Free English Class! Topic: Describing Food! ??? (Lesson Only)

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Well hello and welcome to this English lesson where I'm going
to talk about how to describe food. I'm not going to talk
about the names for different types of food. I'm not going to
show you pictures of food and tell you what the food is
called. Instead in this lesson I'll help you learn different
words and phrases you can use in English to describe the food
that you're eating to describe the food that you ate maybe a
few days ago. In this lesson we'll learn a lot of words and
phrases that you can use to talk about how food tastes, how
food looks, how food behaves a little bit as well. You'll see
what I mean by that when we get to that part of the lesson. But
thank you so much for being here. I hope you enjoy this
little English lesson about describing food. So my first
slide this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. A pet peeve is
something that bothers you in life. And I don't like it when
food is overcooked. When you overcooked food you cook it for
too long. If you put green beans on the stove if you boil
green beans. I like to boil them for about three or four
minutes. Or I like to steam them. When you cook them that
way they come out with a nice green colour and they're still
a little bit crispy. They're a little bit crunchy. But some
people overcooked their beans and they start to look like
this. A pale green colour. Where I think you've cooked all
of the good nutrients out of the bean. So one way to
describe food is to say it's overcooked. Um food food that's
overcooked just isn't as tasty. Um in particular I my pet peeve
is when people overcooked green beans. I like mine to be still
quite green and a little bit crunchy. Of course then we have
the other direction. Food can sometimes be undercooked.
Undercooked food is food that has not been cooked long
enough. When I eat steak I like my steak to be usually medium.
Uh some like their steak rare. But when you cook a steak rare
I consider it to be undercooked. Some people think
that's perfect. But for me I like things cooked a little bit
longer. And so if I was served steak and it was rare I would
say this is a little bit undercooked. It's a little bit
cold in the middle. Could you cook it a little bit longer. So
overcooked means you cook it too long. Undercooked means you
didn't cook it long enough. And then we have of course raw. Raw
food is simply food that has not been cooked. You might be
someone who likes seafood that is raw. You might like eating
fish that's raw. You might eat a lot of raw vegetables and raw
fruits. It's quite common to eat raw vegetables and raw
fruits. You don't have to cook all of those things. Um and
some people do really enjoy eating raw fish. So raw simply
means that the food has not been cooked. It has not been
boiled. It has not been fried. It has not been baked. It has
not been roasted. It has not been I think those are all of
the ones I can think of for how to prepare food. I'm sure
there's more. And we also just have the word fresh. So fresh
food is usually used to refer to food that is relatively
recently delivered to the grocery store. Is that a good
way to say it? So fresh fruit and vegetables means that they
are ripe. They are ready to eat. Um and you definitely want
your food to be as fresh as possible. So how would I
describe this? I should describe this in a better way.
Fresh food like if you buy fresh vegetables they probably
were like in the farmers field two or three days ago and they
were quickly brought to the grocery store. If you have your
own garden you can go out and cut fresh vegetables whenever
you want. That's probably the best way to get fresh
vegetables is to have your own garden. And then we have of
course burnt. Burnt food is food well it's way past being
overcooked. It's overcooked to the point where it starts to
turn black. The best example I could think of is toast.
Sometimes you leave toast in the toaster too long and it
gets burnt. Sometimes you leave something in the oven for too
long and it gets burnt. Burnt food does not taste good. When
I was a kid if I burnt my toast my mom would make me scrape the
burnt part off with a knife and eat it anyways. Because she
didn't Want us to waste food. So food that is burnt usually
has a charred look to it. It has black on it because the
food has cooked so long it has burnt and it has turned black.
Some people like burnt toast. I think my grandfather on my
mom's side liked eating burnt toast. I don't like burnt
toast. I don't mind if it's a little bit burnt but not like
this. This would be too much for me. And then we have by the
way all of these words for describing food it's quite
random this lesson. You never know what the next picture is
going to be. We also have food that is crunchy. If you can
imagine eating celery when you bite celery it's usually
crunchy. When you eat a carrot it's usually crunchy. When you
eat this kind of peanut butter it's crunchy because there's
whole peanuts in the peanut butter. So when food is crunchy
it actually makes a sound when you bite down on it. When you
chew it. So anything Like I mentioned celery, carrots,
crunchy, peanut butter, any of those kinds of things. We
actually say they make a crunchy sound or they make a
crunchy sound. You could use both words. But when you eat
something that's kind of hard and you need to chew it a lot
and it makes kind of a sound. By the way you should you
should always chew with your mouth closed but either way
some food is crunchy. And then of course some of the basics we
have food that is sweet. Any food that you describe as sweet
has a lot of sugar in it. Candies of course are very
sweet. Um candy bars are sweet. Chocolate bars are sweet. There
are a lot of foods in the world that are very very sweet. In
fact in North America a lot of foods are quite sweet. I
personally think we put too much sugar in a lot of our
food. I think that sweet food is yummy. Ice cream is sweet by
the way as well. I really do ice cream. Um which yes let me
move on. I've soon as I start talking about ice cream I could
do a whole lesson on ice cream and that might be kind of
boring. We also will describe food sometimes as being salty.
In fact we often ask people do you like sweet food or do you
like salty food? Some people like to eat sweet food as a
snack. They like chocolates and candies and those kinds of
things. And some people like salty food as a snack. They
like chips. Well you would call crisps I think if you're
learning British English. Uh this is a pretzel and it has
lots of salt on it. Um but definitely we have sweet food
and we have salty food. We usually talk about our snacks
this way. Like I like salty snacks. Oh I like sweet snacks.
Are you a sweet or salty person? Oh I like salty snacks.
By the way Bob the Canadian likes sweet snacks. I have a
sweet tooth. I do like salty snacks a bit but not as much as
sweet snacks. And then we have hot food. And we use this word
to describe food in two ways. When food comes off the stove
or out of the oven it's hot. There's steam rising off of it.
If you try to eat soup right away sometimes the soup's too
hot and you burn your tongue. Okay. So that's one way to
describe hot. Or to use the word hot to describe food. But
we also use hot to describe food that's very very spicy in
the sense that it burns your tongue in a different way. Um
so spicy food in North America would be things like hot wings.
So we have chicken wings where there's lots of hot sauce on
it. So there there's hot sauces that are made from different
kinds of peppers. You can see some hot peppers here. So again
hot can be used two ways. We can use hot to talk about food
that's just hot because it just came off the stove or out of
the oven. But we also use hot to describe Food that has a lot
of hot sauce or peppers or other ingredients that just
give it a little bit of a zing when you eat it. And we also
have the word spicy. So in North America hot food and
spicy food these are kind of interchangeable. Like if I was
eating chicken wings with a lot of hot sauce I could say oh
these are really spicy wings. But spicy is a little broader
than just hot. Okay. Spicy means that there's a lot of
spices used in the food. When we eat at certain types of
restaurants who make food from certain countries some of that
food is quite spicy. Um the North American diet isn't used
to really spicy foods. So sometimes we eat foods and
we'll say whoa this is very very spicy. Mild. So one thing
that's interesting about North Americans. Not all North
Americans. But a lot of North Americans don't eat really
really spicy or hot food. So often you'll find something
like this. Salsa. A very common food item in North America.
You'll find it in the store and you'll be able to buy mild
medium or hot. And there might even be extra hot in some
stores. Um we usually buy mild salsa. This means that it does
not have a very strong it doesn't have a lot of peppers
in it and it doesn't have a lot of hot spices in it. So it
tastes very tomatoy. So we have some foods in North America
where if you're used to what you eat in your country and
it's very spicy you might come here and think wow this mild
salsa does not have very much kick to it. It's not very hot.
It's not very spicy. We also describe food as being chewy.
So you can see here this granola bar. This is a common
snack for kids to take to school in North America. And
it's chewy. It's soft and it sticks together a little bit
when you bite into it. It has a lot of syrup or sugar or
something in it. Maybe even marshmallows. But it has all
the kinds of ingredients that make it soft. And when you chew
it it just has a chewiness to it. It's like not rubbery but
it's it's definitely not hard and it's not crunchy. It's much
softer and it's a little bit sticky as well. Bland. So this
is white bread. Bland is a word we use to describe food that
does not have very much taste to it. Um another good example
would be plain white rice. If you do not add any salt or
butter or oil to your rice if you just eat plain rice it's
bland. But when you eat rice with other food it tastes a lot
better or when you add a little bit of salt or butter to your
rice. So food that does not have very much taste we would
say is bland food. We have dried foods. There are sections
of the grocery store where you can buy food that has been
dried. You can buy dried apricots, dried bananas, dried
plantains, you can buy dried cranberries, dried grapes which
are called raisins. Dried food really really nice when you go
on a hike. Because dried food doesn't go bad. I'll talk about
food going bad in a bit. But dried food has a very long
shelf life. Dried food doesn't go bad very quickly. So if you
buy something like dried cranberries. You can mix it
with some nuts and some other ingredients. Other things that
last a long time. And you can go on a hike for two weeks and
use that as one of the food items that you eat. Dried food.
Super yummy. Um if you go to any grocery store in North
America there will be a dried food section where you can buy
foods that are dried. It's not very big. But it's definitely
there. Mashed. This would be what Bob the Canadian. This was
a typical meal when Bob the Canadian was a kid. Um some
kind of meat looks like sausages here. But those white
things there are mashed potatoes. When I was a kid we
ate mashed potatoes almost everyday There were a couple
reasons why. Number one it was a very common food to eat in
Holland. So when my family immigrated here I was born here
but when my family immigrated here they continued to eat
them. Number two potatoes were very very cheap and are still
very very cheap. It's one of the cheapest foods you can buy.
So we ate a lot of potatoes because they were cheap. And we
always ate them mashed. So mashed means when you cook
something and then you you you smash it up so that it becomes
almost smooth. Mashed potatoes. Um I still like them by the
way. By the way this to me it looks fairly yummy. I'm not
sure what the vegetable is though. Let's go a little
bigger and see. Yeah the vegetable doesn't look familiar
to me. It looks like a little bit of a tomato salad with some
cilantro or something like that. So anyways let's get back
to the lesson. I'm reminiscing eating mashed potatoes as a kid
though. Mashed potatoes with butter and gravy. Not healthy
but very yummy. Sometimes we describe food as being old. Um
if you look here you'll see that this jar I think this is
actually like a mustard jar. It has a best before date. So BB
means best before. And it's an MA means mayor avon. I think
that's the French. Uh this jar of mustard is old. We might
also say it's gone bad. Or we'd would say it's past its expiry
date. Or it's expired. So this was good until April 21st,
2019. By the way when food hits its best before date it doesn't
mean the food's old right away or bad right away. Usually with
something like mustard it would probably take another month
before it would be bad. This is not nutritional advice by the
way. But sometimes food goes gets old. Like oh this bread is
it's dry and crusty and there's mold on it. This this bread is
old. Or we would say this bread has gone bad. Never nice for me
when I find food that has gotten old or gone bad in my
house because I feel like it means we wasted some money.
Stale. So bread in particular will go stale. When you first
buy bread when you have fresh bread it smells really good and
it's nice and chewy or it has a certain nice taste to it. It's
nice and crusty on the outside and nice and soft on the
inside. But eventually the bread goes stale. It it it's
still okay to eat but it doesn't taste as good. It's not
as nice to eat. It doesn't it's not crunchy on the outside
anymore. It's a little soft everywhere. Um usually when we
have stale bread we make something else out of it. We
usually make French toast. So when we have stale bread we dip
it in eggs and fry it in a frying pan. But there are a lot
of other recipes that you can use if you have stale bread. We
have food that's healthy. So any kind of food that is good
for you. Any kind of food that improves your health. Any kind
of food that when you eat it you feel better and your body
is happy we call healthy food. A lot of fruits and vegetables
are healthy. Um but of course everything should be eaten in
moderation. So but that's definitely a basket of healthy
food. We have crispy food. So I talked about potato chips
earlier. In Canada we call these potato chips in North
America. They're potato chips. I think in the UK they're
called crisps. They are definitely crispy. If you take
one and it's very thin and very hard and if you break it it
makes a little bit of a sound. Now again the difference
between crunchy and crispy. I think crunchy also refers to
something that's bigger that you have to chew to make
smaller. Whereas potato chips are crisps. They're crispy
because you don't have to chew them a lot. So I don't know
there's a bit of a difference. A peanut butter can be crunchy
potato chips are crispy. There's some examples of food
that are one or the other. Sour. So the other day I think
it was Judith asked what kind of cherries we make pie out of.
And I said we make pie out of sour cherries and then add a
lot of sugar. When something is sour it's not necessarily the
opposite of sweet but it kind of is. It it kind of makes your
mouth close up a bit and it's a very strong yeah sour taste.
That's probably a bad way to describe it. But we have food
that we describe as sour. Um sometimes when you eat an apple
that's not ripe it might be a bit sour. Sometimes when you
eat cherries you can eat sweet cherries which are really yummy
but there's also sour cherries which don't have as much
natural sugar in them. And then we definitely have a lot of
candies that are sour as well. When you describe a food as
being delicious it means that you really like it. You like
how it tastes. I would say bananas are delicious. When you
describe food as being scrumptious. I usually use the
word scrumptious to talk about things that usually desserts or
snacks. You don't have to use it for that. You can say a meal
is scrumptious. But for me apple pie is scrumptious. Um
any kind of sweet dessert like chocolate cake is scrumptious.
So when I use the scrumptious. I use it to talk about things
that are very sweet and yummy but you can use it to describe
anything that tastes good. Flavorful. Sometimes we will
try a different pizza place. We'll get pizza from a
different restaurant. And sometimes we find it's not as
flavourful or it's more flavourful. So when food is
flavourful it can be from the spices that are used to make
the food. But it can also be because of how the ingredients
mixed together while it was baking or cooking that make it
really really flavourful. Um I find that when I go to a really
fancy restaurant and I order a meal. It's very flavorful.
Because the chef knew how to combine the spices and
ingredients and cook it in a way where all of the flavours
come out. And it's very flavourful. And of course we
have things food that is juicy. Um you can have a juicy steak.
So even meat can be juicy. Um you can have of course
something like an orange. When you eat an orange it can be
really juicy. And the juice might even shoot out when you
bite into it. Um but definitely when we describe food that has
a liquid that comes out of it. That doesn't sound very yummy
does it when I say food with liquid that comes out. But when
you have a juicy steak as opposed to a dry steak or when
you have something like an orange and it's really juicy it
can be quite yummy. We have greasy food. Greasy food is
food that is usually cooked in oil. So they heat oil up. They
put the food into the hot oil and the oil it. So we have
things like French fries, fried chicken. There are a number of
different things. Maybe you like fish and chips. Usually
the fish and chips are deep fried. And that food is all
kind of greasy. So grease and oil are very similar things.
Oil is a liquid. When you cook something in oil when we eat it
we don't usually say it's oily. We usually say it's greasy. Oh
this is really greasy food. Um I think they even use it to
describe a diner in the United States like a greasy spoon. I
don't know. Maybe that's a really old phrase. Sticky. If
any of you have ever eaten honey you'll know that it's
sticky. If you get honey on this finger and this finger it
it actually makes your fingers stick together a little bit. So
we have a lot of different foods that are sticky. Um
definitely when you eat honey or if you ever bake with honey
you'll realize that it's just a very sticky type of food. We
have food that we describe as being bite sized. So bite-sized
food. If you look these little tiny hamburgers they're maybe a
little too big for this but you can see the person's hand
there. They're small enough that you can eat them with one
bite. You can just pop it in your mouth. We have a few
things in North America that are bite sized. You can buy
bite sized brownies at the grocery store. A little
chocolate treat. Anything that's bite sized would fit in
your mouth. It's just small enough. Um Is there a fancy
word for it? I'm used bush. Is that a French word? I think we
use that as well. Uh like an appetizer that you can eat in
one bite. Cheesy. So pizza is definitely cheesy. Lasagna is
cheesy. Anything that we eat that has a lot of cheese. If
one of the ingredients is cheese and if there's a lot of
it we describe it as cheesy. Some people order their pizza
with extra cheese. They'll say I'll get an extra large
pepperoni pizza and could I have extra cheese. And so that
pizza would definitely be very very cheesy. Um Creamy. So a
lot of the soups that we make. We make squash soup. We make
tomato soup. Um we make the soup so it's very creamy. So
it's like a thick liquid. That's the best way I can
describe it. If you're familiar with what cream looks like. You
have milk and you have cream. Cream is very very thick
compared to milk. Milk is more liquidy. So when we make soup
even if there's no actual cream in it. We sometimes make soups
that are very very creamy. So I like soups that are very
creamy. They have a nice smooth texture to them. Deep fried. So
I talked about food that is greasy and that same food could
be described as deep fried. Um deep fried food is of course
cooked in oil. Here's the French fries again. They're
coming out of the oil. They're nice and golden brown. They're
probably crispy and they're just yummy to eat. And they
might be a little bit greasy. But French fries are good
aren't they? So I've just realized you can't really
describe food as being fizzy. This is more about a drink.
When we drink something like soda in my part of Canada we
call it pop. You would describe it as fizzy. Because it's
carbonated. So whenever you have anything that's
carbonated. Anything that has little bubbles in it. Like
Coca-Cola or Pepsi or you might even drink seltzer water or
some other form of drink we describe it as being fizzy.
When you drink you can if it's the bubbles are popping at the
top you can feel them against your nose. It's a fizzy thing.
Sometimes we even say in my area fizzy drinks. Like people
like to have fizzy drinks. Um but when something's fizzy it
means it's carbonated. Flaky here is sadly I have to
pronounce this in the way English speakers pronounce it.
This in Canada is called a croissant. I apologize to all
my French speaking listeners but of croissant is very very
flaky. If you want the French French pronunciation I'll do my
best job. It's croissant but this in Canada we call a
croissant croissant. This doesn't sound right does it?
But that's how English speakers say it. It's very flaky. It has
many many layers and those layers when you bite into it
little flakes fall off. It's just a yummy yummy treat. The
croissant croissant. The croissant is probably the best
example of something that is flaky. By the way if you have
never had a croissant go buy one day if you can find one. If
I was to describe one of my favourite pastries. I'm gonna
call it a pastry. I would say it's the croissant definitely.
Uh frozen food. We have a lot of food that is frozen. Uh food
that is precooked in a factory and then frozen and you can buy
it from the frozen food section. In North America
people buy I bet you frozen pizza is the most popular. So
you take home the frozen food. You warm it up Or cook it in
the oven and then you eat it. Um but there's definitely other
frozen food as well. Gourmet. So gourmet food is usually food
prepared in a fancy restaurant by a chef. Um it doesn't have
to be. They use the word gourmet on all kinds of food
labels here. But usually if you say I'm going to have a gourmet
dinner on Friday night. People will think you're going to a
very nice restaurant and you're going to have food prepared by
someone who is a chef. So gourmet food is prepared really
really well. There's a big difference between regular food
and gourmet food. When I make a hamburger it's just a normal
hamburger. But when I go to a really nice restaurant and
order a hamburger I would say it's a gourmet hamburger. It's
just really well made. Low fat. This is pretty popular in our
part of the world. People are eating too much. So they want
to buy food that has less fat in it. So you can buy low fat
mayonnaise. You can buy almost anything low fat. If it has fat
in it you can buy it in a low fat version. I usually don't. I
like the normal I don't like low fat versions of things.
They don't they don't usually taste right. And we also have
sugar free. So we also have food that doesn't have sugar in
it. It might have a sugar substitute. So these are sugar
free candies. You can buy sugar free pop. Um you can buy sugar
free soda if you want to use the word soda. Um there are
many many types of food that you can buy where instead of
sugar they'll use something like stevia or aspartame.
There's a couple different sugar replacements. So they'll
use those instead. These are donuts and these donuts are
glazed. A glazed donut has a coating of sugar around it.
That's I think sprayed on or it might be dipped in. Um but
glazed donuts. They take a normal donut and then it has
that nice shiny coating of sugar on it. There are many
different kinds of treats and things you can buy that are
glazed. Okay you can buy glazed donuts. Um there are little
treats at the grocery store too that you can buy that are
glazed. You can even buy a glazed croissant. Isn't that
crazy? A croissant with a layer of sugar on it. And then
roasted. So these are roasted almonds. We buy coffee is
roasted as well. Although that's a drink again isn't it?
Not a food. There are many things you can buy that
roasted. In particular nuts are often roasted. Okay you can buy
roasted peanuts, roasted almonds. Basically they put
them in an oven and they heat them up to a certain point and
they develop better tastes. Although I do like my almonds
raw. Which is a word we learned at the beginning of the lesson
right? And then we can defy we can describe food as being
crumbly. You can see that this cookie someone took a bite. And
there's just little pieces of the cookie everywhere. Those
pieces are called crumbs. I would describe this as being
crumbly. A crumbly cookie is a cookie where when you bite it
it starts to fall apart. There are just a lot of crumbs. Um I
like my cookies a little bit chewy in the middle. I don't
like crumbly cookies cos then they're usually a little bit
too dry for me.