Also…an on-topic cartoon…
Hakarl has always intrigued me. The OP’s description sounds every bit as bad as (and very similar to) sürstromming, except with even worse texture. (It’s dried and hanged, right?) I would definitely love to give it a shot, and Iceland is on my bucket list, so hopefully, I will find a way one day.
(Oh, and huitlacoche is pretty tame. Certainly doesn’t belong on the same list as balut, casu marzu, and hakarl.)
Allow me to present this image of an open can of huitlacoche. Here’s some nice fresh-picked huitlacoche. And here’s a big bowl of huitlacoche ready to eat.
shrug I’ve never had any problems getting anyone to try huitlacoche, usually in the form of a quesadilla or something similar. It’s really not that weird, trust me. Just call it a “Mexican truffle.” 
A greatJames May clip - on The F-Word, Gordon Ramsay challenges him to eat several “manly” things, one of which is hakarl. May comes out ahead. Ramsay throws up.
They do eat the hakarl with booze. I think that’s part of the ritual.
I love this guy’s work!
Well, after eating the first chunk without flinching (outwardly, anyway), the girl who offered me the treat asked with a challenging tone: “Would you like another one?” With 20 people watching and my machismo points shooting upwards, how could have I declined? Kinda like in a hazing ritual, the only right answer was: “Yes, please”. It was worth it, as the crowd went “UHHH!” as I calmly chewed on the second chunk. Could I really say I’ve eaten hakarl if I had just quickly downed a morsel?
Yes, I am aware of the present-day version. But I’m pretty sure hakarl was eaten in Iceland well before the introduction of booze in late Medieval times (although beer, wine and mead were certainly known to the settlers). Sure, having a gulp of hard liquor helps the job, but so does having a bike when you need to travel 42.195 km as quickly as possible.
Hey! Huitlacoche is actually good!
Hákarl and surströmming are quite different, IMO, but neither is altogether bad.
Hákarl, made from shark, has a weird texture, sort of rubbery, which means that you have to chew on it for a loong time to be able to swallow it. The longer you keep it in your mouth the stronger the smell/taste of ammonia gets. Almost like eating a urinal cake, I imagine.
Surströmming, made from herring, is much more “fishy” in looks and texture. The taste is strong and salty, but not bad. The smell is not for everybody, though - it definitely approaches rotten, which is why most (sane) people eat it outdoors. It compares to regular herring much in the same way as an old, stinky cheese compares to a regular mild one.
Both should be accompanied by generous amounts of snaps!
That might be less disgusting. The OP’s brave, but I think if a piece of food is buried, you should take the hint.
It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t, at root, some Icelandic quirk. Making hakarl was originally a way to take material that was originally downright literally poisonous – the variety of shark used for hakarl routes its urinary material through its body, suffusing it with ammoniacal liquids – and making it edible and nutritious (if not particularly palatable). It’s not like the Shark you get on the menu at the local seafood restaurant. I suspect the weird internal plumbing is a way this brand of shark protects itself from bigger sea creatures (and Icelanders), making its flesh more than merely unappealing. Any thing that eats one of these sharks quickly learns not to eat another.
Unfortunately, fishing is not completely discriminating a mechanism for pulling food out of the sea, and, along with other, edible fish, Icelanders undoubtedly pulled up a lot of Piss Sharks that they couldn’t eat. But with lots of time on their hands and lots of hunger and few other food sources, they were encouraged to try to find a way to make the shark palatable. Burying things in cold earth is a common method of preservation the world over, so it’s not surprising it was tried. What was surprising was that this worked to reduce the poison content in the shark to the point where it could be eaten without ill effects.
Of course, that explains the eating of the shark in bygone times. Eating it today is simply national pride and bravado. And maybe a touch of Stockholm Syndrome.
Your explanation of their urinary system sounds logical but I’m not sure anything eats basking shark. They’re huge and Wikipedia says they have no known predators.
From the Wikipedia article on basking sharks:
Seems like reason enough to develop a sort of anti-flavorful mechanism.
By the way, in case it isn’t clear from my last post – “they have no known predators” is exactly what you would expect if their defense mechanism worked. The presence of obvious predators would indicate that the weird urinary system didn’t perform its job well.
It’s pretty well acknowledged that Monarch butterfly caterpillars eating of milkweed makes them unpalatable to predators (and the viceroy copies its coloring to take advantage of this effect), but we don’t prove it by looking at all the predators eating monarch butterflies – that would invalidate out point. But there certainly are predators out there scarfing up other, non-milkweed-flavored butterflies.
It’s hard to prove a negative, but I do note that if the mechanism worked as advertised you might see some predator who hadn’t yet learned about the awful taste of basking sharks attacking and eating one, but you’d expect these sightings to be pretty rare, which is consistent with what Wikipedia reports. It says that Sharks are reported to eat decaying basking shark – but that’s pretty much what Icelanders do when they eat hakarl – the period of decay breaks down the urinary waste.
When Anthony Bourdain was in Iceland, he was talking to a chap that said he had eaten hakarl. Bourdain asked if he liked it. The guy said he did. Bourdain replied, “And you’re a lying sack of shit.”
LOL I thought I had seen them all, somehow I missed that one. I love the way poor Denmark is curled up around his jar of herrings =)
I’m holding you responsible for that archive binge.
You’re the second person I’ve done that to in less than a week.
I consider this a victory.
And aru - Poor Denmark’ll probably have a few beers and forget the whole thing, at least. (And my favourite part is Norway’s entrance. That never fails to crack me up.)
Colophon, you already win this thread. Forget that, you win this forum.