Truffles. Pate. Abalone. Caviar. Sharkfin soup.
I’ve watched a lot of Iron Chef lately and would like someone to describe the above foods (to the extent that it’s possible) in terms of other foods, smells etc.
Other Dopers should feel free to add other exotic foods to the list.
OK I’ll have a go, I’m guessing you haven’t ever tasted them and this isn’t just a test right ?
Truffles - only ever had in a sauce over pasta, black and rich in a sort of mushroomy way.
Paté - there are two main kinds - chunky and smooth let’s say. The smooth is like a rich meat paste or perhaps think a cheese like Philadelphia in terms of consistency, it can almost seem mousse like, flavour depends on the ingredients it could be liver based, fish based, meeat based etc. The chunky type is always meat rather than fish and actually has lumps of meat in it, when you bite into it it seems more solid.
Caviar - grainy and salty, seriously it is very salty and there is a fishy taste too but what sticks in my mind most is the fact that you can feel the individual eggs.
Truffles: like a mushroom with more dimensions to it. You know how certain cheeses and wines (like pinot noir) kind of smell like the earth or even dung - weird and funky, but exciting? And how freshly-scraped vanilla pods scent things and lift the undertones of other foods to prominance?
Pate: I guess you mean foie gras. Liverwurst is the start of this sort of thing. If you’ve had some sort of a meat paste you spread on toast, you’re roughly in the neighbourhood. Pate is usually minced chicken duck or goose livers with flavourings, but the foie gras you see on iron chef is a special kind. If you are squeemish about food production, it will bother you: it’s one fatty, engorged liver. Foie gras is like butter only meaty. You know how butter has both a richness and a lightness?
Abalone: hard to describe. I’ve had half a dozen times and only really seen what the fuss was about once (in a Taiwainese soup). If I say it’s somewhere between a scallop and ox-tongue, that’ll probably sound horrible, but it has a slippery, offally toughness to it, combined with a gentle but lingering sea flavour.
Caviar: I’ve never had the good stuff. But, you know when you eat a very fresh raw oyster it’s like a piece of meat that is the essence of the sea in your mouth? With caviar, there’s no meat. There’s graininess, then it’s like the sea bursts in your mouth.
Sharkfin soup: only had it as a kid, left no impression on me. It may be one of those Asian texture deals.
Caviar: Kind of ass. It tastes like seawater and you can feel the little eggs POPPING IN YOUR MOUTH. shudder
Abalone: Really, really chewy. Kind of like how rubber would taste if it were a little nicer to eat.
Sharkfin soup: Quite unremarkable, like fish with sand in it. Keep your money.
Silkworm larvae/witchetty grubs/roasted scorpions/most bugs: Like burned bacon/the brittle bits that break off fried fish/peanut butter.
Dog: Like beef but tender and slightly gamey. Served cold.
Crocodile/alligator: Tastes like chicken, because that’s all they’re fed.
Sea cucumber: Chewy and rubbery but soft and slippery.
Escargot: Soft and creamy, tastes kind of like garlic bread because of the garlic sauce they’re in.
Possum: My friend says it tastes like rabbit. I’ve had possum but not rabbit so I can’t judge.
Eyeballs of any persuasion: Liquidy.
I’ll think of more later. I’ve eaten some pretty weird crap.
Escargot is probably the oddest thing I’ve ever eaten. It reminded me of a soft mushroom, both texturewise and in the fact that it tasted predominantly like the sauce it was in (in this case, a butter and garlic sauce). We had it on the cruise we went on earlier this year. My wife ordered it, which suprised me; she’s hardly an adventurous eater.
Oh, right. Those duck embryos. I heard some people drink them down raw but… yeucch. Adventurous as I am, I think that’s one adventure I could do without. I have had them fried with a little salt however. They taste like egg, not duck. Almost exactly like egg. The meat is so tender it doesn’t feel like meat.
Are frogs’ legs considered exotic? If so I’ve had them too. They’re very muscular, and very white, and if you poke the muscle it will spring right back. The meat is also very dense. For this reason it doesn’t seem to absorb any of the flavour of the sauces around it. Eating them is like having a mouth full of sauce and this chunk of watery-tasting meat. They don’t really blend, or maybe I just went to a bad restaurant.
I want to ask a question of you Dopers now: There’s a Chinese egg thing that I wanted to write about called song hua dan which consists of an egg clad in a sort of clay mixture and stored for a few weeks/months. When you crack it open again the yolk has turned green and white is a clear black with white snowflake patterns in it. I googled and all I got were 1000-year-old eggs which seem to be black with an oogy-looking liquid centre, or are they the same thing? Anyway they taste quite nice but they have a way of turning your tongue numb if you eat too much and smell slightly of ammonia. Hmm. I wonder if I should keep eating them.
Previous posters got the stuff I’ve tried pretty much dead-on, so I’ll just reinforce:
Pate: Rich meaty paste, flavor depends on what it’s made from. It’s really quite good, but rich. Regardless of ingredients, all the ones I’ve tried seem to have at least a twinge of “liver” flavor (if not all-out), even the ones made from crab or fish.
Escargot: A meaty mushroom, almost completely flavorless (takes on the flavor of the sauce). It’s actually a snail, but if you’ve ever had Chinese straw mushroom, think of that but thicker. I think it’s more of a prestige dish than anything else.
Caviar: Very salty, with a horrible texture. The seawater-that-pops-in-your-mouth description was pretty apt. My first and only experience with caviar had me sprinting to the toilet to eject the beady membranes from my tortured mouth. If you ever try it, definitely do not chew.
Abalone: Pretty much a tougher scallop, if I remember correctly. One is less fishy than the other, but I don’t recall which (though neither are very fishy to begin with).
Finally, my little cultural essay on sharkfin soup:
If you’ve paid $50 or less for it, it’s not sharkfin soup. It’s chicken broth with some veggies and fish chunks thrown in. There may have been some sharkfin in the pot at some point (if you’re lucky), but you’re definitely not eating any of it.
If you’ve paid over $100 for it, you’ve probably got a gram or two of sharkfin in your chicken broth, if you’re lucky. If you didn’t, you can rest assured that there most definitely was sharkfin in the pot during the cooking process. Even if you did get a chunk or two, you wouldn’t realize it, because sharkfin has absolutely no flavor whatsoever.
Why the ridiculous price? Prestige. It’s extremely rare (a 3-foot tall sharkfin can be worth over $150,000 to a gourmet chef) and takes about 72 hours to prepare.
Unless you care about the prestige, save yourself the cash and order chicken broth, imagining in your mind that it’s got sharkfin.
There’s a similar Vietnamese food that’s a half-developed chick (past embryonic, but before feathers and bones, I think). IIRC, they can be eaten raw or boiled.
Sounds a lot like 1000-year-old eggs, A.K.A. “Century” eggs. Yes, I know 1000 years is not a century 
Though the ones I’ve seen were buried in the earth, instead of wrapped in clay. Reminds me of a Fear Factor X-mas special I once watched where they ate reindeer testicles and washed it down with 1000-year-old-egg nogg.
The egg thing is called balut, it’s Filipino and is referred to as ‘eggs with legs!’ and you can get them at my local Asian supermarket. No, I’ve never tried one. Lord, no. Yuck.
I’ve had alligator too. I’d describe it as a cross between chicken and shrimp. Pretty tasty actually.
Rattlesnake tastes a lot like chicken. I know that I’ve had lizard but I don’t remember quite what it was like. Not like chicken is a good way to describe it.
All of this gourmet talk is making me really hungry for a hamburger.
Truffles: I’ve heard it described as “Like dirt, but in a good way”. It’s an incredably musty, earthy smell that, IMHO, is not at all like mushrooms. It hits you right in the back of the brain and it seems to envelope your entire nose.
Pate: Depends on what type but is essentially sausage without a casing or fancy meatloaf. If your talking about foie gras pate, then it tastes like meaty butter which just melts on your tounge and releases a sense of concentrated essense of meat without any of the heaviness or cooked flavour associated with stock. There is a faint liver taste to it but I think it complements rather than detracts from the flavour.
Abalone: It’s an incredibly delicate and subtle flavour, sweet like lobster but also briny like a clam. The texture varies depending on how it is prepared but it’s chewy and has texture and gives it robustness.
Caviar: Texture is an important part of texture so egg size matters. The expensive stuff (Beluga, Sevruga) have very large eggs so theres a real meatiness to them as you roll them around your mouth and meet resistance when they pop. The appeal of caviar is biting through the eggs and having a burst of wonderful, fishy, briny flavour that has complex hints of egg and mushroom (IMO at least). The smaller caviar eggs have a much finer, paste like, texture and none of that pop. I actually like Salmon roe to most caviars, precisely because of the egg size.
Sharkfin Soup: Probably as underwhelming as most people have said. It’s a texture thing rather than a flavour thing and there IS something unique about the texture. It’s kind of slippery/slimy and in long strands sort of like vermicelli noodles but with more of a… stickiness to them I think.
All of them are things that you should definately try if you have the chance and all of them are actually pretty approachable on a limited budget.
Foie gras and “Pate de foie gras” are different. Foie gras is sliced from the whole fatty liver. It is typically seared over high heat very quickly (cooked too long it just melts). It has an unctous texture and is as rich as eating a stick of butter. Pate de foie gras is ground up foie gras ) probably mixed with less expensive things) and cooked in a terrine. It tastes like really good liverwurst.
For those who say abalone is tough and chewy, it wasn’t prepared properly.
Abalone has to be pounded with a wooden mallet. And pounded some more. I’ve heard that after cutting off the foot it should be allowed to ‘rest’ overnight before pounding. The only way I’ve had it, as my mother made it and as served in a restaurant in the '70s, was with a light dusting of flour and then pan-fried in butter with some salt and a little pepper. Each time it was tender enough to cut with a fork. It’s closing in on three decades since I’ve eaten it, so I don’t remember exactly how it tastes. Something like a scallop, only different. I’ve heard that you can make faux abalone with calamari steaks, but the result the only time I tried it just tasted like calamari.
I have lots to add to this list, since I’ve tried a lot of weird foods (but not balut!)–any other specific foods you were wondering about?
Truffles: I find truffles kind of gross. They smell just like methane to me–especially the more expensive white truffles. I brought a little bag of white truffle-infused rice home one time and my roommates and I spent half an hour searching the apartment for the gas leak we all smelled–turned out it was the truffles. A tiny drizzle of truffle oil can be nice in combination with other flavors, but something flavored purely with truffles has a kind of sickly almost-sweet flavor to it, like rotting meat.
Abalone: Imagine having an entire little steak made out of the nice chewy part of a clam–none of the distracting textural elements like a sandy stomach or the softer middle part of the body. In other words, it has a nice, mild seafood flavor, and a somewhat chewy, meaty, but tender texture.
Shark’s fin soup: Shark’s fin doesn’t have any flavor, really. It’s there for the texture and the cost. The strands of shark’s fin are clear and slippery, with a slight crunch. I wouldn’t call it “sticky” or “sandy” as other posters have. The texture is very pleasing–all the little separate strands in your mouth like pasta, but with more resilience, and a slippery smooth texture, so the food maintains its shape in your mouth a bit longer than, say, a bite of spaghetti with marinara sauce.
I had a vegetarian version of shark’s fin soup once, and couldn’t tell the difference between that and the meat version–it’s that far removed from any recognizable “meats” you may have eaten. The stock you’ll have it in is basically a thickened chicken broth. I think it may be flavored with dried scallops. Headrush042, I agree that shark’s fin is flavorless, but you should definitely be able to tell from the texture if there’s shark’s fin in your soup (unless it has been extended with the vegetarian stuff :)). It doesn’t come in “chunks”–the clear strands should make up most of the solid matter in your bowl of soup. Just my personal experience from years of eating Chinese banquets.
FlyingRamenMonster, I think what you’re describing is the same as 1000-year-old eggs. I’ve never had a 1000-year-old egg with a completely liquid center (suddenly I’m thinking about Cadbury’s Creme eggs!), but I’ve had some where the edges of the green yolk have gone sort of runny. With absolutely no scientific basis for saying this, I think they’re safe to eat, and very delicious. Are you eating them plain? Cut up in rice porridge? With some kind of meat?