Category Archives: America’s Best Foods

America does food better than any other nation (shut up, France) and here are the most American of our culinary obsessions.

The 16 Best Fast Food Hamburgers in America: A Stolen List

Posted on September 19, 2018 | 4 comments

“I’m not mad about this assignment.”

~AFFotD’s Food Critic
burger

Full disclosure—we are straight up stealing an article here. It’s theft, pure and simple, taking this list from our friends at The Classic Dad and rewriting it, while keeping the rankings exactly as they were. Now normally we’d view that as a Christopher-Blair-level of douchbaggery, but hear us out.

Okay, it’s pretty hack on our part, but one of our writers actually wrote the original article, and we asked him if we could use it. He said no, but then we asked him if we could use it if we gave him a bottle of whiskey. He asked, “What kind?” We said, “Jim Beam.” He said, “I don’t get out of fucking bed for less than Woodford Reserve.” We told him to fuck off, we’re not made of $30 whiskey. Then we stole the article and posted it here.

Okay, so maybe he didn’t give us the okay…meh. This is the internet it’s the Wild West out here baby.

Anyway. Fast food hamburgers. You know them. You love them. They are literally in your arteries right now, which, holy shit, go to a doctor get that looked at, you might need a bypass. There are a lot of fast food chains out there that make cheap, unhealthy, delicious meat pucks for your consumption on the daily.

But which fast food chain reigns supreme? Well, we (read as, our writer who is so mad at us right now he is literally threatening a lawsuit, haha, good luck finding any assets we can even liquidate, buddy) set out to determine, once and for all, who makes the best Fast Food burger in the United States.

A few notes. First, it was with heavy hearts that we had to omit Steak ‘N Shake from this list, because the mere mention of its name led to an hour-long argument about if Steak ‘N Shake counts as fast food or not. Secondly, while some of these are in fact regional chains, we set an arbitrary rule that you have to be in at least five states and, oh, let’s say over 150 locations, for us to include you on this list.

So that knocks off Fuddruckers, for example. Also, we just didn’t want to go to Fuddruckers. And there is a good chance that one of your favorite fast food chains did not make this list somehow. There’s a very good explanation for that if that is in fact the case. It is because we have a strong personal dislike of you. Yes, you. Remember 7th grade? We do, fuckko.

Anyway, to the list!

The 16 Best Fast Food Hamburgers in America: A Stolen List

Continue reading →

4 Comments

Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, America's Best Foods, Hot Dogs, Hamburgers, Steaks

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

AFFotD Ranks Lay’s Regional Potato Chip Flavors

Posted on September 12, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Here’s a funny flavor. Buy our potato bits.”

~The Marketing Team at Lay’s Potato Chips

chips

Lay’s potato chips has a history of coming up with strange flavors, almost as if they know that coming up with strange flavors of your product an easy way to get accidentally free advertising from our site. (Our promotional staff is very bad about getting us paid from the companies whose products we inadvertently give free advertising to.)

Well, we might be a bit late to the party, but this summer they decided to do it again, coming up with eight regional specific potato chip flavors, because why have people vote for three different novelty flavored potato chips when you know our fat asses will have no qualms about going out and buying eight bags of chips that probably taste, at best, fine.

Anyway, we decided to list out these chips for you and rank them, based on how good we imagine they taste. Yes, that’s right, we’re not even going to go out and buy them, even though we are completely able to do so, but fuck it, Lay’s didn’t respond to our email request to “please send the potato chips, and some whiskey, do you guys make whiskey too?” so fuck it. This is going to be a very phoned in effort!

AFFotD Ranks Lay’s Regional Potato Chip Flavors Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, America's Best Foods, America's Culinary Treats, Strange Foods

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

More of America’s Weirdest, Strangest Burritos (That We’d Probably Eat)

Posted on May 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

“I don’t care what’s inside of it, just give me that burrito.”

~America

 burrito

Last week we scoured the nation to bring to your attention burritos filled with, oh, let’s say…non-conventional ingredients. We had octopus burritos, pho burritos, hell, even a doughnut burrito, and we came the a simple conclusion. No matter how strange the filling, the burrito still sounded delicious (with the possible exception of that doughnut one). Tortillas are pretty much the perfect vessel for anything delicious, and burritos utilize tortillas to the utmost extent.

But as it turns out, there are plenty of other weird, unusual, somehow-still-wonderous burritos in this fine nation. So we decided to order seconds to present to you…

More of America’s Weirdest, Strangest Burritos (That We’d Probably Eat)

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, America's Best Foods, Strange Foods

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

America’s Weirdest, Strangest Burritos (That We’d Probably Eat)

Posted on April 25, 2018 | 5 comments

“A burrito is a lot like sex. Everyone insists it’s just like pizza, except they’re wrong, because they don’t realize that Americans do some REALLY weird shit when making burritos.”

~Also, even when it’s pretty bad, it’s still pretty good

burrito

Like the pizza, the hamburger, or pretty much all of our favorite foods, America did not invent the burrito, but we sure as shit put our stamp on it to make it uniquely ours. We don’t really know where burritos came from, apart from the fact that they were either developed in Mexico, or by the Mexican-American community in our fine nation.

There are a lot stories about the invention of the burrito, one of which involves a Mexican street food vendor who used a donkey as transport and decided to wrap his food in tortillas to keep the contents warm.

People like this story since it explains the name “burrito”, which is Spanish for “little donkey” which, by the way, just a lousy name for a food product. Just a crappy name. Though, the name probably proves that the burrito was in fact invented in Mexico, because if it had been invented in America we’d have called them like, well, not Hot Pockets, but… yeah probably Hot Pockets.

In retrospect, “little donkey” is fine.

Anyway, in Mexico, they’re traditional to Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, though they’re pretty basic, containing only a few basic ingredients. And while burritos have only found popularity in the northern part of Mexico, once they got brought over to America, we went ham with that shit. Like, as in, literally putting ham in it sometimes. And that’s what we want to bring your attention to with today’s article.

The moment burritos began to make their way across America, starting in California in the mid-20th century, we Americans realized we could put anything we wanted in there, so long as the end result tasted good. Why limit yourself to pork, chicken, and beef when you can put whatever you want inside that tortilla? Well, usually because pork, chicken and beef are the best tasting options. But that hasn’t stopped our entrepreneurial spirit. And so, we have dozens of variations of burritos that range from “delicious” to “delicious but also really fucking weird, guys.”

We’re here to focus on the weird ones made by the chef with the crazy eyes. Because even though these burritos sound absolutely insane, they also sound absolutely delicious.

America’s Weirdest, Strangest Burritos (That We’d Probably Eat) 

Continue reading →

5 Comments

Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, America's Best Foods, Strange Foods

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The (Complicated) American History of Mac and Cheese

Posted on April 18, 2018 | 3 comments

“This is as delicious as it is problematic.”

~Historians Eating Mac and Cheese

mac and cheese

Mac and cheese. Macaroni and cheese. Mac dog and the cheeser. Two of these are socially recognized and accepted terms for the classic, theoretically simple dish that combines cooked macaroni with a cheese sauce to create an addictive meal. Mac and cheese has recently seen a surge in respectability, as the blue box dinners of our childhood have been replaced by high end ingredients such as truffles, lobster, or whatever the fuck this is.

But before it was a fancy source of carbs, even before it was the only thing you’d eat as a kid, mac and cheese was a high end dish eaten elusively by the wealthy during the formative years of our nation. It’s history is complicated, as is just about everything from the 18th century, but it at least offers a glimpse into the lives of our founding fathers.

So we’re going to dumb it down as much as possible and toss in swears and bad jokes to kind of skirt around the whole “slavery” thing when we tell you about…

The (Complicated) American History of Mac and Cheese

Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, America's Best Foods, Pre-1800 America

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Discontinued McDonald’s Items We Desperately Want Back

Posted on October 3, 2017 | 1 comment

“Ba-da-ba-ba-daaa, We’re missing it”

~McDonald’s Customers

mcdonalds

Back in August, we wrote about how while McDonald’s is a great American establishment, they’ve managed to commit some real crimes against food.  We even promised in that article that we would not write any articles about the best food items you can get at McDonald’s, partly because it’s less interesting than “discontinued awfulness” and also partly because our Editor-in-Chief’s favorite sandwich there is the Filet-o-Fish which automatically discredits any opinions he might have about the McDonald’s menu as it stands in 2017.

But while we were digging through the disgusting, horrible ideas of McDonald’s past (ugh, that pineapple hamburger haunts us) we also noticed that a lot of items that were briefly on the McDonald’s menu seemed actually pretty good. Really good, even. Like, “man, we wish that was still on the menu” good.

So we’re going to talk about those items, wistfully, and mourn their passing.  Because some of this stuff, man…

Discontinued McDonald’s Items We Desperately Want Back

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, America's Best Foods, America's Culinary Treats

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

American Sausage: Miscellaneous Sausages

Posted on February 4, 2016 | Leave a comment

“I just can’t get over the fact that Cincinnati eats their sausages with grape jelly.”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt, after part 4 of this series

 grilled sausage

We’ve been talking a lot about sausages the past few weeks. Like, a lot.

There are dozens of types of sausage out there, even when you include the hundred or so varieties that haven’t made their way to America yet. In fact, we managed to find 25 different types of sausages that were either created in America, or were brought over from Germany (or other countries, but let’s be honest here, mostly Germany) and adopted by America as something that’s worth stuffing into your sin hole (that’s what we’ve been trying to call mouths this year. In retrospect it probably wasn’t our best idea).

Twenty sausage varieties have already been discussed, leaving us going into the homestretch to take all of the leftover sausages we had and “stuff” their “meat” into the “casing” of our final entry in this article series.

(Did you see what we did there, or were we too subtle? Subtle about the “this category is like the sausage of sausage varieties” thing?)

American Sausage Series Part 5: Miscellaneous Sausages

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, America's Best Foods, America's Culinary Treats, American Sausage Series, Hot Dogs, Hamburgers, Steaks

Tagged ,

American Sausage Series: Typical American Sausages

Posted on January 20, 2016 | 1 comment

“Wait, we’re doing sausages enough?  But we’ve already done hot dogs!  And sandwiches!  When will the madness end?”

~AFFotD’s Research Staffers

sausage

About once a year, the staff of America Fun Fact of the Day decide they want to take on a really ambitious project.  Well, really, our editor-in-chief goes on a weird peyote trip and is like, “Man, what if we wrote about every kind of sandwich in America” or has the rest of us scour the internet for every goddamn regional hot dog or what have you, and when the boss man says, “Jump” we say, “Ugh, fine, can we have a few drinks first, at least?”  And now that we’re nice and entrenched in 2016, we apparently are overdue for our latest unnecessarily ambitious article series—sausages!  That’s right, we’re going to tell you about every fucking sausage, for the small, small price of “our sanity.”

Now, we are going to keep this list at least somewhat manageable by only sticking with sausages that were invented in America, or those that have a distinctive “American” version.  That means Italian Sausage, while invented in Italy (really!?  You don’t say!) still counts, because there’s an American variation of that sausage, but we can’t really go with chorizo, since the chorizo we eat tends to be either a Mexican or Spanish style.  It also, thankfully, means we don’t have to write about vegetarian sausage, as the Germans invented that in 1916, possibly as a continuation of the World War I chemical warfare research that brought us mustard gas.

Also unfortunately (or fortunately?) we can’t include Scrapple, which some people consider a sausage, but which is technically a nightmare pudding that mushes together pork offal with corneal and buckwheat and forms it into a loaf.  If we wanted to write an article of “America’s horrific attempts to mimic haggis” we might include Scrapple, but until then they don’t make the cut.  Basically, we stuck with encased meats of a very specific type.  We’re not going to go generic, so a specific kind of meat, in a sausage, on its own isn’t enough to make the list.  That’s right, chicken sausage, get right the fuck out of here.  Otherwise, we will follow these basic rules until our researchers get lazy and we don’t.  But strap yourself in, as the next few weeks you’ll get to learn way more about dick-shaped food than you’d have any reason to know in a thousand lifetimes.  Sausages!

American Sausage Series Part 1:  Typical American Sausages

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in America's Best Foods, American Sausage Series

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

The American History of Clam Chowder

Posted on January 6, 2016 | 2 comments

“It’s chowdah! CHOWDAH! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you all!”

~Freddy Quimby

clam chowder

The existence of what we generally refer to as a clam is a simple one. They are small little mollusks that spend their whole life completely immobile until a human comes along, boils them alive, and eats them unceremoniously alongside literally dozens of its slayed brethren. Don’t feel too bad for them, though, because they’re delicious.

Okay, fine, if that’s not enough of an excuse, uh, let’s say…all clams are racist? Yeah, every clam is like, suuuper racist, like “you don’t feel safe when they start talking, and you’re like, Scandinavian” racist. Better? Yeah, fuck those guys! That’s why we have a duty, as Americans, to slaughter them in droves and cook them in rich, satisfying stews.

Clam chowder is a dish that even people who don’t eat clams still like and enjoy. If someone said, “I don’t like clams, they’re too rubbery, also that racist thing is still messing with my head” they would still see “clam chowder” on the menu and want to order it, despite literally half of the words in the dish being things they actively dislike.

That is because clam chowder, at its very core, is an inherently American dish—it’s not nearly as widespread as, say, hamburgers or pizza (sit down Germany and Italy we took the ball from you and ran farther with it, those are ours now) but it is one of the best soup options out there, especially for that asshole boss of yours with the shellfish allergy (just tell them that clams don’t count, and that promotion will be yours in no time!)

That’s why today we’re going to take a moment to set you aside, but a warm bowl of creamy seafoody cholesterol in front of you, and tell you about the history of one of the first American soups.

The American History of Clam Chowder

Continue reading →

2 Comments

Posted in America's Best Foods

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Otto Frederick Rohwedder and the Invention of Sliced Bread

Posted on November 10, 2015 | Leave a comment

“It’s the greatest invention since sliced bread.”

~Literally every single salesperson you have ever met, every goddamn one

 sliced bread

We take a lot of the simple things in our lives for granted. That’s just human nature—if something doesn’t look difficult, or inherently present itself as some technological triumph, we tend to assume that these have always existed.

We can marvel at the technology behind, say, a smart phone, but overlook the fact that the first calculator was made in 1959, looked like this, and was able to compute less than your smart phone’s calculator app.

We’re going about this in a roundabout way, but the moral here is that many assume sliced bread has been around since, oh, roughly the same time as bread and knives co-existed, when in reality it’s a 20th century phenomenon.

Yes, sliced bread was first packaged and sold in 1928, and it is an American invention. Specifically, by an enterprising Midwesterner who devoted over ten years of his life to designing and perfecting a machine to slice whole loaves of bread at once to ensure that we would forever be able to take an arduous step out of the process of making toast and sandwiches. That man, nay, that hero, was Otto Frederick Rohwedder, and this is his story.

Otto Frederick Rohwedder and the Invention of Sliced Bread

 otto frederick whatshisname Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in America's Best Foods, America's Culinary Treats, American Heroes, The Best of the Rest

Tagged , , ,