Here at IfYouLikeA we have a commitment to bad food. We stand by our word that the food must be bad. But, as you have probably noticed, there are exceptions. These exceptions are failed attempts. And we do not take failure lightly. We want all our combinations to pass. We want everything we make to be disgusting. And so we made the greatest tournament of all time.
Bigger than March Madness. Bigger than the Olympics. Bigger than the Super Bowl. This tournament has revolutionized the entertainment industry as we know it.
How it Works
All our starting foods with their partners. 32 total foods, 16 combinations, 1 great time.
Our food tournament works almost in reverse. We take two randomly generated foods (taken from a list of foods we like) and combine them in a randomly selected way. We then proceed to evaluate the taste of the foods in our normal manner. The goal is, of course, to make something vile. But we also realize that when foods are combined randomly in random ways, there is the potential for good food, or as we know it, failures. So our tournament combines foods together, and if they fail they must continue onwards to be combined randomly with another failure. If they pass, they are celebrated and are allowed to exit the tournament early.
The Bracket
Cole made a nice program that chose our foods and way of combining them, so we generated 16 random food pairings and combining methods for all possible scenarios. Here is a picture of our bracket so you can track the foods that we consumed.
As you can (hopefully) see, some combinations look like easy failures (a.k.a. they should taste good). There are some debatable ones. And there are some that look bad. Our hope is that everything passes in the end.
We hope the bracket makes sense. We start with all our foods, then combine combine them with the method shown until it provides us with something truly vile.
The “winner” from the Eastern Conference.
Early Rounds
Cole and Bronwyn trying some unknown food.
The early rounds of this competition went smoothly. This was rather unfortunately. Glacier Freeze Gatorade and chamomile tea, for example, was extraordinarily good and something that we all thought was better than either food separately. Clearly a failure. And when I say “we all,” I mean Cole, Simon, and Cole’s friend Bronwyn, who helped us out cooking, cleaning, and consuming. I want to take the time now to thank her for putting up with our shenanigans and helping us make food. It’s always helpful to have someone else there.
Other foods were also clearly failures. Beefstick and decorative sprinkles was just crunchy beefstick, and salmon and “smiling lady” brand (we don’t actually know the real brand name) hot sauce were things that often go together.
But there were those foods (well, one food) that some might consider debatably good. The Doritos Locos Tacos from Taco Bell blended with Kettle brand salt and vinegar chips was just barely palatable. But it only took till the next round for us to find it inedible. Here’s a quick little video to show you how it all went down: 
What a color![/caption]
Another rather disgusting food type was our baked hummus blend with clam chowder and ground cocktail shrimp and mustard. Personally I think it was the baking that did this dish in. But it was so unspectacularly bad that it provided no good or entertaining footage. Doubly bad.
The flavor wasn’t that bad, actually. It was a combination of texture and aftertaste that made this dish inedible. It’s one of the few indescribable bad foods I’ve eaten.
The End Game
Some stuff we made. Dare you to guess what’s in it.
The later rounds got progressively worse as more foods were added, which was the idea. But they were still not actively disgusting. And we might need to remind you that it takes an actively disgusting food for it to pass and leave the tournament. Even when the food looked absolutely horrid it was still palatable, and in some cases still tasted good. Powerful flavors that we liked, such as tapioca pudding and smiling lady brand hot sauce, pulled the foods through seemingly all on their own. And we managed, somehow to get a dish from both sides of the bracket into the finals. Somehow our random selector had failed us. But one last cooking instruction stood in the way of complete failure: serving the two dishes shaken, not stirred.
So for those of you who worked it out from the bracket, that means that the following foodstuffs were put into our mouths:
The Final Product.
Dish 1 contained sliced strawberries boiled with candied ginger, ground together with baked popcorn and orange juice, used as a dipping sauce for Wheat Thins fried with oatmeal that was microwaved with a grilled cheese with carrots.
Dish 2 contained baked tapioca pudding and Pirate’s Booty, fried with a grind of caramelized onion and celery, blended with all of billed raw salmon and smiling lady brand sauce, microwaved with a blend of Glacier Freeze Gatorade and chamomile tea, blended again with a mixture of papaya and Triscuits boiled with ground peanuts and Eggo Waffles, added to a lemon lime slushy with mango.
Dishes 1 and 2 were served shaken, not stirred.
So you’re probably wondering how it turned out. You’re probably dying to know how it went. Was our tournament a complete disaster of delicious food, or did we actually succeed in creating a food Satan himself wouldn’t eat? Well, we have prepared a nice, concise, 8-minute video for you to watch. You’ll find the answer within. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLmyTCWasDw%5D
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