So the question about the graters brings up another topic - ratings of food products and tools

M

music-city-missy

Well-known member
We subscribe to Consumer Reports, Shop Smart, and Cooks Illustrated but I can't always remember which products they like and what they do or don't like about them so we use the online quite a bit for research. But I mainly do it with larger purchases. For instance, I don't think I have ever gone and looked up graters. I have looked up rice cookers and things like that but it's usually afterwards and I pretty much go with what they have at Costco, what looked good to me at Bed Bath & Beyond, what I got a deal on, or what brands I trust. As for the foods, I always listen to them on the shows but I can't say that I have ever gone out there and really looked. After my adventure with all the Asian sauces the other day and one online store saying that CI rated the particular fish sauce I chanced upon as being one of the best, I decided to go out and look just now while I was looking up the graters.

So do any of you use ratings and tools like this to make selections, particularly on food items?

Maybe we should have somewhere to store OUR results, tests, thoughts, etc. on our favorite products smileys/smile.gif I would have killed for advice (and pictures since I couldn't read the majority of the labels) on all the Asian ingredients the other day. I lucked out when it came to the fish sauce but I've had some bad fish sauce so I really do feel lucky.

 
I get periodic emails from CI and save the recommendations.

I used to copy them into word files but now I just save them as PDF files. I just looked at the folder and have 50 files saved. I have noticed over the years that the most highly rated items change so some of the older files I have may no longer be the best choices.

 
I was surprised at the taste difference in Asian staple products. I recently replaced hoisin sauce

and couldn't find the brand I had before. I spotted Koon Chun and and remembered it had been recommended by a blogger of Asian foods, so I bought it. I still had a small amount of the other brand (I think it was Kikkoman's) and did a taste test. The Koon Chun was so much more flavorful and we thought the dish I made with the it tasted better.

I can relate to the fish sauce choices. Am curious as to which brand of fish sauce you bought. I've had Golden Boy Tiparos and Three Crabs, current is Three Crabs. All are recommended by various "experts". And I can never remember which brands come from which countries. I think Vietnamese is considered the mildest?

There's a great Asian market here where most of the items have labels I can't read. A really fun place to go.

 
About the change in recommendations by CI. It seems to me they've changed a lot of their

recommendations to less expensive and more readily available items. Probably to try to boost their readership. I think they'd be better served by taking a few of the extra steps out of their recipes!

 
Really, when I looked at products so many were brands I had never seen

and they were only rating two or three of a product so I was VERY disappointed. And on things like the Asian products, they went with mainly the generic main stream brands you see in a typical grocery store.

 
Tiparos was what I got this time because they didn't have Golden Boy

But one time I got some and it was BAD, REALLY BAD!!! It might have been that it was old because it was sort of cloudy looking with some settlement at the bottom of the bottle.

 
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