit too eggy - the onion is very much the star. That said, the surrounding custard is sufficiently cheesy to provide a good amount of flavour itself. Had I thought of it, I could have chucked a few of the jalapenos in too. 

As for the sauerkraut, there was so much of it left to use that I think I will save my further experiments for another post soon (but again, I came across the Snack Hacker's excellent suggestion too late). Despite my love of the stuff, I couldn't imagine I was going to be able to follow the instruction on the label to "consume within 2 days", so I decanted the rest into a large, sterilised jar. It usually keeps perfectly well for far longer than two days in a jar in the fridge, so that felt like the manufacturers erring very much on the side of caution. Perhaps some warning to take care when lifting or carrying the tin would be more useful - drop this on your foot and you'd probably break a bone or two. And if Mick Dundee had managed to lob it with the same accuracy as the tin in the film, I doubt the bag thief would ever have got up from the ground again...

*On a related note, as part of its annual attempt to come up with Christmas-themed products, this year Sainsbury's is currently selling Pigs-in-Blankets-flavoured mayonnaise. This sounds unpleasant enough itself, but is made worse when you look at the label and discover that it contains no meat whatsoever. The porkiness is provided entirely by added "Smoke Flavour". I will not be trying it. Even if/when they reduce it to 5p to clear all the unsold stock after Christmas. Well ok, maybe then - I can't say no to a good bargain - but only in the interests of research, mind you.