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Strange Food

The document describes several unusual foods from around the world, including balut (fertilized duck or chicken egg with a nearly-developed embryo eaten in the shell), sannakji (live baby octopus sliced and served still squirming), casu marzu (cheese containing live insect larvae that can jump up to half a foot), and hakarl (fermented Greenland shark meat that smells strongly of ammonia). It also mentions stuffed camel, Rocky Mountain oysters (deep fried bull or boar testicles), fried insects eaten as street food in Thailand, Scottish haggis made from sheep organs boiled in its stomach, and fried brain sandwiches once popular in parts of the United States.

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109 views3 pages

Strange Food

The document describes several unusual foods from around the world, including balut (fertilized duck or chicken egg with a nearly-developed embryo eaten in the shell), sannakji (live baby octopus sliced and served still squirming), casu marzu (cheese containing live insect larvae that can jump up to half a foot), and hakarl (fermented Greenland shark meat that smells strongly of ammonia). It also mentions stuffed camel, Rocky Mountain oysters (deep fried bull or boar testicles), fried insects eaten as street food in Thailand, Scottish haggis made from sheep organs boiled in its stomach, and fried brain sandwiches once popular in parts of the United States.

Uploaded by

falegna213
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Strange food

They say one mans trash is another mans treasure. The same could be said about food: one mans nightmare may just be another mans delicacy. From cows tongue and pigs snout to chickens feet, from fried worms and frogs legs to sauted snails, the list of weird stuff we eat is endless (and often quite tasty). If youve been indulging lately and need a reason to diet, take a read, you may just lose that appetite.

Balut
Balut seems to be on every strange food list, usually at the top, and for good reason. Though no longer wriggling on the plate like the live octopus in Korea, the fertilized duck or chicken egg with a nearlydeveloped embryo that is boiled and eaten in the shell is easily one of the strangest foods in the world. Balut is very common in the Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam and usually sold by street vendors. It is said balut tastes like egg and duck (or chicken), which is essentially what it is. It is surprising to many that food that appears to bizarre-often the with the birds features clearly developedcan taste so banal. In the end, apparently everything does indeed, just taste like chicken.

Sannakji
With sashimi and sushi readily available the world over, eating raw seafood is no longer considered a dining adventure. The Korean delicacy sannakji however, is something quite different, as the seafood isnt quite dead. Live baby octopus are sliced up and seasoned with sesame oil. The tentacles are still squirming when this dish is served and, if not chewed carefully, the tiny suction cups can stick to the mouth and throat. This is not a dish for the fainthearted.

Casu marzu
Found in the city of Sardinia in Italy, casu marzu is a

cheese

that is home to

live insect larvae. These larvae are deliberately added to the cheese to promote a level of fermentation that is close to decomposition, at which point the cheeses fats are broken down. The tiny, translucent worms can jump up to half a foot if disturbed, which explains

why some people prefer to brush off the insects before enjoying a spoonful of the pungent cheese.

Fugu
Fugu is the Japanese word for the poisonous puffer fish, filled with enough of the poison tetrodotoxin to be lethal. Only specially-trained chefs, filled with enough two to three years of training and have passed an official test, can prepare the fish. Some chefs will choose to leave a minute amount of poison in the fish to cause a tingling sensation on the tongue and lips as fugu can be quite bland. Perhaps the fuss of fugu is more in surviving the experience than the actual taste of the deadly fish.

Hakarl
Anthony Bourdain, known for eating some of the strangest foods in the world, claims that hakarl is the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten. Made by gutting a Greenland or basking shark and then fermenting it for two to four months, hakarl is an Icelandic food that reeks with the smell of ammonia. It is available all year round in Icelandic stores and often served in cubes on toothpicks.

Stuffed Camel
The recipe for a whole stuffed camel kind of reads like a bad joke, with ingredients that include one whole camel, one whole lamb and 20 whole chickens. The Guinness Book of World Records lists the recipe as the largest item on any menu in the world, conveniently leaving out any concrete examples of this dish seemingly prepared like Russian Stacking Doll, where a camel is stiffed with a whole lamb, the lamb stuffed with the chickens and the chickens stuffed with eggs and rice. The entire concoction is then barbequed until cooked and served. Fact or fiction, the shear amount of food created by this dish makes it deserving of a place on the list.

Rocky Mountain Oysters


What is so strange about oysters? Probably the fact that theyre not the kind you find at the bottom of the ocean, but rather a fancy name given to deep-fried testicles of a buffalo, bull or boar. Rocky Mountain oysters (also called Prairie Oysters) are well-known and regularly enjoyed, in certain parts of the United States and Canada, generally where cattle ranching is prevalent. The testicles are peeled, boiled, rolled in a flour mixture, and fried, then generally served with a nice cocktail sauce.

Bugs
The practice of eating insects for food is called entomophagy and is fairly common in many parts of the world, with the exceptions of Europe and North America (though bugs are apparently a favorite with the television show Fear Factor). It is not uncommon to find vendors selling fried grasshoppers, crickets, scorpions, spiders and worms on the streets of Bangkok, Thailand. Insects are high in protein and apparently consist of important fatty acid and vitamins. In fact flour from drying and grinding up mealworm can be and is often used to make chocolate chip cookies. So next time you think there is a fly in your soup, it may actually just be part of the presentation.

Haggis
A traditional Scottish dish, haggis is made with the minced heart, liver and lung of a sheep mixed with onions spices, oatmeal, salt and stock, and boiled in the sheeps stomach for a few hours. Larousse Gastronomique, a popular encyclopedia of gastronomic delights, claims that haggis has an excellent nutty texture and delicious savory flavor. Haggis is available yearround in Scottish supermarkets and made with an artificial casing rather than sheeps stomach. In fact some are sold in cans to be heated in a microwave before eating. Similar dishes can be found in other Europe countries with goat, pork or beef used instead of sheep.

Fried - brain sandwiches


Long before the era of Mad-Cow Disease, a sandwich made from fried calves brain, thinly sliced on whitebread was a common item on the menus in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. The sandwich is still available in the Ohio River Valley, where the brains are now heavily battered and served on hamburger buns. In El Salvador and Mexico beef brains, lovingly called sesos in Spanish, are used in tacos and burritos. The brains have a mushy texture and very little flavor on their own so the addition of copious amounts of hot sauce definitely helps

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