Doughnuts Near You and New Uses for Chip Cans
Armando Rafael Moutela, 2014, Television Food Network, G.P. All Rights Reserved. 2013, Cooking Channel, LLC. All Rights Reserved
The Great Gefilte Fish Shortage of 2014: The Passover Seders have come and gone, and many families, it seems, had to do without a holiday staple: gefilte fish. The oval fish patties — often made from whitefish, as well as carp and perhaps pike, mullet or even salmon — are in short supply this year, The New York Times reports, because of icy conditions on the Great Lakes and in western Canada. "In all my years making gefilte fish, it has never been this bad," said Benzion Raskin, owner of Brooklyn's BenZ’s Gourmet, which has been turning away customers. "I can’t remember a time with so little fish." There are those who love gefilte fish and those who love to hate it — and then there are those who eat it for unusual reasons. "It may taste like cat food," locavore fish store owner Peter Shelsky told the Times, "but that’s why I love it." [ The New York Times]
Craving Doughnuts? There's an App for That: You may never have another doughnut emergency. A new app called Doughbot promises to keep you just a tap away from finding "every doughnut shop in your area" — whether you're looking for "old-school shops or hipster-hyped cronut purveyors" — with directions, reviews and Instagram-powered galleries. "I was amazed at how many donut places are in walking distance from my office," enthused one user. Fun, though perhaps not the best app for dieters. [ iTunes via Huffington Post]
Speaking of Cool (Ice-Cold) Apps: Try to scoop your ice cream when it's straight out of the freezer and you may find it too hard. Wait too long and it gets soft and drippy. But calculating the right amount of time to get precisely the right consistency can be tough. Haagen-Dazs has apparently come to consumers' rescue with a fun app that provides classical-music entertainment for the two minutes it takes to "temper" the ice cream for the perfect amount of time. You can watch the "concerto timer" in action here — or here. [ Stick a Fork in It]
Snack-Food Art: Most people eat their Pringles and pitch the cylindrical cans they come in. Not the Brooklyn art collective Fall On Your Sword. Its members used the perfectly formed crisps as a prototype from which to cast polymer replicas they then painted silver and turned into a giant chandelier that gracefully floats in the wind. They used Pringles cans — the Original, Sour Cream, Onion and Tortilla varieties — to make a working pipe organ. FOYS artist Sarah Bereza says she "toyed with the idea of painting" the cans, but decided against it. "There's something Warholian about seeing all the guys with their little mustaches, so I wanted to do something with a pop art feeling," she told Gawker, which is hosting the contest for which the Pringles art was created and will showcase winning entries in May at its Silent Disco in New York. "And that's why I used more of the red cans in the end. They're so iconic." [ Gawker via Food Republic]
In Other Food News: A judge in Georgia has denied a request by a Vidalia onion farmer to prevent the state's agriculture commissioner from enforcing a new regulation that aims to prevent unripe onions from being rushed to market, a practice some other onion farmers fear is damaging the brand. [ Christian Science Monitor] A survey of consumer spending habits among teenagers has found they are spending more money on food than on clothing — and in fact than on anything else — for the first time in history. [ Piper Jaffray]