Homo sapiens are the current species on top of the food chain, and quite frankly, there is not much we haven’t put on our dinner plate at one time or another. So, what happens on a planet once you’ve eyed, fried, and tried just about everything on it? Well, then it’s up to some pretty creative individuals to find new ways to prepare the old stuff, so it can reinvigorate man’s pioneering spirit.
This month, we bring you five culinary treats that are definitely not for the feint of stomach:
Balut Eggs (Which Came First, the Whole Chicken, or a Partially Developed One?)
Most of us eat eggs on a daily basis. They are used in salads, baked goods, and most every truck stop across America. They are a rather simple food with a humble appearance, and even more humble origins. The problem is, we eat them at such an early stage of development, we forget the full potential of them as a bizarre food. In the Philippines and Vietnam, the balut egg is allowed to mature up to 21 days. This is where your egg salad sandwich becomes more like an alien, complete with a floppy head, beak, arms, and legs. These under-developed chickens (or ducks) are usually served boiled to soften the bones (you don’t want to lose a tooth). As you may have guessed, most fans of balut say ittastes (predominantly) like chicken!
Kaestur Hakari (Where There’s a Will, There’s a way)
Throughout time, man has hated defeat, whether it was by the ancient Romans, a blinking VCR, or a toxic shark that has killed most everyone who’s challenged it by hook, bat, and fork. Well, those crafty Icelandic folks must have been determined to eat this fish, which must have grilled, sauteed, boiled, flambeed, and fermented until one day their dinner guests quit dying. It turns out the only way to eat a basking shark safely, is to gut it, and bury it in the sand until its toxins have been expelled from the carcass. Then you hang it to dry until a nice brown crust forms over the surface. In our modern splendor of technology, you will no longer die from ingesting too much of this toxic shark. However, considering the flavor of Kaestur Hakari has a predominantly piquant ammonia aftertaste, which is standard fair for any decaying aquatic matter, you may wish you had.
Casu Marzu (Redneck Cheese)
Most every redneck knows that when you shovel a dead varmint off the road, and it explodes from the gas and excess heat, spilling a pile of guts and maggots, it’s probably not appropriate to serve to guests. Unless, of course, it’s your Aunt Edna (twice removed) who’s coming to dinner. In the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, the delicacy, Casu Marzu, is a maggot infested cheese that it is currently illegal to sell, which means you’ve got to make this stuff yourself. You begin by whipping up a batch of pecorino (sheep milk) cheese. You drill a bunch of holes around it, so it kind of resembles Swiss, then you drop some oil inside each hole to ensure a crew of cheese skippers invite all their friends to the party. The result is the typical Jackass film, beginning with a lot of eating and drinking, and ending with a little defecation on the premises. The flavor really peeks once the feces starts to ferment, creating a gooey substance on the cheese which drives all the chubby Sardinia women crazy.
Kopi Luwak (Cat Poop Coffee)
The Paradoxurus is a “cat” whose place in the Asian food chain is more highly sought after as a treat outside (as opposed to inside) an iron wok. This animal lives primarily in the trees, and loves eating ripe coffee cherries. In fact, they eat these so quick, they don’t even bother spitting out the seeds (bean). However, something very magical happens once this $0.10 a bushel bean travels through their intestine, and finds its way out the poop shoot at $120 a pound. Back in its heyday, a couple guys would follow these little critters around with sacks, collecting their stool samples with feverish delight. They’d take their treasures home, roast them, and grind them up for one hell of a mean cup of Jo. Unfortunately, now that the locals are keen on the loose spending habits of North Americans, they’ve streamlined the process into a capitalized market that resembles a chicken farm, except instead of eggs, these farmers are collecting sh**.
Deadly Aquatics
The saying goes, What doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger, and in most parts of the world, this is constantly being put to the test as a means of proving (and improving) machismo. Sannakji (a.k.a. “Korean Viagra”) is an art-form where the chef must be quick to disperse the limbs from a baby octopus, so they can be served up wriggling. This is a rare opportunity to eat something that will literally fight you all the way down. While not exceptionally dangerous, if you slurp too many without dispersing them with your gnashing jaws, the food that may actually get the last laugh as it grabs onto your esophagus, slowly suffocating you to death. Fogu (a.k.a “blowfish” or “pufferfish”) protects itself in the water by puffing itself into a spiny ball, and producing an internal toxin (tetrodotoxin) thought to be 1,000 times more deadly than cyanide. It gradually paralyzes the body’s organs, which as it turns out, is just a really unpleasant way to die. It takes a very skilled chef to carve out the edible areas, which makes this culinary treat especially entertaining (and expensive) at bachelor parties.
About Dr. Eric J. Leech
Eric has written for over a decade. Then one day he created Urbasm.com, a site for every guy.
About Dr. Eric J. Leech