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Bogus Butter Bake-OffCooking & Baking sticks, and Dr. Andrew Weil’s sockeye salmon sausageWhat's new? What's great? What's weird? Our columnist samples offerings from supermarket aisles and fast-food menus. |
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! Cooking & Baking Sticks
By: Unilever
I Paid: $3.09 for a 1-pound box of four sticks (prices may vary by region)
Cooking & Baking sticks, newly introduced to the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! range, are touted as a healthy stand-in for butter, with 50 percent less saturated fat. A series of TV ads directly challenges viewers to try the product and be staggered by the identical results. If nothing else, it’s a wise marketing move: Big claims prod people to act.
The only fair way to evaluate the stuff, therefore, is a head-to-head face-off, pitting butter against its vegetable oil– and whey-based substitute. Test number one: spread on toast. Subject A (butter) has the golden color and lip-smacking fattiness of … butter. Subject B (ICBINB!) is creamier in texture and less substantial, with less depth overall. I can absolutely believe it’s not butter, as it behaves more like a nonbutter spread; but in terms of taste, it’s a surprisingly faithful shadow of butter, almost like a butter lite. It’s certainly not unpleasant.
Test number two: sugar cookies. Even before the cookies have come out of the oven, an observation: The ICBINB! cookies are not browning as quickly. An extra three to four minutes are required for cookies that are still slightly less browned and a bit more spread out than their butter-based kin. As for taste, it’s close. There’s an oily finish to the ICBINB! cookie; the butter cookie has a more caramelized depth. The new product isn’t a train wreck, but it’s certainly no Doppelgänger.
Weil for Vital Choice Wild Alaskan Sockeye Salmon Sausage
By: Vital Choice
I Paid: $25 for three boxes of two (3-ounce) patties per box (prices may vary by region)
Dr. Andrew Weil made his name as an author and popularizer of alternative and holistic approaches to health and medicine. (In the mid-1990s, he penned a health advice column for now-defunct web magazine HotWired.com, and advised readers to eat vitamin C if they were going to take Ecstasy.) Now, he’s a bona fide brand; his benevolent, avuncular, Santa Clausian visage beams out at you from the package of any number of different products, including fruit and nut bars, antioxidant supplements, tea drinks, and the Vital Choice line of wild Alaskan sockeye salmon sausage patties.
At $25 for 540 calories of salmon, these patties may be among the most expensive frozen entrées you ever put into your mouth. That said, the box sure claims you get a lot for your money: Omega-3 fatty acids, organic herbs and spices, wild-caught salmon, no MSG, kosher certification, and a Marine Stewardship Council seal. These are certainly salmon sausage patties of the holiest level.
Taste is another story. The patties, which supposedly were developed using Weil’s input, are quite inconsistent in terms of flavor philosophy. The Spicy Chorizo Style is meek and underpowered, although it boasts a good approximation of sausagelike texture. The Italian Style is a bit of a bungle: The flavor of salmon and the spicing of Italian sausage are both distinctly present, but neither seems to acknowledge the other. It’s like watching two different TV channels at once. Best of the lot is the Savory Country Style, which really works—it almost tastes like an elegant version of turkey sausage, and could in fact sub for regular sausage in a recipe.
The overall thrust behind these entrées is pretty admirable, but it might behoove Weil and Vital Choice to go back to the test kitchen one or two more times.
Salmon and Italian sausage are two foods that should never appear in the same sentence, much less the same box or -- the horror -- the same plate. That Weil is a real piece o' work, he is.
Why would you want to eat, or for that matter taste either of these vile products.
The I Can't Believe people really ticked me off with these sticks. You see, I Can't Believe is my brother's spread of choice, and we'd been buying the ICB sticks for YEARS, going back to when we were kids. Then one day, they were gone from the shelves. He switched to the tubs and I started buying the cheap margarine sticks for cooking (I use butter Crisco usually for baking, or buy real butter). I kept an eye out for the ICB sticks to come back for months, and then suddenly here were commercials for special ICB sticks for "cooking and baking". When they finally showed up on shelves here we bought them. They are IDENTICAL to the old ICB sticks, which were also used for "cooking and baking". I feel like the ICB people truly think we are idiots, they only had the product off shelves for a few months before bringing it back and acting like they'd never, ever made sticks before. ICB people, I'm not that stupid. Really. :/