This 40 oz jar of orangeish pinkish gloop proves exactly how much we Jews love Chinese food
-
You know those little duck sauce packets for your egg rolls you get when you order Chinese food? Well, on my most recent grocery run I found myself in the kosher section, and these giant jars of Jewishy duck sauce caught my eye.
Gold's Pure Foods started out many moons ago making horseradish for Jewish delis in NYC and later branched out into mustards and other kosher food products.
But as you may have heard, we Jews love Chinese food so much...
...that various Kosher foodstuff manufacturers make many, many kosher Chinese and other Asian food products.
These 40 oz jars are far from the largest container of Gold's Duck Sauce available for purchase. Oh no, far from it.
I, however, have no need for the giant foodservice size vat of Gold's kosher duck sauce, because my wife, bless her goyish heart, hangs on to the innumerable sauce packets that get chucked into our many many Chinese takeout orders, in a cute little oh-so-pinterest-y Chinese takeout container in our pantry.
My wife is huuuuuge on Christmas with her family back in Wisconsin but we're not visiting them this year because of covid.
Even though it's exceedingly rare for me to find myself here at home on Christmas day, my Jewish Christmas Chinese feast may happen on the 26th, because all the Jews in my heavily Jewish & Asian corner of the DC burbs overwhelm all the many delicious Chinese restaurants here.
But then again, it's Jewish Christmas, and who knows when the next time I'll find myself able to get me some proper Rockville Chinese food on Christmas day, so it could be worth it.
-
Had no idea duck sauce was available outside of the little packets, haha. Although now that you called it gloop, I'm prob done with it forever.
-
@tripper But duck sauce is the good kind of gloop.
The jars and vats of duck sauce exist because saving the packets is such a common practice in Jewish households. We pretty much just use them on frozen egg rolls, but other Jewish folks put duck sauce on all kinds of stuff. -
@texturedsoyprotein I've yet to find a commercially available duck sauce that's as good as what you get at the restaurant. It all just tastes a little off somehow.
-
@texturedsoyprotein Haha, I'm mostly kidding. One of my wierdo ticks is that certain words/language make me extremely uncomfortable. Gloop does not put me over the edge with food but close. It's mostly medical terminology to be honest. Like I can watch open heart surgery...nbd...but if you start giving me the play by play...im out.
Went into a cold sweat and fainted when my sports medicine doc was explaining knee stuff to me.
-
@tripper At a follow-up appointment after surgery, my orthopedist was like, "hey want to see your achilles tendon after I stitched it back together, you don't get queasy with this stuff do you?" and then showed me the video on his phone. This is what I get for going with an orthopedist who's a gym rat sneakerhead like me and roughly my same age.
-
Duck sauce story time: a friend of mine convinced his wife (both early 20s at the time) that duck sauce was made from ground up duck bills. Yes, you read that right. She believed him for years. Until many years later, both families out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant and someone innocently asks for duck sauce. She goes bananas, saying how can you eat that? Don't you know where it comes from? My friend sits there silent, trying to be invisible. She was PISSED at him.
-
@matthurting said in This 40 oz jar of orangeish pinkish gloop proves exactly how much we Jews love Chinese food:
Duck sauce story time: a friend of mine convinced his wife (both early 20s at the time) that duck sauce was made from ground up duck bills.
When I was a kid and could not read English good (mind you, Spanish is my first language), I thought that duck sauce was made of duck. See, it says "duck" on the label, right? Some years of English classes at school later I got around to reading the list of ingredients in one of them packets and thought, oh, there's no duck in here after all.
-
@texturedsoyprotein A rabbi told me this joke last year (as I was teaching a class on natural selection on Christmas)
A Chinese guy and a Jewish guy are talking in a bar. The Chinese guy tells the Jewish guy he comes from a culture that is 5,000 years old. The Jewish guy says, "very interesting, I come from a culture that is 6,000 years old, " to which the Chinese guy replies, "what did you eat for the first thousand years?"
On that note, Chinese kosher food is fucking expensive here.
-
@texturedsoyprotein I think it's also an immigrant thing because we always get Chinese food for Christmas but we're not Jewish.
-
@matthurting said in This 40 oz jar of orangeish pinkish gloop proves exactly how much we Jews love Chinese food:
Duck sauce story time: a friend of mine convinced his wife (both early 20s at the time) that duck sauce was made from ground up duck bills.
Good thing he didn't tell her about Gentleman's Relish (first time I heard the term, I took it to be a euphemism for something else entirely).
-
I have a lot of Jewish friends back in Montreal, and I visited Israel a couple of times. I gotta say, as much as I love Jewish humor, the food is awful. I guess you need a great sense of humor to eat food that is essentially void of taste.
-
@krustywantout It's an immigrant thing for sure. In this case it dates back to the late 1800s early 1900s on the lower east side of Manhattan where there were tons of Jewish and Chinese immigrants. The extra connection for the Jews to Chinese food is that because of Chinese food's general lack of dairy, and kosher rules forbidding eating meat and dairy in the same meal, Chinese restaurants were a way for Jews to go out to eat while remaining kosher-ish, if they avoided things like pork and shellfish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_American_Chinese_restaurant_patronage
-
@midengine Not sure what kind of Jewish food you've eaten but there's plenty that's very good if you're eating the right sort.
Of course, the best things are gigantic corned beef and/or pastrami sandwiches and I no longer partake in meat, but this week before Hanukkah ends I'm attempting vegetarian matzo ball soup and I know for a fact it will be delicious.
Oh, and Israeli food and Ashkenazi Jewish American food are two very different things.
-
@midengine Can confirm. I lived with Russian Jews and other than some of their cheeses and pastries, the food was not good.
-
@texturedsoyprotein I'm not dissing on you at all, I just find authentic Jewish food bland. The American take on Jewish food is more palatable to me, but regardless isn't my go to food whatsoever. It is interesting, as Israel is a very advanced country => I work in semiconductors and Israelis are without a doubt some of the best engineers I've met anywhere, particularly when it comes to network security.
-
@midengine Israeli food is not "authentic" vs some bastardization done here in America.
There are two main cultural subsets of Jews, Ashkenazim and Sephardim. The Ashkenazim are more from eastern Europe while Sephardim are more middle eastern/mediterranean. Each has its own food culture. American Jewish food is heavily Ashkenazi while Israeli food is more in line with Sephardic and the general middle eastern vibe.
But Israeli food is kind of its own thing that's not exactly Sephardic, and Israeli food can be very bland. I have some Israeli cousins, really one of my mom's cousins from Chicago moved to Israel and raised her kids there. They visited us in DC when I was a teenager, and we took them to some southwest-y type restaurant. The kids ordered plain old regular non-spicy menu items and after a couple bites were all complaining that their mouths were on fire.
-
It's actually plum sauce to us. In Cantonese cuisine it's usually served with roasted goose/duck, that's probably why it got its name.
-
@tonicipriani For some reason all the older Jews I know call the hoisin sauce that comes with moo shu dishes, plum sauce. Only as an adult did I realize they were doing it wrong.
-
I've never heard it called duck sauce before - only plum sauce. Some off-brand plum sauce I've had had pumpkin puree in it for the color.
-
@texturedsoyprotein If you haven't tried Mama Chang's in Fairfax you are missing out.
-
@texturedsoyprotein As someone who was partly raised by an old Chinese woman, I am very surprised to learn about the Jewish affinity for Chinese food considering the predominant protein source in Chinese food is certainly pork! No matter, just a funny irony, good food is good food!
-
@cash-rewards There's a Peter Chang here in Rockville. At some point I'll get around to trying some of their other locations. Maybe once I'm back going to the office in Tyson's. Not that I'm in any rush to go back to commuting.
@amoore100 The kosher-keeping Jews usually stick with veggie, chicken and beef dishes. The not-kosher Jews are all about getting that pork & shellfish. The kosher-ish Jews use the lack of dairy as an excuse to slip and eat some pork or shellfish. Fun fact: there's a vegetarian Chinese place near me, and among the framed good reviews on the walls are several from places like Washington Jewish Week, because for many kosher but not super strict Jews, vegetarian food is close enough to kosher, even if the kitchen hasn't been officially blessed by a rabbi.
-
@texturedsoyprotein it's not terribly far from tysons, just on the other side of Vienna
-
@cash-rewards Yeah we'll see when I actually have to go down that way. I started this job June 1 and the only time I've been to my office was the Friday before that to pick up my laptop. My company isn't in any big rush to get people back in the office, and I could see it being contingent on covid vaccination.
The last time I worked in Tyson's, my go-to Chinese lunch spot was China Express, which is like a ghost kitchen from before ghost kitchens were officially a thing. I used to work in the Dell/EMC building at the corner of Westpark & Rt 7, and my new office is on the other side of the Galleria from there, by the Hilton.
