Eating 7-Eleven food is the gastronomic equivalent of masturbation. We all do it, but nobody wants to talk about it – at least not in public. That said, there’s always that one guy at the dinner party who is happy to interrupt a highbrow conversation with an anecdote about wanking. I am that guy.
Let’s face facts. Today, a hundred times more people will tuck into a 7-Eleven burger kai than anything featured on the Bangkok Burger Blog. The Water Library’s ham and cheese sandwich with Idiazabal, roast suckling pig and Perigord truffles is divine, yes, but the 7-Eleven saenwit haem cheet sells a thousandfold more. Yet while there are umpteen websites about food in Thailand, the Internet is maintaining radio silence when it comes to 7-Eleven’s gastronomic contributions. Why, Lord, why?
It is time to give 7-Eleven its due. Its products reach every corner of the Thai Kingdom. And the Thai Kingdom is big. Could you accomplish a logistical feat of this magnitude? Exactly. So if at times the “cuisine” is bland or dessicated or downright revolting, that’s hardly 7-Eleven’s fault, is it? And when the products are actually edible – well, that’s an achievement worth celebrating. In this column, I will be examining 7-Eleven’s fine product range. Today: baked goods.
Bologna Mayonnaise Bread
When enjoying this product, a sweet bread bun filled with a load of boloney, you’d be forgiven for asking: “Where is the promised mayonnaise?”. Actually, you’re already eating it, stupid! Look closely and you’ll see it’s right there on the surface of the bun in congealed translucent streaks. The boloney, for its part, is much more apparent. Small cuboids of the stuff pour out of a crevice in the bread bun. This makes the product look strangely human, like the bun is puking up after a binge in a ham factory. Tip: Always brush your teeth after eating one of these bad boys. No-one wants to kiss a person whose breath smells like mechanically reconstituted pig carcass.
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Burger Cake with Coffee Cream
Is it a burger? Is it a cake? It’s both. This ingenious subversion of food categories sees a foamy coffee-flavored “bap” encase a “burger” in the form of some coffee-flavored butter cream. Strangely, the aforementioned Bangkok Burger Blog, with its staggeringly narrow-minded conception of what constitutes a “burger”, hasn’t deemed it worthy of comment. If anyone tells you that this is the kind of cake that will make you question whether you even like cake at all, they are a big fat liar. This is the kind of cake that will make you question whether you even like cake at all.
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Coconut Cream Raisin Bun
Four nouns that tell you all you need to know. Say them one by one like an incantation. Here’s the scoop: the fluffy yellow coconut cream is where the goodness lies but you can never tell exactly where in the bun it’s going to be. This means you’ll probably get a few mouthfuls of boring old raisin bread before hitting the sweet spot. Then you burst into a big fat pocket of golden coconutty awesomeness and all is well with the world – for a few mouthfuls at least. Treasure them.
Choco Twist Bread
This product was launched a couple of weeks ago, though the media fanfare was curiously muted. What you get here is tender chocolate bread covered in gooey chocolate butter. What’s not to like? If you don’t want your hands covered in a suspicious-looking brown substance you won’t want to touch this one – except with your mouth, obviously – so eat it out of its plastic tray, nudging the cake up from below and into your hungry fizzog. Score extra points for accomplishing this with your dignity intact.
Mixed Fruit Bread
Two slices of spongy bread with raisins and pieces of dried papaya and pineapple inside. Yes, the bread is dry as a bone but that just makes the scattered chunks of fruit seem all the more juicy. Interestingly, when you add up the percentages of the ingredients listed on the packet you get just 65.3%, leaving 34.7% of the product unaccounted for. That’s because there’s a secret ingredient: love.
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Red Bean Filling Panbread
A flat, round breadbun stuffed with sweet mashings of red bean. You know you’re Thai when you think beans are a perfectly acceptable component of a dessert. To many other global citizens, of course, putting beans in a pudding is an unconscionable culinary outrage akin to adding broccoli to a blancmange or kippers to a swiss roll. But this is Thailand, sucker (TITS). Get used to it.
Seventh Heaven: An occasional column in which Dan Waites explores the culinary delights of Thailand’s favorite convenience store franchise.
