As you do I was just thinking about different meals and foods I'd had that sound strange together...

Beef with cinnamom would have been the weirdest combination I could have thought of until having Stamna in Corfu, where eating it made me realise how ideas about the flavours of dishes needed to be looked at...I mean cinnamon would have been a pudding and putting it with beef????... but it works...(very well)

Other things when you think about it like Duck and orange, or Turkey and Cranberry make you think that sweet and savoury work....

So what else goes together?

Pork with apple sauce is a traditional British idea, just like lamb and mint..

one of the oddest things I've had was... a grated cheese with raisens and a blob of strawberry jam sandwich ! It worked incredibly well....

so what other strange combinations are there?

go on admit it....lol

Steve

This is an interesting thread, we may get some strange combinations here!

Cinnamon is used in many, many savoury dishes in Asia, specially the Indian subcontinent.

Peanut butter with jam-USA

Cheese with marmalade on fresh bread ?Sweden

Boiled rice with sugar and butter/ghee and raw/brown sugar-India

Hot roties, just off the griddle, with heaps of fresh, home made butter and jaggary http://kolhapur.nic.in/Htmldocs/kjaggary.htm - Indian

Sugar/jagary added most of the savoury Gujrati main meal dishes-Gujrat

I've not done it myself (yet) but dark chocolate in chili !

Its odd that something you see as a "pudding" ingredient works just as well (if not better) in savoury dishes... I wonder what hidden gems people have that we haven't thought about.

Steve

In Chile, where my husband's from, they eat a corn pie called "pastel de choclo" which is a similar kind of thing to our shepherd's pie, except that instead of having mashed potato on top it has a topping made from pureed sweetcorn. The really strange thing though is that they cook it with brown sugar sprinkled on top! To me it's delicous, but not with the sugar.

In fact in Chile they add sugar to lots of savoury things as they're eating them. When they eat empanadas (meat pies - similar to Cornish pasties) they sprinkle sugar inside them. A lot of Chileans seem to think that this is essential to lessen the acidity and prevent indigestion. Maybe this does work, but I'm not sure.

I've just found this recipe on the internet for a chocolate cake made using beetroot! I don't think I can post the link though as my message got blocked when I tried to just then.

I'm sure my Mum went through a phase of making various cakes (as in the sweet spongey ones)using potatoes as an ingredient. I'll check with her when I speak to her next, as I was very young then so might have imagined it.

Amanda, that reminded me of this cake with sauerkraut. (No, I haven't tried it.)

http://www.sauerkrautrecipes.com/recipe021.shtml

The sauerkraut cake sounds very interesting! I wouldn't have imagined that it would be nice in a cake, but it would be interesting to try it and see.

Isn't there a sort of corn cake that Americans use like bread for mopping up gravy ?

Steve

I am thinking of trying making American style corn bread one day. We Indians eat un-leavened corn bread with all kinds of saags. Well, it is to sort of mop up ;-)!

How about rose petals (wild one) in rice pudding?

I have actually seen people in the pub have lemonade put in their beer.

That actually is quite refreshing digger :-)!

Very good Digger ... lol

I believe its called "a lager top" guv...

Steve

I find most of those mixes disgusting!

I have no sweet tooth at all, so I need a strict divide between sweet and sour.

But then, I like sweet, hot and sour, so I'm contradicting myself!

Duck and orange isn't odd: the citric taste is there to offset the fattiness of the duck.

Chocolatee is hard to decide on, since it is bitter in many forms, but repulsively sweet (in my view) in other forms, as in British and American 'chocolates'. Cocoa is sour.

Er, I don't think I've shed much light on this issue!

Phi

I've got another strange Chilean combination to add now. My husband made it yesterday. They're called sopaipillas and they're large patty type things made from a mixture of pumpkin, marrow and flour. I'm not sure what else he added. The strange combination bit comes in after they've been fried as he pours a kind of sugary syrup over them. The name of the sugary substance translates as brown sugar loaf in our dictionary, but we used a dark brown sugar to make this syrup (not having sugar loaf). They were actually quite nice, although he said the flavour of the sugar wasn't the same as the Chilean one.

The other thing he does is he adds a beaten egg to guinness which makes a very frothy mixture. He says they do this a lot in Chile. I'm not so keen on this though.

In Cyprus I had a small parcel/pie (looked a bit like a samosa, but wasn't fried) that had pumkin, raisens and rice, spiced with cinnamon...tasted great and some how worked. I believe they are a special made for certain times of the year (Easter maybe)..

Steve

PS they also often make sweet pies and parcels drenched in syrup's (one of them has a sort of ricotta cheese with cinnamon)

I've got a sweet tooth, so those pies drenched in syrup sound really nice! Steve, if you've got a recipe for them I'd be interested. I like the combination of ricotta and cinnamon too.

Amanda

Were they anything like this Steve: Gunjia?

Mamta

Very much like those, in fact almost identical... looks like another crossover recipe....

Steve

Here in Japan I come across many odd/strange combinations.

1)Chicken with teriyaki sauce...(quite sweet)

2)In sukiyaki Tare(Dipping sauce) sugar is added

3)Grilled brinjal with soya sauce and ginger(My fav)

4)Dango <>

with curry topping(kill me)

5)Ochazuke <>

(Green tea poured over rice and topped with Nori aka seaweed)

6)Goya chanpuru (Okinawan dish with bitter gourd and tofu sauted in soya sauce)

Some of them do sound quite odd Emma...

Steve

I have a friend who puts banana on her pizza!

Following the cinnamon thread from earlier - I ADORE cinnamon and will eat it with just about anything.

I have some breakfast cereal that is porridge oats with dried fruit (raisens, banana etc) and cinnamon... its really quite special...

Steve

Bananas are delicious on a toast, as are other soft fruits, much better than a jam!