Adrienne Raphel reveals some fast food items on secret menus you’ve probably never heard of:
In-N-Out Burger, the West Coast chain, has perhaps the most notorious fast-food secret menu. Since the nineteen-seventies, customers have been ordering Animal Style fries (fries smothered in sauce that resembles Thousand Island dressing and topped with melted cheese and diced grilled onions) and 3x3s (burgers with three patties and three slices of cheese), along with several other modifications that don’t appear on the menu. The corporate Web site now acknowledges some of these options as In-N-Out’s “not-so-secret menu”; they’ve trademarked “Animal Style,” “Protein Style,” “3×3,” and “4×4.” Yet, Carl Van Fleet, the company’s vice-president of planning and development, told me, “We don’t see ourselves as having a secret menu at all.”
These kinds of denials have been successful enough at presenting the impression of secrecy to attract a fair amount of attention. Liz Childers, in a Thrillist article, describes her mission to request secret-menu items at eight chains; J. Kenji López-Alt, the managing culinary director at Serious Eats, ordered every possible item at In-N-Out; and BuzzFeed provides list after list of secret-menu items. Web sites like HackTheMenu aggregate user contributions, encourage customers to rate items, document successful finds, and add new discoveries.
In another area of food secrecy, Phil Daoust test-drives some dessert recipes with an unsettling substitution, and one that’s perfect for your Halloween baked goods today:
Back in January, in a report that British bakers have shamefully ignored, the Copenhagen-based Nordic Food Lab explained how pigs’ blood can replace eggs in sweet dishes. Both ingredients, it pointed out, contain a similar mix of proteins, and both will coagulate when heated. This was great news, it declared, for all those suffering from egg-white intolerance.
The accompanying recipes ranged from pigs’ blood ice-cream to pigs’ blood pancakes. … [Elisabeth] Paul’s recipe was for chocolate sponge cake, which she recommends as the basis for “blood forest gateau”. But that sounded a bit involved for cooking with kids, so I decided to make fairy cakes instead, adapting a recipe from that culinary authority Dr Oetker. I combined 110g of butter with the same weight of caster sugar, 75g of self-raising flour, 25g of cocoa powder and two medium eggs – or rather, 130g of pigs’ blood. According to the NFL, 65g of blood will do the work of one medium egg, while 43g of blood can stand in for an egg white. (To put it another way, since a slaughtered pig yields between 2.25kg and 4.5kg of blood, a single porker can replace three to six dozen eggs. And, come to think of it, you can get bacon, sausages and egg substitutes from the same animal. Isn’t nature wonderful?)
Meanwhile, Roberto A. Ferdman praises John Oliver for pointing out in the above segment how much hidden sugar is “in everything from fruit drinks to salad dressings, cereals, crackers, and ketchup.”:
The FDA, for its part, has proposed a new nutrition label that will better communicate the amount of “added sugar”—how much of any given food’s sugar content wasn’t in the food before it was produced and packaged. But the proposal, which was first put on the table at the beginning of the year, has met fierce opposition from the cash-rich sugar industry. “Being forced to reveal how much sugar you are adding to people’s food might seem pretty mild, but there is no way the food manufacturing industry is going to let that happen,” Oliver said.
The Dish 