Belgian beer, French cheese

We traveled to northern France for a little less than a week of touring by motorhome (or camping-car, as it's called over there). We saw plenty of the countryside, but more importantly: we drank a lot of beer, and ate a lot of cheese.

This is what I thought of it.

Beer

When you go to Belgium, you drink Belgian beer. It's almost offensive to see Heineken and Desperados on the shelf. Best drunk out of a fancy glass with gold leaf on the rim.

• Tripel Karmeliet. Good and Belgian. Nutty notes. Good pub beer I reckon. Lighter coloured than I was expecting. 8.4% is a good spot to be. 3/5.
• Trappistes Rochefort. Very sweet, thick in the mouth like fudge. An excellent beer to have just one of. You can get 750ml for like €6 at any corner shop in Belgium, or 250ml for £15 at the Head of Steam in Durham. 5/5
• Straffe Hendrik Brugs Quadrupel 11. Putting "quadrupel" and "11" together in the name of a beer constitutes a promise that the beer itself sort of fails to fulfil. Lots of Belgian character, but it lacks the sauce. 750ml of it will make you feel pretty good though. 4/5
• Maredsous. Blond, drinkable. "Only" 6.5%, which makes it session-able, I guess. I don't know why you'd want to. 3/5
• La Goudale ambrée. I think that this is a sort of proletariat kind of Belgian beer. The Belgian proletariat clearly drink well. 4/5
• La Corne des Bois des Pendus. Darker than the rest but almost totally characterless. It's recognisably beer. The label's a bit corny. 2/5
• Barbar bok brune. Very idiosyncratic, packed with spices and, apparently, honey. I don't think that it's quite my thing, but I like the bottle. 2/5
• Chimay Bleue. This is the classic. Available pretty much everywhere, always very nice, especially in the iconic Chimay glass. Best consumed with a tiny terrine of salami and the secondhand tobacco smoke of six or seven men in sunglasses and polos tucked into their shorts. 5/5

Cheese

The tragedy of trying to eat as many cheeses as you can is that cheesemongers always assume you'll be sharing with between four and six other people. Which makes it very hard to go through enough cheese to get a representative sample of what's available. To get this far, we ate multiple meals of just cheese and bread.

• Galet du boulonnais. Soft and creamy in texture, with an extremely bitter orange rind. Might be good with a sweet jam to balance the bitterness, but not very pleasant on its own with bread. 2/5
• Écume de Wimereux. Almost crumbly, with a slightly tangy taste and a chewy rind. That makes it sound worse than it is. 3/5
• P'ti frais ail - Fromagerie de la Semois. Now this is a cheese you get out of bed for. Creamy and covered in garlic. Just enough to polish off between two people. 4/5
• Le Carré - Bons mayennais. A popular camembert with almost no discernable flavour at all. Pleasant on bread but would benefit from another topping to give it some oomph. 2/5

Fast Food, Slow Reviews - Sam's ongoing mission to review all of the USA's fast food establishments, one at a time, over the course of years of trips to the States.

Classic chicken sandwich

The reviews I read said this was the best item on the menu. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice, but nothing exciting. The best things about it were the soft bread and the breading on the chicken. I ordered extra pickles and that added a bit of interest to an otherwise bland burger. 

Cajun fries

I tried Charles’s chips and they were tasty and had a nice texture. My only vexation is with the naming of the chips. Cajun is too generous. They had a tickle of seasoning on them. 

Nugs 

The nugs appeared to be the same composition as the chicken sandwich just smaller. They were more satisfying than the sandwich I’d say. Purer. Plus you get interesting sauces to choose from. 

Biscuit

Soft and buttery and warm and well seasoned. Nothing much to say on that one. Only negative is I would have loved a dipping/smothering gravy option. 

Back in 2016 I made a note of some short-lived Flavour Trends that I'd noticed in convenience stores across Japan: every couple of months, all of the different brands would agree on a certain flavour, and start producing snacks in that flavour. Mostly it was candies, and mostly it was fruit flavours. (I ate a lot of fruit-flavoured candies back then—whereas the candies that I eat today are mostly colour-flavoured than fruit-flavoured, e.g. this is a red-flavoured candy).

Anyway, I've noticed it happening again, this time in Britain: the Flavour of the Now is: hot honey.

Okay two items does not make a trend—but I also had a hot-honey themed burger at Fat Hippo in Durham the other night. It was good but didn't really taste that much like honey and wasn't particularly hot. I did not take a picture of it because I'm Not That Kind of Person 😌

I've made no secret of my abiding love for Sweden's kanelbulle, and while we were in Stockholm this fall I just about gorged myself. But even in the throes of cinnamon joy, I managed to jot some quick notes on the bullar that passed my way; here they are, presented in order of best to worst.

Note that even the very most abysmal kanelbullar, are, by British standards, still pretty good. Kanelbullar are, like pizza and pancakes, still good even when they're bad.

Skansen

Skansen makes kanelbullar the way that kanelbullar want to be made: tied in a knot, dense and chewy, tall, a little stocky, with plenty of flavour and just the right amount of pearl sugar on top. Magnificent.

Under Kastanjen

Not quite enough sugar on this one, but the flavour was there, and the shape was right. Maybe a bit more crust than I'd like but the perfect texture on the inside. Absolutely marvellous with a coffee: an excellent fika bulle.

Skeppsbro bageri

I expected much worse from such a touristy spot, but Skeppsbro knows their bullar! Plenty of character forgives this one its flatness. Sticky, super-dense, with a heaping helpful of cinnamon. An ideal bulle for Americans.

Thelins

A respectable bulle. Very light on the inside—almost a cake. Delicate flavours as well. Feels like it was made by a French person. That's not a bad thing, but it's not quite what I'm looking for.

Bageriet Kringlan

I regrettably forgot to take a picture of this one. To be fair it was pretty much middle of the road. Not a ton of character, no real flaws, went well with coffee.

Bröd & Salt

Surprising amount of cardamom in this one. Cardamom bullar are a thing on their own, but I can appreciate a bit of experimentation. Maybe a bit too much cardamom, though. And not enough pearl sugar. I think there was more sugar on others in the display—maybe I just had bad luck of the draw.

Gateau

Points for its novel shape, but this was an otherwise unexceptional bulle. Picked up in a hurry at the train station on the way to the airport.

Pressbyrån

We are now proceeding into the realm of the not good kanelbullar. Pressbyrån is a convenience store and this was a convenience-store-grade bulle. Dry, a little stale, not particularly flavourful. I neglected to take a picture of this one either, so bland was it.

Airport

This was mostly a formality. Dry, light, cake-ish. The only thing to recommend it is the correct shape and the generous helping of pearl sugar.

Lidl

Lidl is perhaps famous in the UK for its bakery section, but it did not fare well in the bulle ranking. You can tell from this picture how dry and flavourless it is. Using the conventional spiral shape helps, perhaps, in cranking out prodigious numbers of these things to ship out to grocery stores nationwide, but it does not recommend them to me.

7-Eleven

Not a bulle, and neither particularly nice to look at nor to eat. The guy who sold it to me called me maestro, though, and that was a lot of fun.

Hey so has anyone ever noticed that Japanese snacks, especially the candies and drinks in convenience stores, follow a bit of a flavor pattern? Like one month, the different brands all release a bunch of x-flavored candies, and the next, almost in sync, you start seeing y-flavored candies and drinks?

(Which totally sidesteps the weirdness of products that must go through a lot of testing and development only to exist for like a month, which we see pretty often here. Examples: pink lemonade (last month; this month is coconut-pineapple) Mentos, yuzu Hi-Chew, lemon Coke.)

Anyway, as a heads-up to anyone paying attention, last month's flavor was peach, but we're currently slowly transitioning into orange and orange-associated flavors, which I guess includes the tiny 'kinkan' fruit, an olive-sized citrus fruit that the Japanese eat like grapes. Skin and all. Apparently the skin is quite sweet. Anyway.

Last month, we had peach-flavored I-lohas flavored water, peach-flavored gummies, and Kamu Kamu Peach, which are chewy, tart little candies.

If you're wandering around a combini in late March/early April 2016, you'll probably find (clockwise): orange "Fettucine" (more sour chewy things), Hi-Chew in 'bitter orange', a bag of orange-flavored energy jelly by Weider, then more Hi-Chew, kinkan-flavored, and your standard orange gummies. I also found some orange-flavored I-lohas water but I forgot to take a picture of it.