Where You Been, Uncle Ben? You Smell Like Chicken
These last 10 years, I’m tasting a lot of flavors in foods that weren’t there before. I taste almond flavoring in some French vanilla coffee creamers. I taste caramel flavoring in cheap bourbons. Just minuscule amounts, you know, too little to be listed in the ingredients.
And I can taste — even smell — chicken broth in Uncle Ben’s rice once it has cooked.
Am I crazy — don’t answer that. Is it just me, or can other people taste the faintest hint of chicken broth in Uncle Ben’s freakishly white, fluff, regular grains?
I can settle this. My husband, with a serious chicken allergy, will do a tasting.
I know this much: He has eaten Uncle Ben’s in the past to no ill effect.
Why do you use Uncle Ben’s? Why not just regular rice? Speaking of tasting/smelling things, I have a gag reflex that happens when I smell certain rice mixes cooking, like rice-a-roni or Farmhouse rice boxes. It is an additive or herb that I can’t ID. I make my own pilaf mix now because of it. I’m thinking it started when I was pregnant. I have no idea what it is, but it is very distinctive to me.
We were a virtuous brown rice household back when we ate carbs. We have the Uncle Bens because we had to take a side dish to something where brown rice wouldn’t have been welcome.
Diana, report back. But this chicken flavor could even be kosher/vegetarian chickenless broth powder. Wild Oats stocked it, and it was uncanny how much it tasted like chicken.
Diana, are you going to stand by with an Epi pen? Are you crazy?