Fascinating Food Mashups

The best thing since sliced bread? More like the best thing since the bread bowl. Food has an incredible innate ability to taste even better when paired with complimentary or even completely opposite flavors. Take a look below for some of our favorite delectable duos.

Cupcakes and Cookie Dough

Who cares about sugar overload when you can enjoy the two best desserts known to man? The cookie dough cupcake is a standard cupcake of your favorite flavor, filled with frozen cookie dough of your favorite flavor. When baked, the cupcake bakes all the way through and the cookie dough stays ooey, gooey, and scrumptious.

Chili Mac and Hot Dogs

Chili dogs, good. Macaroni and cheese with hot dogs, good. Chili mac and hot dogs? Oh so good. Top your hot dog with a concoction of your favorite chili recipe, make it as sweet or spicy as you want, mixed with your favorite macaroni and cheese recipe. The savory, cheesy pair will top any frank beautifully. To make the recipe really exciting, swap the mac and cheese for a macaroni salad with red onions and add corn chips to the chili for a delightful crunch.

Cheeseburgers and…Ramen Noodles?

Okay,I’ll admit it. Even I was a little suspicious about this one but now we’re convinced! This isn’t some sloppy “pasta sandwich,” it’s a beautiful and elegant cheeseburger but, instead of buns, it’s surrounded by bun-shaped Ramen. The noodle buns are cooked, mixed together with egg, refrigerated and compressed in ramekins for 15 minutes, then fried to golden brown perfection.

Doughnuts and Egg

Well I didn’t promise these mashups would be healthy…But there’s no arguing on my part that the Glazed Dunkin’ Donuts Breakfast Sandwich is on the verge of reaching the limits of what a sane person will put into their body. Despite, or maybe because of, its incredible levels of carbs, sugar, and fat, this is one delicious sandwich. To make it at home, simply slice a doughnut in half like you are splitting a bagel and add egg, bacon, cheese, sausage, or whatever strikes your fancy. Be careful, you can have too much of a good thing in this case.

Brussels Sprouts and Kale (aka BrusselKale)

We need a break after that last one, and what better way to do it than to discuss the healthiest mashup on the list? BrusselKale is actually a hybrid plant made from Brussels sprouts and Russian Red Kale. The taste is a decidedly subtler flavor than Brussels sprouts, with very little cabbage undertones and a slight peppery taste from the kale. When cooked the hybrid has a less bitter taste than kale and requires little prep work, unlike Swiss chard and other high maintenance leafy greens. The new vegetable is tasty, convenient, and nutritious with almost double the Vitamin C and Vitamin B6 than that of traditional Brussels sprouts.

Let’s end on a healthy note before we find some other chocolate, doughnut, bacon creation, shall we? The food world is always changing and coming up with new ways to eat food that was once “so yesterday.” Whether we find new flavors by accident, by trying a crazy new recipe, or by engineering the creation of a new plant, we will always be faced with something new and interesting to try. Embrace it and you may discover the next Cronut…