Awesome Food

Treat your favorite backyard grillmaster to BBQ Rubdown’s tasty spice collection. The gift set includes six 12 oz. bottles of spices and rubs for making deliciously sweet, smoky, and spicy beef, pork, chicken, and other foods on the grill, cooktop, or in the oven. The salt-pepper-sugar-garlic-onion base coat is the perfect all-purpose seasoning.

We love us some gummy bears. There’s something so perfect about their chewy texture, fruity flavors, and adorable form that makes them special. Mental Floss series Food History looks back at the origins and evolution of the tasty candy treat, which first took their bear-shaped form in the 1920s in Germany.

When it comes to getting kids hooked on fast food, few things have had a bigger impact than McDonald’s Happy Meals. Conceived in the 1970s, the junk food giant’s combination of colorful packaging, a packed-in prize, and a complete meal in a box was the perfect storm for choosy kids and lazy parents. Weird History Food has the complete story.

Restaurants in Japan sometimes use fake food in their display windows. Shigeharu Takeuchi has been honing his skills in creating lookalike food for over 50 years. In this Process X video, you’ll see how he makes realistic lettuce, omelets, tempura shrimp, and other inedible delicacies from wax, pigments, and plastic. He even makes caulk look like an appetizing dessert.

Heatonist double dares you to taste the hot sauces used in insane Hot Ones challenges. Recreate Season 21 of the spicy interview show at home with this ten-pack of bottles representing each heat level from 1-to-9 plus an 11 (one-better-than-ten) with a Scoville Heat Unit rating so intense it hasn’t been measured yet.

Combining and balancing flavors in an unexpected yet delicious way, these 36% milk chocolate bars have been infused with Sriracha hot sauce and a dash of pink Himalayan salt, resulting in a perfect mix of sweet and spicy. The 2.5 oz. bars also come in 55% dark chocolate and 70% dark chocolate versions.

While we’re more than happy to go with the Martha Stewart’s perfect bacon cooking method, there are lots of other ways to prepare delectably smoky, sliced pork belly. Bon Appétit’s Amiel Stanek offers up 50 different methods for cooking the artery-clogging treat, some more successful than others.

In many parts of the world, using salt and pepper to season foods is as ubiquitous as the duo of ketchup and mustard. But how did this pairing of two very different seasonings rise to such popularity? BBC Ideas series Edible Histories provides a brief backgrounder on the flavorful combo.

Try opening a beer with your jaws, and you might chip a tooth. Try with a pretzel, and you’ll get a pile of crumbs. But Fred’s Beer Pretzel has a proper bottle opener built into its bottom, assuring you of a properly opened bottle every time. It also doubles as a chip clip.

Do you immediately toss out food the second it hits its expiration date? TED-Ed is here to explain how you’re probably wasting food if you do that. It turns out that the dates stamped on food are often quite arbitrary. In most cases, your best bet is to use your senses of touch, sight, and smell to suss out when food is no longer suitable to eat.

Each slice of Stellar Factory’s pizza puzzles is a smaller puzzle indicated by patterns on the back of its pieces, making them great fun for cooperative puzzle parties. Each 550-piece, 8-slice puzzle features a wavy edge and is loaded with toppings ranging from delicious to downright disturbing. Choose from pepperoni, veggie supreme, or meat lover’s varieties.

You’ll never go back to regular honey on toast, waffles, or pancakes once you try these creamed honeys from Nate’s Nectar. They’re made from stirred raw honey with natural spices and fruit extracts to create deliciously sweet spreads in flavors like blueberry, caramel, orange, peach, and our go-to cinnamon.

While we prefer fresh-made pizza, a frozen pizza can satisfy hunger in a pinch. Wondastic Tech takes us inside a factory that mass-produces frozen pizzas. First, huge quantities of dough are flattened and cut. One machine squirts out tomato sauce, while others shred mozzarella and drop on toppings. Stick around for a look at a factory that makes honey candies.

This very special collectible from Mighty Jaxx and design trio Ilustrata celebrates three amazing things – Godzilla, sushi, and The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The limited-edition 10″ vinyl art toy features Japan’s iconic kaiju made of imaginary sticky rice, raw salmon, and seaweed strips and stomping through the bluest bowl of miso soup we’ve ever seen.

Sit back and enjoy this 14-minute video from a bread factory in Korea, where ingredients are combined, then kneaded into dough and baked in industrial ovens. Then the freshly-baked loaves of white and chestnut bread glide along an assembly line, tumble out of their pans and head to the cooling racks before slicing.

Tootsie Rolls have been around since 1896. Food Network’s Unwrapped 2.0 takes us on a tour of Tootsie’s enormous Chicago factory for a look at how these sweet and chewy treats are produced in mass quantities – nearly 65 million pieces of candy per day. We’re surprised they never tried selling those giant Tootsie logs.

Popcorn is a tasty and addictive snack food most associated with carnivals and movies. But who first discovered that certain kinds of corn would pop when heated, and how did popcorn eventually make its way to the concession stand? Find out in this brief history lesson from TEDEd.

When we were kids, our parents told us not to play with our food. But this waffle iron encourages just that behavior, cranking out stackable waffle pieces that interlock like LEGO bricks. It makes 1×1, 1×2, and 1×4 blocks. In addition, they’re offering plates that serve as a base for stacking, with spots for butter and syrup.

The Commodore Amiga was one of the most graphically-capable PCs of the 1980s. Stuart Brown of Ahoy dives deep into one of the greatest pieces of digital art from the era – a gloriously colorful cheeseburger designed by Commodore’s Art Director Jack Haeger. Sadly, the original file wasn’t saved, so Ahoy reproduced it from scratch.

Maker Peter Brown once made a handle for an ice cream scoop out of moldable thermoplastic, but it didn’t last. So he decided to retrofit his brass scoop with something more appropriate. He took a big batch of colorful sprinkles, submerged them in resin, then turned the block on a lathe to form the handle.

One of the best guilty pleasures to make its way onto dinner tables is macaroni and cheese. From homemade casseroles to the dorm room staple of Kraft mac and cheese, there’s a place in our bellies for all of them. Weird History Food explores the origins of the dish and how it became an all-American comfort food.

TikToker lii0il6 shows us how, in the hands of the right person, anything can be used as a weapon. From sunflower seeds to orange peels to shellfish, you’d better be ready if this masked assassin comes looking for you in your kitchen. And definitely don’t let him near your veggies.

A typical breakfast in America includes items like coffee, orange juice, and high-carb treats like toast, hash browns, donuts, and cereal. Just how did we end up starting our days with these deliciously unhealthy foods? Weird History Food digs into what led to their popularity.