Welcome to Off-Menu, where we’ll be rounding up all the food news and food-adjacent internet ephemera that delighted, fascinated, or infuriated us this morning.
News
- Our esteemed culinary director Farideh Sadeghin dips her pizza in ranch dressing—and sometimes Dijon mustard, but that’s a story for a different day—which is as much of an endorsement of the flavor combination as anyone should need. Pizza is hot and sometimes spicy; ranch is cool and creamy. Hence, everyone should try it. And now Hidden Valley has made it so you don’t even need pizza to try pizza-plus-ranch. They’ve released a squeezable bottle of their BLASTED Creamy Dipping Sauce that is, yes, ranch-dipped-pizza-flavored. So ranch sauce that tastes like pizza dipped in ranch sauce. Again, it’s not the combo I object to, but the utility that I’m curious about. What do you put this on? Surely not pizza, so what’s the point? Do you put it on plain bread for the sake of textural verisimilitude? Do you put it on salad to repeat the benefits of the flavor, but with fewer calories? Do you just… drink it straight? I mean, I know that’s not what Hidden Valley intended but I guess what I’m wondering is: Would you?
Videos by VICE
- Fortnum & Mason is an upscale London department store that happens to have a line of chocolate bars with low-key interesting flavors such as “salted honeycomb” and “strawberry and black pepper” and high-key crazy names such as “The Peculiar Bees of Salt Bay” and “Pilots Fly in Pink Skies.” Other bars in their “library” include: A Bittersweet Romance, The Obedience of Bubbles the Dog, Fire in the Hive, Into the Shadows, The Descent into Darkness, Beyond the Abyss, Goodnight My Bittersweet Beloved, She Dreams in Marmalade, The Icebreaker, The Beast Comes at Midnight, and Forever Chasing Supernovas. Metro reached out to Fortnum & Mason to ensure everyone is alright over there, and since they are, I think there’s only one thing to do now: Someone needs to start an indie band that retrofits songs to these titles. Owl City could never.
- The creator of the New Orleans Pelicans King Cake Baby mascot is suing Universal Studios for giving the villain of their slasher flick Happy Death Day and its forthcoming sequel a mask that also looks like the oversized, frozen face of a plastic baby that’s typically found in the Mardi Gras cakes. Personally, I think the artist behind the mascot has a point—the two do look basically identical—but then again, he never should have made such a terrifying mascot in the first place.
Not News
Did a bottle of Hint, a line of lightly flavored fruit water that’s been around for over a decade, write this article in Business Insider touting how “Hint makes fruit-infused sunscreens and guilt-free, zero-calorie drinks that everyone from moms to tech employees loves”?
Something Nice
This ten-hour track of chicken sounds is a great way to spend a long workday pretending that you’re actually out on a farm somewhere instead of tethered to your desk slowly destroying your retinas by staring at screen and setting human ambulatory evolution back several centuries by remaining so sedentary… without actually standing up or going outside.
