Great (and funny) article! Although I don't know how smoked salmon and cracked pepper got on this list.

I am trying to think of an ingredient that I don't like using and I would have to say it's green peppers. I have finally managed to accept the taste (and the indigestion they cause me), but green peppers are never going to be really high on my list of things I can't do without.

I always feel that chefs may not be good cooks.

A home cook can possibly be a much better cook than a chef.

A chef cooks with the same very limited recipes everyday, and with lots of help in the kitchen.

A home cook has to deal with limited budget, leftovers in the refrigerator, no help in the kitchen, fussy eaters ----etc.

So I don't really care if chefs hate certain foods and ingredients..

dcarch

I seemed to notice that they are all British and therefore are probably horrible chefs themselves, as Britain has the reputation of having one of the worse cuisines in the world. Britain is NOT on my list of places to visit, but I'm sure that the ethnic restaurants there are much better than the ones that serve typically British food.

I pretty much disagree with everything in that article and I especially dislike the attitudes of the so-called "chefs". I am not amused. I used to watch Floyd On Food, and it was entertaining because Floyd admitted that Britain had a lot of horrible food.

Chefs that hate okra as an ingredient don’t know how to use it. In the south it is an affordable, readily available ingredient. Easy for home gardeners to grow, so we do! We used to put up a bunch of jars of soup or stew starter, when the season was winding down we would cook up a tomato based soup with every vegetable left in the garden, usually corn, Lima beans, okra, etc. Then all winter we could grab a jar and add chickens or whatever meat we were in the mood for and have a great dinner! I agree with dcarch above, many chefs aren’t necessarily good cooks.

In the past, like decades ago, British food had a justifiably bad reputation. However, today London is considered one of the great food cities in the world, and modern British cuisine has evolved beyond the pub grub of the past. (And British Indian/Raj has always been a great choice). There is still a whole lot of bad, though, especially in the countryside (I've travelled and stayed for weeks on end when DH was on projects). Many chefs are excellent cooks.

That being said, I don't trust a California-Mexican restaurant that lists cilantro as one of their most hated ingredients. I looked it up -- it's a vegan taco place where people complain of jarred salsa.

I love okra, I don't care whether it's stewed with tomatoes, gumboed, fried or pickled.

Cilantro - if there is just a little bit I like it but if there is over a certain amount of it I don't like it at all. And I'm sorry but until about 15 or twenty years ago I had never heard of it and probably never tasted it, either, where did this craze come from? I don't recall anyone eating it here in the U.S. years ago and I'm including Mexican and Asian dishes. Were we just clueless?

I used to hear that British cooking was awful but I've seen a lot of the chefs on TV making some food that looked pretty good to me.

Sometimes hatred of cilantro is genetic.

......for those cilantro-haters for whom the plant tastes like soap, the issue is genetic. These people have a variation in a group of olfactory-receptor genes that allows them to strongly perceive the soapy-flavored aldehydes in cilantro leaves.

To me it used to taste like soap but now it doesn't anymore. I use it a lot.

I could say the same about artichokes. It seemed like the person complaining just had a hate on and didn't really know how to eat or use an artichoke. Yeah, prepping hundreds is an uncomfortable, tedious chore, but if that's what your boss wants, do your job. If you're the boss, cook something else. Artichokes are fab.

Thanks, Barb, for a really fun read!

A lot of the complaints about all the foods were just about the amount of work involved. I suppose when your job is preparing food and a reporter asks you for your least favorite, complaining about difficult or tedious food is fair game, but it's not fair to the delightful artichoke to blame it for being an artichoke.

I've only cooked okra a couple of times, but I followed directions and it wasn't slimy. I've eaten plenty more that wasn't slimy. I remember ever being served slimy okra. Restaurants have no excuse for serving slimy okra. If they don't know how to prepare it, there's the whole internet to tell them.

I like the snotty turbot comment much more. The chef admitted to loving turbot except for the snot. That is, didn't denigrate it as a whole, just the icky part of prepping it.

Rita, cilantro has been a staple all along. If it's harder to get or more expensive where you live, it makes sense you would have encountered less of it. Also, if there are more cilantro haters, the local restaurants may omit it. There is an enzyme (I think it's an enzyme--it's some kind of bodily function actor) that some people have and others don't. One group goes into kitty in the catnip raves over the deliciousness of cilantro. The other group hates it and generally think it tastes like soap or chemicals. I'm not sure which group I'm in because I have an atypical reaction. I dislike it in general, and won't use it in my own cooking (though I'll use dried coriander seed, which I don't dislike), but when I taste fresh cilantro I just think "Mexican" rather than "soap". I don't know if I'm in the hate group but am so used to it from a lifetime of eating Mexican food that it doesn't produce the not-food reaction, or if I'm in the like group but instead of adoring it I actually dislike it. My father was a hater of the tastes like chemicals variety who couldn't bear even a small amount.

Visited London 47 years ago, and I was surprised that every meal we had was delicious. Too much cilantro, and I taste soap, but in moderation I like it.

Other than the pepper and cilantro, I hate all those things too. Okra is the WORST BLECH!

I also hate sesame oil. The dark kind has the most noxious stench to it. Gag!

and their favorite ingredient ?

SALT!

We did Britain 39 years ago, and, yes it was pretty horrible (bought a hamburger and noticed it was very pink he replied"Well, it's am idn't it?")

We did a tour of Britain in June and I don't remember a bad meal! The best was a farm to table meal at a winery in Wales! Unfortunately, they still don't do leftovers or take-away and I don't have a big appetite! All that wonderful cheese/bread/food probably went to the pigs!

Well, that was interesting, LOL. I do agree on okra, it's vile and slimy no matter how I've had it prepared, unless it's deep fried until it's hard, then it's vile and hard. Elery, however, loves the stuff, and he can have it all.

Artichokes I don't hate, I just don't think they taste like anything at all, a bland lump of something which isn't worth the time or trouble. If you dip the leaves in butter they taste just like butter, so there's that.

The rest of the items I can deal with, I don't hate any of them, nor do I love any of them. The slime on turbot isn't any worse than the slime on raw oysters, but it does take a lot of crayfish to make a meal.

Annie

The trick to artichokes is that the pretty ones are bland. The frostbitten ones that look nasty are the tastiest.

Hate okra. Okra is the most foul thing ever grown.

I think some are taking the article far too seriously. Fun read even if I don’t agree with all of it, but I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who has a heck of a time with cilantro getting stuck everywhere!

I see a lot of things I like on that list, for sure.

I agree about the foraged foods (nothing but spinach tastes like spinach, IMO), and cilantro, but I love ground coriander. That description of turbot seems really gross!

I do love okra - esp. when it's fresh-picked. It has a sort of floral flavor. I grow it just so I can munch it raw, and often can't grow enough to save for cooking.

It's also high in glutamine, I believe, so good for health as well.

I also love coconut - except for that nasty sweetened stuff.

Haha @ 'cacky brown' and 'faffy'!

It's good to hear that the food in Britain has improved. The reports I had about it were from 40 to 30 years ago, and so they've had time to make some needed changes. I still don't like their attitude, however, and I love okra, no matter how it is cooked. My father used to grow it, and we had it quite a bit when I was growing it. It was probably my favorite vegetable, and I always buy it whenever I see it in the markets. I cook it a number of different ways. I sometimes use an African recipe from Marcus Samuelsson, and sometimes I make it like eggplant Parmesan, but with okra instead of eggplant.

The Brits have also discovered ICE! 40 years ago you would ask for some ice in your drink and they would give you one or two tiny cubes (plink plink). Now they actually have ice machines!

So what do you think could have possessed the first people to try okra? Looks like something out of a. Shakespeare novel.

Oh, that looks tasty, let's try it.

I'm not gonna try it, YOU try it.

Let's get Mikey, he hates everything ....

For me it's fin fish. I'm highly allergic to it, which is probably why even the smell bothers me. DH loved fish and would eat it daily if available. It's really hard to cook something that you can even taste, so a quick sauté was the best he got from me.

I like Okra a great deal but have never had it slimy, it's either lightly oven fried and it's not hard or slimy -or it goes in soups. My best friend grills it whole all the time and loves it, again not slimy, but I haven't tried it grilled yet.

Yes, it seems many of the hated ingredients are due to the prepwork involved (tumeric root because it turns your hands yellow???).

Another defender of British food. I worked in a pub in the English countryside in my 20s, and the food was delicious. They relied on local vendors long before the farm-to-table trend. So much so that the milk would change texture throughout the year depending upon what the dairy cows were grazing on. The food was fresh and real... and those pub lunches. The maitre d' used to trash the French for exporting their deplorable beaujolais as if it were something special.

And what about the dairy products and desserts? English cheeses are some of the best, IMO, and think of all the lovely desserts made famous in the British Isles: cakes, puddings, biscuits and creams (hello, trifle!), lemon curd, marmalades, toffee - I could go on...

All you okra lovers are welcome to my share. I cannot stand it. If it's not slimy, it's fuzzy.