In the Netherlands, we love simpler food like ‘stamppot boerenkool’ or ‘pannenkoeken’. Straightforward food, nothing weird about it. But all over the world people tend to eat very interesting things. Did you know people eat these dishes?
In the Netherlands, we love simpler food like ‘stamppot boerenkool’ or ‘pannenkoeken’. Straightforward food, nothing weird about it. But all over the world people tend to eat very interesting things. Did you know people eat these dishes?
This is not just a random dish, this is the national dish of Iceland. Hákarl, as they call it, is fermented shark. You can make it by placing a Greenlandic shark in a shallow grave and cover it with sand and stones. Leave it be for around three months, which will make it ferment and become hard. After the three months, you cut it up in slices and hang it to dry for five more months. The end result is very tough meat which has a strong ammonia scent. So if you wish to try it, keep your nose closed and withhold yourself from gagging.
Although we promote exploring the possibilities of insects for future protein sources, we don’t think we would put one of these into our mouth. Fried tarantula is a common delicacy in Cambodia, where they were first introduced as a food source during the communist time in Cambodia in the seventies. There was a famine, and these were one of the few easily available things to eat. Nowadays it is common thing to buy at a lot of places. People say they kind of taste like crab.
This dish is called Gaeng Kai Mot Daeng. It is a soup made with ants, the eggs of ants and an embryo. The taste should be quite sour and taste a bit like shrimps. Frankly, we do not really wish to find out if that is true.
This Italian cheese called Casu Marzu is a very mouldy cheese. And if we say mouldy, we mean very very mouldy. To make the cheese, the Italians use moulded Pecorino, which is made with sheep milk. To make it even more mouldy, the lay the cheese in a dark room for some months to let flies lay their eggs inside it. Subsequently, the larvae dig themselves into the cheese and leave their feces in there. This is how the cheese gets is very sharp taste. One small note about this cheese: it is not easy to acquire a piece of it, since the EU banned it because of health risks.
When you eat an egg, you can almost certainly assume that you won’t find a little baby chick on the inside. But with Balut, a treat that is popular in the Filipinas, Cambodia and Vietnam, that is exactly what you will find. It is a fertilized chicken or duck egg with an almost fully developed embryo inside it. You can buy it on the streets and it is very popular. They say it tastes just like regular eggs, but we won’t blame you if you are not up to trying.
Fugu is a Japanese dish for people wanting to get a little bit more excitement in their lives. The fish used in this dish is the very poisonous puffer fish. The poison is deadly and only specifically trained chefs are allowed to make this dish. If done wrong, you won’t be there to tell people what it tasted like.
Okay, let’s just cut to the chase: we are not talking about the oysters you may know. These oysters are not sea creatures at all, they are in fact the testicles of bulls or boars. This dish, popular in de United States and Canada, is made by peeling and cooking the testicles, dipping them in flour and fry them. They are served with cocktail sauce. Luckily, they don’t resemble what they once were, so that may make it a bit easier to try them.
This dish, called Haggis, might be a little bit more well-known and maybe even kind of mainstream. But if you think about it, it is not that normal to fill a sheep’s stomach or cows intestine with chopped up lung, liver, heart, kidney fat and oats. Still, a lot of people, especially the Scottish where this dish is from, eat the dish a lot and they even have a national holiday dedicated to the birthday of a poet who wrote an ode to Haggis. Of course, the serving of the dish is in that case accompanied by bagpipe music.
In China they like a dish with chicken, but not just any part of the chicken: the feet. And yes, sometimes including the nails. They dry the feet and then fry, bake or stir fry them. The dish is served with soy sauce and is usually paired with a beer. If you are not that eager to try it, be careful ordering chicken leg in China or you might get a plate with these instead.
