uk

A Marmite Valentine

maki — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:37:10 +0100

Back in January, I received an email from someone called Chris, who worked for the PR company for Marmite. He’d enjoyed my post about Paddington Bear becoming a spokesperson (spokesbear?) for Marmite. I pointed him to the other Marmite-love articles I’d written: the Guinness Marmite tasting and this somewhat obsessive taste comparison of Marmite, Vegemite and Cenovis. (Marmite won over Cenovis by a narrow margin, and over Vegemite by a mile. Sorry to all my Aussie readers! It’s a matter of personal taste and having spent some of my formative years eating thin Marmite-and-butter-sandwiches for tea.)

Chris and I exchanged a couple of nice emails, and he left the enigmatic words “Watch this space!” I had forgotten about it totally, until a small yet hefty package arrived in the mail a couple of hours ago, containing this:

Yes, this is a special limited edition of Marmite, made with champagne! I have to admit that I was contemplating trying to procure one when I’d first heard of it, but hesitated because I still have about two and a half jars of last year’s special edition Guinness Marmite. But then again, can a dedicated Marmite lover have too much Marmite? I don’t think so.

Then I realized that Rax from the Marmite PR people even sent this wonderful poem by email:

Hi Maki, I hope you’re well
We’ve written a poem for you
Because it’s St Valentine’s Day
And we love the blog that you do

JustHungry sums up the expatriate view
That missing home-food can seem like a curse
So we want to offer you comfort
In the form of this little verse

Whilst Marmite isn’t Japanese
Nor is it American or Swiss
It is a nomadic food available for all
That fills its fans with bliss

There are those that hate it who claim
That it’s never really been in culinary fashion
But Marmite Lovers from around the globe
Testify their LOVE for it with real passion

And it is YOUR passion that we truly admire
(We loved reading your Paddington Bear monologue
But it is your February article on Marmite
Which makes JustHungry.com our favourite blog!

So expect some Lovers Marmite
To be delivered to you in the post
Please think of us and our love for you
When spreading it on your toast!

So, how does the Champagne Marmite taste? (Naturally, I tried it on a piece of toast with butter.) It is a bit runnier than the Guiness Marmite, and does have a distinctive taste of champagne. It’s not bubbly of course, but that’s a minor drawback. But most of all, the label is just so right.

You can read more about the Champagne Marmite on the Lovers’ Marmite blog. Viva Marmite!

Hmm, I wonder if I can somehow make Marmite fit with rice…

(As an aside, when you’ve been running a food blog for more than 4 years, you get contacted by all kinds of PR folks, and this is the one of the nicest experience I’ve ever had in that area. I feel even more warm and fuzzies towards Marmite now, if that’s possible. ;))

Daiso is coming to Europe!

maki — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:56:10 +0100

Great news for fans of things Japanese who live in Europe, the UK in particular: Daiso, the 100 yen store chain, is opening a branch in London on November 17th. They are teaming up with Japan Centre, one of my favorite sources for Japanese food and other things. (Disclaimer: Japan Centre advertises on this site, but I’m also a happy customer.) It will be at 213 Piccadilly.

If you’re not familiar with the awesomeness of 100 yen shops, you owe yourself a visit if you go to London. I am hoping that they will carry plenty of cute goods for the fans of cute. I think I need to go to London soon! I’m rather curious as to how they’ll price things at the London store…will everything be a pound? We’ll see.

Daiso also has several stores in North America.
An excerpt from the press release follows after the jump.

JAPANESE HOMEWARE GIANTS LAND IN CENTRAL LONDON
Daiso, the Japanese low-cost home ware specialists bring their recent US success to the UK.

In conjunction with Japan Centre UK, established in 1976 from a single suitcase of Japanese books, Daiso Japan is beginning its European campaign with a flagship store in London’s Piccadilly, opening November 17th. With over 2,500 stores in Japan and 450 worldwide, Daiso’s fixed low cost home ware range has
catapulted it to the tenth fastest growing company in the global retail industry. This places it amongst well known brands such as Starbucks, Amazon.com & Uniqlo. Complementing Daiso will be Europe’s largest Japanese speciality food store and deli, Japan Centre. Combining organic, locally sourced and imported produce, Japan Centre sports Europe’s largest
selection of Japanese food and drink.

Paddington Bear eats Marmite!

maki — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 09:03:58 +0200

There’s quite a lot of slightly matted plush fur flying in Britain this week over the new Marmite TV ad, which features the lovable Paddington Bear, devotee of marmelade sandwiches, tucking into a Marmite sandwich. It made so much of a furor that it even made the evening news on the BBC yesterday. Paddington Bear creator Michael Bond has been accused of selling out and for supplying the script for the commercial (he has denied both). There have been dozens of news stories and editorials devoted to it (my favorite headline is What Next, Rupert Bear in Burberry?).

I’ve written about my fondness for Marmite before. I also grew up reading Paddington Bear, who, despite having come from Darkest Peru, may be the most British of bears, more so than Winnie the Pooh and edging out Rupert. I can understand the fuss a little bit - people want their childhood heroes to remain just the way they are. On the other hand, it is rather funny that so many seem to be taking it so seriously. I suppose that years of being conditioned to Disney and other characters being plastered all over various products has desensitized me to marketing tie-ins and product placement and all of that. And at least, Paddington is endorsing a very British and fairly good-for-you (barring the salt content) product, not a Happy Meal. It could be that Paddington is displaying some media savvy with this move, since it’s been announced that he will be appearing in a big screen feature film soon too. Good for the old bear.

You can check out the ad for yourself on YouTube. I think it’s great, with the typical deprecating sense of humor shown in other Marmite ads. (He makes a Marmite and cheese sandwich, which reminds me that Marmite is pretty good on grilled cheese…)

Some great UK Food TV shows

maki — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 02:38:54 +0200

At the moment there are so many UK TV food shows that are compelling enough to watch that it’s hard to find time for them all. Thank goodness for DVRs and torrents. Here’s a rundown, in no particular order of preference - all of them are worth watching for different reasons, and most are far better than almost anything that U.S. TV has to offer at the moment.

The Restaurant: If you ever saw the Australian reality show My Restaurant Rules, this BBC2 show’s format should be familiar. Nine couples compete against each other running real restaurants. The ultimate prize is a real restaurant, which will be part of two-star Michelin chef Raymond Blanc’s empire. I did see most of season one of My Restaurant Rules a couple of years ago, and I think the editing and challenge format for The Restaurant is a lot better. And Raymond Blanc is a fair yet stern taskmaster. (His inspectors are pretty harsh…especially the woman.) This show airs two hour-long episodes per week plus a “You’re Fried” show (get it….you’re fried…) in the style of The Apprentice. (show link) [Edit: This show gets better and better!]
Hell’s Kitchen UK, season 3: Hell’s Kitchen originated in the UK, with Gordon Ramsay. It’s different from the US show though since it airs every day for a couple of weeks. It also, unfortunately, uses hapless B and C-list celebrities as the amateur chef wannabes. However, it’s worth watching because the head chef for this season is the legendary Marco Pierre White - the guy that allegedly made Gordon Ramsay cry and Mario Battali wet his pants (or something like that). I watched the first episode last night, and while the celebrity-chefwannabes were as lame and annoying as I thought they’d be, the chef, or Marco as he wants to be addressed, was quite compelling to watch. He looks like an aging, battered rock star, he doesn’t swear nearly as much as Ramsay does, and he’s very scary. (show link) [Edit: Unfortunately, Hell’s Kitchen deteriorated rapidly into the realm of Celebrity Big Brother and other such silly shows centered around ‘celebrities’. ]
Nigella Express: The Domestic Goddess is back with another series of food porn on BBC2. This time it’s quickly prepared food porn! A must for Nigella fans, and of course there’s a book to go with the series. Watch Nigella balance a plate of saucy pork chops and gnocchi on her lap while sitting on her sofa! (show link)
Kitchen Criminals: Another BBC2 reality show, the premise of this one is that two top chefs, Angela Hartnett and John Burton Race, attempt to train two teams of totally inept cooks to prepare restaurant quality food. This one is actually in its last week I think (or maybe there is another week), but I just caught up on it. It’s much more fun than it might sound, and the recipes are quite nice and doable. (show link)
Cook Yourself Thin: At first I was wary of this Channel 4 show, which promises that you will ‘drop a dress size in six weeks’ while cooking the way four female food professionals (a chef, a food writer, and I forget what the other two do) with posh boarding school accents and nicknames to match (Harry, Gizzi, Sal and Sophie) do. The for ladies have the ability to stay reasonably svelte (sizes 10 to 14) and also cook while dressed for nightclubbing. It’s awfully girly and cutesy in a somewhat tacky way. However the women actually do make some very tasty looking food, and offer lots of good calorie-cutting ideas. I am almost tempted to buy the ubiquitous companion book.(show link)
Finally, two shows that have finishes airing (but I just recently finished catching up on with my DVR) are Indian Food Made Easy and Rick Stein’s Mediterranean Escapes, both on BBC2. Indian Food Made Easy (show link), presented by food writer (and, well, total Yummy Mummy) Anjum Anand, was terrific with a light, modern take on various Indian classics, and Rick Stein’s latest show was as usual a terrific mix of travel, people and great food. I did buy the Indian Food book, and it’s quite nice though a bit on the slim side. (You could just get by with the online recipes).

I guess I should say something here about high profile starred chefs like Raymond Blanc, Marco Pierre White, Angela Hartnett and John Burton Race appearing on reality food shows. (Rick Stein is also a high profile chef and restauranteur, but he’s been presenting food shows for years now and is a real pro doing it.) But I guess we should be resigned to the fact that chefs are now rock stars, and that some of them love, maybe just need, the exposure they get on the small screen. And to give them credit, all of them do pretty well there.

Rhubarb berry trifle

maki — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 18:20:52 +0200

On rhubarb, stewed fruit and England

I first saw this curious plant called rhubarb during the time we lived for 5 years in Berkshire, England. I was 5 when we moved there. The rhubarb grew like a small jungle in a corner of the vegetable patch of the house we were renting, alongside some equally puzzling gooseberry bushes. Neither existed at all in Japan at the time, and my mother was at a loss as to what to do with them, until our next door neighbor lady told her how to stew them. The neighbor lady believed in stewing most fruit - she told my mother to stew or jam all of the raspberries too, since eating them raw may lead to upset small tummies. Thankfully my mother didn’t take her advice for all of the raspberries, and I still have memories of stickily enjoying bowls and bowls of red, ripe raspberries with clouds of whipped cream. One of the first things I did when I got my own garden was to plant several raspberry canes.

Stewed and cooked fruit figures quite prominently in my memories of English food at the time. This was in the ’70s. Whenever I was invited to tea at a friend’s house, there was usually always some sort of cooked fruit dish, be it a compote of peaches in the summer or apple and blackberry pie later on in the year. I think we only ate fresh, raw fruit at home, except for bananas and strawberries. I didn’t even know that gooseberries could be anything other than sour, green and only edible stewed with sugar, until I came to Switzerland and saw them left to ripen on a bush, turning a bright reddish-purple.

That penchant for cooking fruit does mean that there are many terrific fruity desserts (aka puddings) in British cookbooks. One of them is trifle. I’m in the midst of my annual rhubarb orgy period, and it’s one ‘fruit’ (though it’s botanically a vegetable) that needs to be cooked. Hence, the rhubarb trifle.

The slightly modernized trifle

A trifle is small pieces of sponge cake soaked in a sweet, fruity liquid, and topped with custard or cream. Some versions of trifle are quite alcoholic, but this one has no alcohol in it since I imagine my 8 year old self tucking into it. The components are simple: the fruit-liquidy mix, the cake, and the creamy topping. The key part that makes this trifle different is the rhubarb soaking liquid part, which is quite sour and not too sweet. I’ve added a few frozen berries (raspberries from last summer’s crop in fact) to make the red color more intense - if you have fresh strawberries by all means use those instead.

Trifle is traditionally topped with custard, cream or both. Here I have combined the two so to speak and topped it with vanilla ice cream instead - this is the slightly modernized part. It’s homemade but you can use a good store bought ice cream if you don’t want to bother, or don’t have an ice cream maker.

I think that the key to a good trifle is to not overload it with sponge cake, which makes it go rather stodgy. Add just a few pieces for the interesting texture. Note that I’ve used pieces of store bought roll cake here (called Swiss roll in England, but not really Swiss as far as I know) which adds some extra flavor. You can assemble it all in a big bowl, or in individual glasses as I’ve done here.

This is my pre-planned entry for Sam’s Fish and Quips event celebrating British food. See also my other two British-theme posts this week, Tasting Guinness Marmite and The Edwardians and their food.

Rhubarb berry trifle with vanilla ice cream

To keep the color as clean and red as possible, use only the red parts of rhubarb stalks. This may mean buying more rhubarb than you need. Use the green parts for another dish.

I’ve used cup measurements here throughout since it’s easier for this particular recipe, and everything is proportional. Note 1 cup = 250ml.

The ice cream part:

This makes more ice cream than you’ll probably need but…anything wrong with that? I don’t think so. You can skip this step and get some good quality store bought.

Vanilla Ice Cream

2 cups whole milk
1 vanilla pod or 1 tsp. real vanilla extract
4 egg yolks from pasteurized eggs or eggs from very happy organic hens
7/8th cups (a bit less than 1 cup) sugar
1 cup heavy cream

If using a vanilla pod, cut it open and scrape out the beans put the pod and the beans into the milk. Let the milk simmer for about 10-15 minutes on very low heat.

In a bowl, beat together the yolks and the sugar. Slowly add the heated milk (fish out the pod), beating vigorously. Add the vanilla extract if you are using that. Add the cream and whisk together. Let cool until ice cold. Put into an ice cream maker and churn following the manufacturer’s instructions. This, incidentally, is my standard vanilla ice cream recipe.

The rhubarb-berry part:

8 cups of cut up red rhubarb
1 cup fresh or frozen red berries (raspberries or strawberries or even red currants)
1 1/4 cups sugar
Juice of 1 lemon

Mix everything together in a non-reactive pan (stainless steel, enamel or non-stick. Not aluminum or iron in other words). Heat over medium-low heat - after a while it will become quite liquid. Simmer for about 20 minutes until the rhubarb pieces are soft.

Let cool to room temperature, and taste - if it seems too sour to you (remembering that you’ll be adding sweet cake pieces to it) add a little sugar and mix well to melt.

The cake part:

A store bought (Swiss) roll cake with a jam and cream filling

To assemble it all:

For every cup of the rhubarb mixture, add about 1/3 cup’s worth of cut up cake. Don’t overload the liquid with the cake, and reserve some for decoration. Allow the combined mixture to mellow and cool in the fridge for several hours.

To serve, scoop the mixture into individual parfait glasses or into one big glass bowl, a trifle bowl if you have one. The mixture should come up to about 2/3rds of the height of the glass. Top with scoops of softened vanilla ice cream, and decorate with slices of the roll cake.

The Edwardians and their food on BBC Four

maki — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:40:23 +0200

BBC Four is running a series of program(me)s about the Edwardians, and two of those are about the food of the era. They have already aired but will be repeated several times as most BBC Four shows are. Both are well worth watching for anyone interested in food and history.

Edwardian Supersize Me is the showier of the two. Giles Coren, food critic for The Times, and TV presenter Sue Perkins lived the life of well-off Edwardians for a week, and ate like the Edwardians of the upper-middle class did - in Sue’s case while wearing a corset. Their in-house meals were cooked by famed food writer Sophie Grigson, from an Edwardian housekeeping book, and they also ate out frequently since this was the era when restaurant dining became popular in England.

Their meals were something like this:

Breakfast: Meat Meat Meat Eggs Fish Meat Offal Meat - oops time for Lunch! More Meat Meat Fish or Shellfish Cream-or cheese-sauced carb dish Meat Meat Dessert - oops time for Tea! Cake Cake Cake Scones Bread Cake Sugar Cake Cake - oops time for Dinner! Meat Meat Meat Some Jellified Thing Cheese… you get the idea. Here’s a menu for lunch, which doesn’t show the last course (Friandises):

The amounts eaten were amazing, and all that… MEAT was just really mind boggling. Watching Giles and Sue gorge, suffer, then finally turn almost feral from all the MEAT, was amusing. The frequent belching, farting and occasional throwing up was… well ok, let’s forget that part. All in all a fun and pictoresque hour of entertainment. (Giles Coren has written about his experience. )

As entertaining as Edwardian Supersize Me was, I enjoyed The Edwardian Larder even more. It was a more scholary documentary that featured some well known British food brands that had their start in the Edwardian period - Typhoo Tea, Perrier, Cadbury’s Milk Chocolate, Marmite and (briefly) Oxo. Unlike the superficial take on similar themes on shows like Unwrapped in the U.S., this showed just how national and even international brands came to be so prevalent. For instance, Perrier, which was a company founded by an Englishman, managed to sell the idea that French mineral water was much superior. They put as much emphasis on the design of the bottle as with anything else. This was also the era when celebrity endorsements became a critical part of marketing - Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole for instance was laden with free food from various companies eager to see their brand associated with such a heroic - and well-publicized - undertaking.

The Marmite segment was fascinating (of course I am somewhat obsessed by yeast spreads anyway). The company was actually started by a Swiss, which makes me wonder if Cenovis or Cenovis-like products existed before Marmite in Switzerland. (On a related note, it’s interesting that two of the world’s leading dessicated soup base companies are Swiss - Knorr and Maggi.) Marmite is a by-product of making beer, and was originally sold as a soup stock base. What’s more, it was marketed to vegetarians as an alternative to beef tea, which was tremendously popular at the time for health reasons. (This explains why invalids in old novels are often fed things like beef tea and jellied veal. I’ve always wondered about that.) It was also mentioned (in the Supersize Me program) that the suffragette movement was associated with vegetarian restaurants. Marmite and Women’s Rights, hand in hand - the mind boggles.

One statement that caught my attention was that national and international brands were able to gain popularity because their product was seen as being of higher quality, ‘more pure’, and more hygenic than foods prepared locally with no recognizable labels. People liked that the branded, sturdily packaged foods had been barely touched by unknown human hands. Ironically, a hundred years later the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction; the craze now is for the small local production, the ‘homemade’, the minimally packaged. The Edwardian era was also when mass food exportation got into full swing - all that beef had to shipped from somewhere (mostly South America and the U.S.). Now everyone is earnestly talking about ‘eating local’.

In any case, these are the type of shows I like to bring up to TV naysayers: when used well, the medium of television can delivery something truly enlightening.

Historic food adventures continued in The Supersizers Go

In 2008 the concept of Edwardian Supersize Me was continued, sending Giles and Sue to other historical eras to gorge themselves.

Supersizers Go recaps

Edwardian Supersize Me, not part of the series, but sort of the pilot that aired in 2007
Description of the whole series, plus World War II (episode 1)
Restoration (episode 2)
Victorian (episode 3)
1970s (episode 4)
Elizabethan (episode 5)
Regency (episode 6, last in series)

Tasting Guinness Marmite

maki — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:42:07 +0200

Back in February I reported on the new limited edition Guinness Marmite. Since then, the salty yeast spread connoisseur in me yearned to taste this mysterious combination. Parts of me panicked at the thought of it selling out before I had a chance at it.

Enter my friend Mimi to the rescue. She kindly procured not one, but four, yes 4, 250 gram jars of Guinness Marmite for me, which arrived in the mail today. My first reaction: “ZOMG, a kilo of Marmite!” (That’s about 2.2 lb for the metrically challenged.)

Calming down, I proceeded to inspect it in detail.

Packaging

The original Marmite jar is a classic of product design, but the Guinness Marmite jar may have even bettered it. I love the cool white and black label against the dark brown of the jar.

The back label is just as good as the front:

“Good things come to those who wait” indeed. You can also see the ingredients: Yeast Extract, Yeast Extract, and salt. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.) How pure! It warms the cockles of my heart to see such a straightforward product being sold by a multinational conglomerate like Unilever.

Appearance

Guinness Marmite has the same color as classic Marmite, but is rather more liquid in consistency.

Aroma

Does Guinness Marmite have a beer-like smell? To test this, I stuck my nose deep into the jar and sniffed. Indeed it does have the slight aroma of beer, though about equal to that of Cenovis.

Taste

Taste, of course, is the most important aspect. First, I took a tiny amount on the end of a rounded knife an placed it carefully on my tongue. The top note is quite similar to that of Cenovis - a bit beer-y. The midnote is that of classic Marmite - salty and yeasty without any fishy undertones like in Vegemite. The aftertaste is the most interesting however. It’s bitter and slightly dark, reminiscent of a good stout. Like Guinness, as a matter of fact.

Then the ultimate test: spread on a piece of bread that is first covered with a rather generous schmear of butter. I used the 1:8 Marmite to butter ratio as mentioned in my yeast spread opus. This worked very well. I then upped that to a 1:4 ratio,and that worked quite well too. Somehow the bitter undertones in the Guinness Marmite counteract the saltiness.

Conclusion

I am quite taken with this Guinness Marmite. I do hope they will continue to produce it, but if not I may need to figure out a way to preserve the remaining 3 unopened jars safely, as a Collectible for the Future. Who knows, it may pay for my niece’s college education.

Where to buy

If you aren’t in the UK, don’t have nice friends or obliging relatives there, and are desperate to try Guinness Marmite, I’ve seen them listed on eBay. So…good luck!

Is it worth it, or will you regret it? Well, when it comes to salty yeast spreads, I dare not say either way.

Tune in to the Big (Cheddar) Cheese

maki — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 13:39:02 +0200

Don’t forget to tune in to Cheddarvision.tv (previously mentioned on Just Hungry here) today!

They are going to turn the Big Cheese over, take a core sample, and see how it’s doing! If they haven’t already…I’m not sure. Was that label on the other end before? (thanks Mimi!)

Guinness Marmite!

maki — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 22:57:30 +0100

Wow, look at the gorgeous black and white special edition Guinness Marmite jar! Limited to a run of 300,000 jars, this special blend of Guinness and Marmite is on sale in the U.K. right now. I’m not too sure how different it would be in taste from regular Marmite, which is after all a yeast spread. I’m speculating it might taste like the slightly beer-y Cenovis. Now how to get my hands on one… (link via Coolest Gadgets and The Guinness Blog - yes, Guinness has a blog. The portal is a bugger…just say you are from England, and old enough.)

Update: I finally taste it!

Extra from the archives, for all Guinness and stout fans: Irish stout cake with whisky-sour icing.

Marmite, Vegemite, and...Cenovis? A tale of salty yeast spreads

maki — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:45:41 +0100

Since it was reported a couple of weeks ago (erroneously, as it turns out) that Vegemite was a banned substance in the U.S., there's been renewed interest in the mysterious black spread from Australia, and its bitter rival in the yeast-extract world from the UK, Marmite.

But, did you know that Switzerland, the otherwise sane land of beautiful mountains and secretive banks, has its own black, viscous, salty yeast spread? Yes it does, and its name is Cenovis.

As you can see, Cenovis comes in a fairly straightforward jar (made of plastic), or in a tube. You may think it's funny that a spread should come in a toothpaste-like tube, but in Switzerland a lot of food products come in such tubes - mayonnaise, tomato paste, fish paste, dog food. (Okay, not dog food.)

Like its more famous counterparts, Cenovis is a by-product of the beer brewing process. The ingredient list says that it is fortified with Vitamin B1 (Thiamin), though I am fairly sure that the nutritional makeup of all three yeast spreads is quite similar. Unlike the Kraft-owned Vegemite or the Unilever-owned Marmite, Cenovis is still made by a company called, quaintly, Cenovis S.A., based in Geneva. Their web site says that Cenovis used to be included in Swiss Army rations. Since they are beer brewing by-products, they are all vegetable based. (Bovril, a similar product, is traditionally made of beef extract so is not included here.)

A side-by-side yeasty comparison

Marmite, Vegemite, and Cenovis are all quite similar yet distinctly different. Since I had on hand jars of all three products (Vegemite and Marmite were procured last week in England; Marmite is available in Switzerland in some department store food halls, but I've never seen Vegemite), I decided to do a simple comparison.

Following are my findings on this weighty matter.

The packaging

Both Vegemite and Cenovis come in fairly plain, straight jars (or in toothpaste tubes for Cenovis, as noted above). Cenovis does have a nice Swiss-theme paper cutout kind of design on it.

But in terms of packaging, the Marmite jar wins hands down. Made of brown glass, it is nicely rounded. The logo font is curved to fit, and there's a cartoonish pot marked Marmite, probably in reference to the French meaning of the word (pot). (Marmite is in fact named after its container.) It's a timeless, classic and lovable design.

The appearance

All three are dark brown-black, but Vegemite is slightly darker in color than the other two. It's also the least sticky one - the consistency is sort of like that of a fruit butter. It is opaque and matte, not shiny.

Marmite is the most sticky and viscous one - the consistency is like that of a toffee syrup, and very shiny.

Cenovis is somewhere in between - shiny and slightly sticky, but not as viscous as Marmite.

The taste

But the most important test is taste. The standard way to eat these spreads is to put them on bread, toast or a plain cracker with butter, so that's how they were consumed. (I was out of toast bread.)

N00bs People who have not grown up with any of these yeast spreads may have heard fearful stories of how disgusting they are and such. The most common problem with yeast spread neophytes is spreading way too much of it on. If you spread it on as thickly as you might a jam, you are headed towards disaster, horror, and a lifelong loathing of anything dark and viscous.

The difficult thing though is that the amount of spread to use differs from spread to spread. From my tests, the optimum amount of Marmite (M) per 1 teaspoon of butter (B) is 1/8th of a teaspoon, or a 1:8 M:B ratio. Vegemite (V) on the other hand is less salty and less intense in flavor, so you can go up to 1/4 teaspoon, or a 1:4 V:B ratio. Cenovis (C) comes somewhere in between, but is closer to Marmite in saltiness, so the 1:8 C:B ratio works well. You can make the argument that Marmite and Cenovis are more economical in this case.

In terms of flavor, Marmite is the strongest, with a sort of 'meaty' taste. Cenovis shows its brewing roots more, with a beer-ish undertone. Vegemite has a very slight fishy taste to me, plus the taste of dessicated onion flakes.

So the winner is...

Well I must admit to a bias towards Marmite, since I spent some childhood years in England consuming marmite-and-butter-sandwiches for tea. However I must say that Cenovis is surprisingly tasty, and has an adult air to it due to that beer undertone. Its only drawback is that as far as I know, it's not available outside of Switzerland. Swiss expatriates do not seem to have as strong an emotional attachment to yeast spread as Brit and Aussie expats do.

My least favorite by far is Vegemite. This may get me banned for life from ever entering the great nation of Australia. The fishy-oniony undertone just doesn't do it for me at all, I'm afraid. One day though I look forward to trying the Vegemite alternatives said to be available in Australia, such as Aussie-mite and Mightymite. All in the name of research.