Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles 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.
B1 US describe crunchy buy croissant dried burnt Free English Class! Topic: Describing Food! ??? (Lesson Only) 37 4 lijun wu posted on 2022/02/11 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary