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- Welcome to FridgeCam.
Today, we're gonna be talking about tinned food,
good or bad.
You're gonna help us decide.
Now we did one of these before
and there were some very good
and some very questionable items in tins.
Today, more tinned treats,
and I'm gonna cook up some stuff with them,
with a few little tips and tricks along the way as well.
- I am ready.
- You know, I love meat in a tin from that first video.
So I'm excited to see where we can go.
(upbeat music)
- [Ben] Number one, lift the cloche.
- What on earth is this?
- [Ben] We've deliberately taken,
obviously the wrappers and the labels off
to see if you can identify what might be inside.
- Looking at the top, I could make a guess.
'Cause that looks like a burger bun.
- Oh my goodness.
- It's a tinned burger.
- It is a cheeseburger in a tin.
I thought we'd start strong.
We saw it.
We couldn't resist buying it because we were so intrigued.
This particular one came from a company in Germany
that specialises in trekking food.
So the stuff that you might have out in the wilderness,
obviously long shelf life, the beauty of all tinned food,
and then easy to prepare.
This one, you have the option,
but you can just put it in a pan of water and heat it up
in the tin before you open it.
- I really wanna try this.
What on earth is this going to taste like?
- [Jamie] Oh, that's a cross section, isn't it?
- Now when you can things,
there's certain ingredients I just
would never imagine canning
and cooked bread is one of those.
Going back to some of the positives of tinned food.
Basically it's a preservation method.
So it keeps items safe for consumption
without the need for refrigeration.
If you are camping, for example.
- It smells more of brioche than it does anything else.
- It smells like Christmas.
- Joy.
- [Jamie] No.
- Christmas brings me great joy.
Does that bring you great joy?
- It smells like Christmas spices.
That does not smell like a burger.
- It's not delicious.
- That is not a tasty burger.
- It tastes very fatty, very oily,
very sweet from the bread.
And then the meat tastes of, I can't tell you which meat.
It tastes of generic meat.
- It squeaked as I put it in my mouth.
So texture wise, everything was the same consistency.
- What if I told you a tinned cheeseburger
was five euros 99.
About a fiver.
- I mean, if you're in the wilderness, you'd eat it.
You wouldn't enjoy it.
- If you're camping, probability is
that you've got access to a fire.
- Look, we've been camping before
and we've created some amazing things outside
on open fires and you can definitely cook better,
but most of those things need a refrigerator or stuff.
So I can absolutely see a place for that.
If I'm honest, I chose to start with this one
'cause I thought it was gonna
get a worse reaction than that.
- Yeah, unfortunately you are dealing
with the basicest of (beep)
and that's not that bad.
- [Ben] Number two.
- Here we go.
Oh, now this is what I was expecting.
That is, oh, it's really wobbly.
- Intrigued so far.
There's like a brown gravy,
unidentifiable meat coming out of it.
- Do you know what?
Actually, it looks like it could be dog food.
- First impressions from looking at it, dog food.
Second impression from sniffing it,
barbecue, barbecue sauce.
- Feel free to decant it.
See if it changes your mind.
See if you can identify the meat.
Yet again, any food straight out of a tin
that's supposed to be served hot never looks good
when it's cold.
- No.
It looks meaty.
It's like beef in gravy or something.
- Ebbers, would that be pulled pork?
- This man knows his meat, even in a can.
- Come on, come on!
- [Ben] That is pulled pork
in an American-style barbecue sauce with lots of molasses.
Now the cheeseburger absolutely is just meant
to be eaten as cheeseburger.
This we've actually done something with.
- You can actually see the fibres of the pulled pork
before it's even been reheated.
So interesting.
I would love this to taste good.
- Bear with me.
There you go, J, you can lift that little mini cloche.
What you have is a pulled pork burrito.
- Oh, Ebbers, I knew it!
- So you got some lime and coriander rice.
You've got pulled pork.
You've got pico de gallo and a homemade guac.
The pico de gallo I made and the guac I made
in the time that it took to boil up the rice
and the pulled pork heated in the microwave
in its own sauce in a couple of minutes.
So instead of hours and hours and hours of waiting
for pulled pork to do its thing,
could cheated tinned pulled pork be any good?
- That's very nice.
- The barbecue sauce flavour really comes through.
It's a very strong barbecue sauce.
It's very tangy, very tomatoey, very, very sweet.
It's not how I would want pulled pork
'cause it masks the flavour of the pork too much.
- The pulled pork itself isn't obviously as good
as if you slow cooked a pork shoulder.
However, if you put that in front of me
and I didn't know what it was and tasted it,
I'd tell you it was barbecued pulled pork.
So it does, absolutely does that job.
If I want a 15 minute burrito,
then that's the only way I can get that.
- When you put it into a burrito and you've got rice,
and you've got guac,
and you've got everything else going on in there
you can't really tell
because it's masked by everything else around it.
- Interestingly, the cheeseburger does not
interest me in the slightest, but if I went camping.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- That, boil up some rice and cook that,
suddenly that might be an easy solution.
It does the job.
- It does.
It does a job.
It doesn't do the job.
- In comparison to, you know, a kilo of pork shoulder,
which is about seven or eight pounds.
I can see where I'd go for it.
- Mind you four quid.
- Oh, what?
No.
Double that and you can get-
- Twice the amount of pork shoulder that you could cook.
- If I have a craving for pulled pork,
I'd rather go to the effort of making it.
I'd rather do that.
And then at the end of the day,
have an amazing pulled pork dinner and then have it
for lunch on Saturday and breakfast on Sunday.
It's just there.
I'd rather do that than get it from a can.
I mean, I'm still gonna eat it.
(upbeat music)
(people clapping)
- [Ben] Number three.
- When I knew we were doing this video,
this is the type of thing I expected from you.
- It looks like something that clings
to a rock under the sea.
I'm guessing it's a fruit and I can-
- [Ben] You can.
I'll prepare it in a nicer form in a bit,
but you can.
Stored in brine so it's probably a little on the salty side.
- It tastes of vegetable,
but like a really diluted sort of mild vegetable
that doesn't taste of enough to be offensive or delicious.
- I have no idea what that is.
- That's jackfruit in a tin.
So I don't know if collectively
we've ever had fresh jackfruit.
I know we have had it as a meat substitute,
a meat substitute to pulled pork,
sometimes a meat substitute to chicken wings.
I think we had on a street food stall.
Most, if not all, UK supermarkets now stock it.
And I think in Southeast Asia and other tropical climates,
they are used as a fruit in themselves.
They make great ice cream.
They make great smoothies and things like that.
But commonly we see it as a substitute
or alternative to meat.
- You know, I'd really like to eat some jackfruit prepared
in a way to celebrate jackfruit instead of trying
to be something else.
Oh, have you fried this in like Buffalo sauce or something?
- Let me present you with an idea.
- Okay.
- This is not what I was expecting.
- Oh.
- So what I've done for you is heat up the jackfruit
which I've sliced a little bit
with some Chinese five spice and hoisin
and then put it into a pancake roll
with cucumber and spring onions.
So it is replicating duck and hoisin pancakes.
So it absolutely in this instance
is a substitute for duck.
- It smells exactly like a duck and hoisin roll.
It looks amazingly like shredded duck.
- [Ben] Some of it looks like leg meat of a duck.
Some of it goes nice and crispy.
So you get like the crispy bits of duck.
- That is delicious.
- The texture's like a vegetable.
It is fibrous and stringy,
but it's got that sort of bite, crunch,
of a vegetable, not meat.
However, when it's in this,
there is no difference whatsoever
that I can work out between this and a duck
and a hoisin pancake roll.
- Because you're packing so much flavour into it,
it has a really great texture to it.
The flavour across the whole thing is lovely.
I really like that.
That is such a great substitute.
- Whether it's a meat substitute
or a great standalone vegetable or fruit.
One of the reasons I chose it in a tin
is because in a tin, it is so much easier
to get hold of, A, and B to prepare.
I don't know if you've seen jackfruit.
They're big spiky things that need sort
of getting into, and therefore,
another reason why tinned food can be excellent
because it gives you access to ingredients
that are already prepared consistently for you,
without you having to bother.
A tin that size from UK supermarket in brine, one pound 60.
So, you know, pretty affordable too.
The only comment I would make is
if you're using it as a meat substitute,
nutritionally, it's not.
It's really high in fibre, which is excellent.
It's high in lots of great things,
but it is not comparable as a protein source.
Meat typically 25% protein.
That's about 1%.
So it's not comparable nutritionally,
but it is very good for you because it's high in fibre
and all the other wonderful things.
- It's amazing.
It's really cool.
- That's a winner for me.
- Do you want one more?
- I would love one more.
(bell dings)
(people cheering)
- I'll be intrigued to hear what you think about this one.
- Oh, we're not off to a good start, are we Ebbers?
- This looks like scrambled egg.
- [Jamie] Please, please tell me that's not scrambled egg.
- I genuinely think it might be something
you've not tried before.
I've only tried it once and up until today,
I've never cooked with it,
which is why yet again, after 10 and a half years,
I love what we do.
Fish a bit out if you want.
Have a taste.
And then I'll prepare a dish for you.
- It's like eggy and cheesy, but watery.
- Genuinely, genuinely, genuinely,
I wonder if this is because of the unknown.
Because you don't know what it is,
because I promise you, it's not that bad.
In fact, it's actually quite delicious.
- I know, but I'm trying.
- So it's salty.
It's got really nice texture.
It's really creamy.
Like, it goes really smooth when you bite into it.
- I mean, I'm guessing it's a fruit of some description.
- So it is ackee.
- I have heard of this.
I had no idea it looked like this.
- From our research, it's native to western Africa,
but now one of the national fruits,
pretty much, of Jamaica
and they have a dish called salt fish and ackee
which they commonly have for breakfast.
In fact, I think it's arguably one
of the national dishes of Jamaica.
Would you like me to prepare you some?
- Yes please because it must be good.
And I'm obviously not eating it in the right way
and that's your fault.
This is awesome, okay, great.
I can't wait for this.
- I learnt this dish from two YouTube channels,
Chef Ricardo Cooking and the Caribbean Pot.
We'll put the links down below.
Basically onion, bell pepper,
and salt fish fried off in oil,
scotch bonnet, thyme, tomato, and then the ackee,
which is just drained and used as it is.
You don't wanna cook it too much
'cause it will break down 'cause it's quite soft.
That is salt fish and ackee.
- That is absolutely delicious.
- Oh now see, that is really good.
- It tastes smoky and spicy and of the sea.
It's like sea salty, obviously from the fish.
- It does the tofu thing of taking on flavour.
- This sort of melts in your mouth and goes really creamy.
And in a dish like this,
like you can absolutely see why it's so popular.
So how do you prep the ackee?
How do you cook it?
- Great question and the reason why from a tin is the best.
If you prepare it wrong,
i.e. harvest it when it's not ripe
or under prepare it, it is known to be toxic.
It has toxicity levels of things
that your body just does not agree with.
So you absolutely don't wanna get it wrong.
However, by buying it in a tin,
somebody's taken all of that risk away from you.
And it is always consistently reliable.
It's a very, very simple recipe
once you've got the ingredients.
So a big tin like that you can get from UK supermarkets
for between four and five pounds.
So again, quite expensive as a tinned food,
but I'm sure you can get fresh ackee somewhere in London.
I've never seen it,
but then maybe that's 'cause I've never looked out for it.
What I do know is in a tin it's very affordable,
very easily got hold of, again, stocked in supermarkets.
And you know that it's always consistent and safe.
- Interestingly, I think the only way you're going
to buy that is if you know what you're doing with it.
But what I'd love to do is go to the international aisle
in a supermarket and find some tins of things
that I don't recognise, like the ackee,
buy them and then research what to do with them
to make the most out of them 'cause that is delicious
and I've never had that before.
- What you just described is the journey
that I've been on the last week in preparation for this.
And you realise
there's so many great people out there cooking
their national dishes as beautifully as that.
And then we can be creative.
- That is cool.
I'd be fascinated to see what else you could do with that.
'Cause that is delicious.
- Tinned food still gets a bit of a bad rap.
And to be honest with you, often fresh food,
if put side by side with tinned food is going to be better.
However, there are so many circumstances
where the benefits of tinned food,
whether it's consistency, the price, the accessibility,
the safety of it,
or if you're in the middle of wild camping
and want something in a tin,
like there's always a situation
where tinned food does have a role.
- Absolutely.
I think the main thing that I've taken away
from this is that canning something
from the other side of the world is an amazing way
for someone like me to taste something brand new
from a culture that just does such an amazing job with it.
- I've never thought of tinned foods before
as a method of food exploration.
You know, at the moment I can't travel to Jamaica,
I would love to go.
If this is the next best thing
and it's made possible by tinned food,
then it's a massive win for me.
This is what's great about having you
on the other end of the camera.
Let us know what tinned foods, dishes,
should we be trying from different countries
and cultures that are different from the UK
and who should we be looking at,
as experts, as contributors, as chefs
to get involved and teach us how
to make the most of those ingredients?
'Cause if we can travel the world
from our studio here in London,
whilst we can't actually travel the world,
then I think that's a win for all of us.
- 100%.
- [Narrator] Do you ever have one of those days
where you just can't be arsed to cook anything?
Well we certainly do so we put together volume two
of our best-selling club book, "CBA 2 Cook".
It's a load of simple recipes which have been hacked
by our chefs to make life so much easier
those days you just CBA.
Head to https://www.sorted.club/bookshop
to get your copy.
And now for a blooper.
- During lockdown, I've gone through waves
of trying to eat healthily
and then just goin' on an utter blowout.
And there's been times where I've got up
at one in the morning absolutely ravenous
and eaten things like pita bread outta the bin,
slices of Edam.
So if I was in a similar situation
knowing I had a cheeseburger in a tin,
I can see myself eating that at one in the morning, easily.