My Chef Boyardee Experience: A Cautionary Tale
I have memories from my early youth about eating Chef Boyardee products dating back to my early childhood, when we were very poor and sometimes had noodles with ketchup when we couldn’t afford Chef Boyardee.
Those are not among my fondest memories…so it beggars a ready explanation as to why I sometimes inflict Chef Boyardee upon myself now that I am myself a chef of sorts and know the difference between food and traif.
From this day forward until the end of time, you (my most significant other) are hereby instructed, upon pain of my never cracking another joke ever again, to never NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER permit me to purchase, acquire, beg, borrow, steal, bring into the house, cook or consume any food item with the words CHEF BOYARDEE ON ITS LABEL
The “Overstuffed Ravioli with Italian Sausage” I ate today was absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt the worst food item I have ever put into my mouth. My tongue hates me. My taste buds hate me, my teeth hate me, my throat hates me, my esophagus hates me, my stomach hates me and my bowels hate me. (The bowels in particular because they have to wait eight hours to get that shipment. Imagine the negative anticipation!)
That shit was worse than the shit they served you at Momma Mia that time, the stuff that looked like noodles with diarrhea.
I vehemently apologize for inflicting that shit on myself voluntarily. I think I would rather starve to death in a warehouse full of Chef Boyardee products than eat anything coming out of one of those cans.
It takes ten minutes to make fresh ravioli with brown butter sauce and, come to think of it, I don’t even like gourmet ravioli. I don’t think I have ever ordered ravioli in a restaurant, have I?
Fuck, I could have eaten raw Nathan’s hot dogs and made a better lunch than I stuffed down my throat today.
You are hereby absolutely enjoined against EVER purchasing anything made by that dead asshole or allowing me to purchase or consume such products and hereby empowered to have the locks changed without giving me the key if I EVER bring that shit back into the house again.
(For those of you who don’t know, Chef Boyardee was a real person, an Italian immigrant named Ettore Boiardi, who – believe it or not – was the head chef of the Plaza Hotel in New York City until 1924 when he opened his own restaurant in Pennsylvania. During World War II, his company produced 250,000 cans of pasta in sauce PER DAY that went into the rations of US and Allied soldiers. The shit now sold under his name was probably concocted by someone else, probably in the commissary command of the United States Army. There’s no record of any Chef Boyardee product ever being delivered to the Navy. That’s why people joined the Navy. Their food was always better.)
01/24/2024 @ 3:15 pm
Never have I ever! consumed anything with the Chef Boyardee label.
I understand your disgust completely.
It’s just too easy to make a large variety of pasta sauces, many very economical.
We grew up poor, too, and pasta with homemade sauce was a relatively inexpensive meal.
The mother of a young friend of mine served her family spaghetti with cream cheese and ketchup on occasion. That’s just…wrong.
Food is a pleasure and a joy. Preparing good food is also a pleasure and a joy. These days, I make my red pasta sauce with San Marzano peeled tomatoes. I tried the “San Marzano STYLE” tomatoes and they were not nearly as good. The brand I use is Cento, mostly because that’s the only brand of the real thing my local stores carry. All the others are “style”. The difference lies in texture (the real thing is soft and mushes down to a lovely almost- puree, with a great flavor and no acidity. The also-rans are just okay- a bit acidic and not as smooth.)
And yes, I make my own ravioli once in a while. It’s not hard- just time consuming.
Now…how do we feel about SPAM????
The trick to a good tomato sauce is not to overcook it. I start it when I put the pot of water up to boil. It’s done at the same time as the pasta- about 35 minutes later.
Those old Italian grannies who cooked their sauce for hours until it turned brown and acidy (sorry Gramma) ruined it. Yuck.
01/24/2024 @ 4:05 pm
The secret to a great sauce is to boil the pasta in less water than usual, and transfer a couple of ladles worth of the pasta water to the sauce. Automatic, authentic thickening agent. I also use Cento San Marzano because it is the only brand that Walmart carries that has the authentication labels on the cans.
It is virtually impossible to get fresh San Marzana tomatoes because they don’t ship well at all and if they are grown from San Marzano seeds, they won’t produce the same results because we don’t happen to have volcanic soil in Florida. I have heard that there are some growers who have imported volcanic soil from San Marano but where would anyone get it from?
01/24/2024 @ 4:58 pm
…there’s an old man that I LOVE…
01/24/2024 @ 4:43 pm
I have heard of San Marano tomatoes, but rarely eat tomatoes because acidic foods upset my stomach in my later years. Except in August, when the heirlooms come to our farmer’s market, I bought a four dollar tomato, chopped it up raw, and tossed it into a bowl of Deano’s noodles with garlic, olive oil, homegrown cranberry beans, and fresh parmesan cheese. The upset tummy was worth it!
Am unfamiliar with Chef Boyardee, but when I was a poor hippie girl living with a poor hippie boy in a tipi, we ate Ragu sauce from a jar poured over Star Market white spaghetti several times a week because you could make it on a propane two burner stove. To this day I cannot smell Ragu without feeling gaggy.
01/24/2024 @ 9:53 pm
Star Market? n Massachusetts maybe?
01/25/2024 @ 10:19 am
Since c1971. However, even if you are born in an ambulance speeding towards the MA border, then live your entire life here, natives will always say you ‘came from away’. Sixteen years ‘away’ (Pittsburgh), 54 years in MA.
It was either Star Market or A&P back then in the tipi times. Both, gone now. Unfortunately, not so with Ragu.
01/24/2024 @ 4:45 pm
I think Alan should write a poem about Chef Boyardee, his evil muse 🙂
01/24/2024 @ 11:10 pm
It’s too easy to boil pasta and throw anything on it to eat Chef Boyardee.
01/25/2024 @ 7:51 am
Boyardee is some really awful stuff, but for Ohioans, and particularly Cleveland’s, there is a bit of pride associated with it. You see, Ettore Boiardi opened his restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio. It was called Il Giardino d’Italia (the Garden of Italy). That was in 1924. The idea for Boiardi came about when customers asked for his spaghetti sauce, which he distributed in milk bottles. It wasn’t until 1928 that he moved to Pennsylvania.
01/25/2024 @ 10:07 am
We had some sort of glop made from egg noodles, a can or two of tomato sauce and hamburger.
Mom called it spaghetti but I knew it wasn’t.
Something that looked like the Boyardee product was served for school lunch. It made a ‘thwop” sort of noise when the lunch lady slung it mostly onto your plate on a tray.
I couldn’t eat it.
Even mom’s “spaghetti” was better.