If you've been coming to Krystal Adventures for any length of time you probably already know I love cranberry sauce. I'm not one of those "Cran-Snobs" who swears up and down it has to be home made and have whole chunks of cranberries in it. Just give me the pure jelly from the can. Make sure it's cold, though! It's good any time, but it's a Thanksgiving (and Christmas) requirement. And with Thanksgiving just passed, you might recognize this:  (It says "Open Other End.) Sadly, it wasn't a joke. No this is serious. Someone's messing with my cranberry sauce! Apparently someone at Ocean Spray got the idea of change the construction of the can! One end is the classic can construction, where the "lid" is basically crimped onto the sides. The other end now is all one piece. I could explain how this is accomplished but I know you don't care. That's right, your regular can opener will no longer open the top of the can. If you wish to use a can opener you HAVE to open the bottom. (Which sort of makes the message on the top pointless.) The next question I had was "Why didn't they change the bottom of the can instead of the top?" In fact I seem to recall a year or so ago that's how it was. Want to know my guess as to why? As the cranberry sauce sits on the store shelves, the sauce inside will settle to the bottom. Since the bottom is the end that will be opened, the result of settling will be a pretty, smooth presentation of sauce,as if that has ever been a problem on either end, ever before. This persuit for beauty has created a new problem: How do you get the sauce out?!? As the sauce settles to the bottom is creates a very nice vacuum seal in the can. No amount of shaking on Earth will ever get it to release. In the past there were two solutions: The first and most common, was to simply turn the can over and use your can opener on that end too, but do not remove the lid. You then use the lid to make a "push pop" of your sauce and it slides neatly out the other end. If you are especially crafty with your sauce, like I am, you learn the trick of pushing just a half inch out, then using the end of the can as a guide to cut a perfect slice off the sauce. Push out a bit more, make another slice. Repeat until all done. The second, not as elegant method was to use a Church Key.  Neither of these tricks work now because there's no "lip" for any device to grip on to. While I was at my parents this past Thanksgiving, I contemplated getting the hack saw (previously seen cutting a corned ham in half) and using it to cut the can open. However, metal filings in your cranberry sauce are not very appealing. You may be thinking this is no big deal, however you'd be wrong. Oceanspray KNEW they'd created a problem. The label on the back of the can now gives instructions on how to get the sauce out:  To remove product intact, sweep a flat knife around the inside edge of can, invert and shake.Don't even get me started on when companies refer to the contents of their package as "product." It's Cranberry Sauce, you idiots! It says that on the front of the can!! So now these brainiacs want me to take one of my nice knives and deliberately rub it against the (sharp) metal edge and insides of the can? Call me crazy but I learned a long time ago that it's not good to rub the sharp edge of a knife on metal if you intend for it to stay sharp. And I tried their directions over Thanksgiving and they do not work quite as nicely as they imply. You have to run the knife around and around and around. (I used my mother's knife not mine, but don't tell her that!) In fact, you have to KEEP running it around, with the can inverted, and shaking. Doesn't this sound like an injury waiting to happen? Perhaps tomorrow I'll call their 800 number and have a chat with someone about why they screwed up Thanksgiving, and who's brilliant idea it was to make the bottom the end to open, and who decided there was something wrong with the old can anyway. I should ask to speak to the "Crantard-in-charge." And if they don't like it, I can just tell them to "Kiss my product!"  |
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I love the church key! I thought I was one of the only people living in the south that know what a church key is! You see, I am a yankee...so I thought that church key was a Yankee term...I guess not.
ReplyDeleteANYWAY....in defense of Ocean Spray: I doubt they were expecting the majority of their consumers to have SHARP, EXPENSIVE, knives roaming about the kitchen. My guess is that the corporation figured that MOST people would use a table knife to extract said "product" because people with expensive knives would make their own sauce and those people that buy their "product" would not have the knowledge or resources to make their own (say nothing about having an expensive knife in their drawer) and would use whatever they had handy...a table knife.
By the way, if you used your sharp knife to extract the jelly sauce...you should have known better. As my daughter says: "Silly-butt."