For me it has to be the 1000 year egg, or century egg or whatever it is called. I had a Taiwanese flatmate who had food sent to him from Taiwan by his wife and a lot of people over all the time to partake. One time there were three cute girls with him (he was the president of the Taiwanese society, he was giving them advice about the school and how it was ran), so I came in and asked what they were having. They told me it was the Century Egg and if I would like to try. I put it in my mouth and had to leave the room immediatly. It turns out it is an egg they bury in some sort of dirt for many moons so it becomes dark green (almost black) and tastes like decomposed egg… yuuuum.
He also introduced me to the “joys” of chicken feet (actually, chicken claws), fried in some sort of batter. He told me to try one, stating it was “chicken” but did not advise me, that the inner part of the nice fried batter croquette I put in my mouth contained the chicken’s nails, so one got stuck to my palate.
Imagine something that is both painful and disgusting at the same time yuuum. He told me they eat them like popcorn in movie theatres in Taiwan. I wonder if many people bleed to death from palate-punctures in Taiwan, or if you are supposed to eat them some other way. Personally, I don’t think I will ever find out, though.
I must say that I tried a lot of other things that I did like with my flatmate, but the egg and the chicken feet… no no no.
I would think that in this case forewarned is ten-armed.
Ha! I crack me up.
Zebra and cuauhtemoc, I assume you have only had some nasty, store-bought approximation of the true manna that is my Grandmother’s gefilte fish. She makes it with only super fresh fish (whitefish and pike I think). She uses plenty of carrots and her secret: plenty of white pepper. Most importantly, no fish jelly. blech
I think the most revolting thing I have ever attempted to eat was a duriyan, a fruit from Asia said to be so vile that airlines refuse to carry them for fear of having one split open and stink up the entire airplane. My dad had been talked into buying one from the local Chinatown by a pastor who wanted to have one at some sort of party, IIRC. The pastor claimed it smelled like sewage but tasted like vanilla ice cream. In reality, it both smelled and tasted like a mixture of sewage and vanilla ice cream. I was able to keep it down for less than a minute. My brother says the pastor’s son, after seeing my reaction from eating it, started to count down how long it would be before the duriyan came back up. And had the number right to within a count or two.
I’ve eaten escargot, too, in a restaurant. Much grosser than squid (which is pretty good) or octopus (too rubbery). Escargot has a phlegm-like quality all its own.
Another time, I tried to serve escargot at one of my Bad Film Festivals. It was seafood-themed (shark for Jaws 3-D for instance, red snapper for Piranha). I thought escargot would go well with The Monster that Challenged the World. But nobody would touch it.
Once, I picked up my can of beer and took a big swig, only to find out it wasn’t my can - it was somebody else’s Skoal spit can.
Other than that, I’ll second Mullinator on the Rocky Mountain Oysters. And it’s not because of what they are - I didn’t know what they were when I got them at the free bar food buffet. They just looked like some deep-fried thing (<Homer>Mmmmm - deep fried</H>). I bit into it, and it was like biting into a bunch of rubber bands soaked in rancid grease. Bleaggh. It was only later that I heard someone bellow to his buddy, “Hey! Didja try the Rocky Mountain Oysters? Haw haw haw!” Good Lord, they’re friggin’ awful.
Although I don’t think this tops DaToad’s or Wonko’s experiences.
A glass of whip cream and water. I was getting a glass of water one night, saw the whip cream and decided to see if they would go together. They didn’t. I swear, it was horrible. I can’t really describe what it tasted like. Maybe detergent or something.
I can’t believe the magnitude of escargot haters. I had some in a restaurant in Montreal a few months ago and found them delicious.
The most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten was a wasabi pea. They’re raw peas covered in a hard, green shell. As soon as you bite down, the thing explodes in your mouth and tastes like dried puke. It was all I could do just to swallow it, with a friend laughing her head off the entire time.
A couple days ago, some of my students (I’m a high school teacher in Japan) came in with trays of grey sludge fresh from Home Ec.
“Gomadofu! Delicious!” they said. Now, I like gelatinous foods, and rubbery is my friend, but sesame tofu with soy sauce has a dusty, fragile taste. It coats your throat with chilly nasty.
But I gotta chip in on the “but that wasn’t really my cup” vein. One of my mother’s trashy habits was putting uncovered plates or dishes in the 'fridge, sometimes unlikely ones. I engaged in the marginally more acceptable variant - putting my massive tumber of Texas Tea in there until I was ready to come back and finish it. We were all tea-drinkers.
I reached in one morning, spotted a tumbler and knocked it back, all my nerves fully primed for crisp tea.
CUT GREEN BEANS!
IN THE CAN’S FOETID JUICE!
ICE COLD!
Ice cold. Several immediately slid partway down my throat like fingers from the grave and more were left protruding in a great cluster from my mouth; icy bean juice filled my mouth and boiled out my nostrils and probably eyes, and I coughed and hacked and puked and wallowed until finally able to limp away, no longer the same little kid.
Barbqued goat is double-plus good. Escargot is (are?) good. Squid is not. Octopus is not. Abalone is not. KimChi is not. KimChi is double-plus ungood. MHO only, YMMV.
Grossest actual food is a tie between natto (fermented soybeans, mentioned above), raw yam (yam. not sweet potato) grated into a slimy paste and mixed with soy sauce, and the durian candy a student brought back from a vacation in Singapore.
Foods that groosed out others but not me: chopped raw beef liver topped with chives and raw egg (at my local yakiniku shop), whole roasted sparrow at a yakitori shop (my freind ordered it trying to gross me out - his wife got sick. He took one bite and wouldn’t eat anymore. I finished off both our servings - sparrow bones are crunchy!), and probably a bunch of other stuff that would gross out many.
The grossest thing I ever ate that wasn’t intended as food was probably when I got curious as a child (4 or 5 years old) and nibbled my own feeces. BLEECH!
I really like kimchee and wasabi peas. There exists somewhere on this fine internet of ours a picture of me with a wasabi pea up each nostril. It ws an invigorating experience.
Rocky Mountain oysters… YUMMY!! Friends from work in Cheyenne introduced me to these lovely treats in a bar one night. I refused for the longest time, but finally gave in when someone called me a chicken. Sometimes I’ve got more balls than brains. Tried 'em. Liked 'em.
A mate brought back from China these funky sour plum candy things. Never seen me waddle/run so bloody fast in all my life!!
Also not too keen on sashimi.
Generally I’m quite adventurous in trying new foods. Love all sorts of other Japanese, Thai, Korean, Mexican (okay most foreign) foods that others think are nasty.
The grossest thing I’ve ever eaten was, oddly enough, too gross for me to even eat. Just the smell of it was enough.
It was this thick, brown, gelatinous, vaguely fondue-like concoction offered to guests at my cousin’s graduation party some years back. His well-meaning but culinarily challenged mother had seen fit to splatter this insult to the gods inside a defenseless silver bowl into which unsuspecting guests were supposed to dip various yummy sundries.
I took one whiff. One whiff. A few minutes later, when my stomach had finished its sojourn into the upper reaches of my esophagus and descended back into its rightful place I saw an uncle of mine happily shove a small pastry coated with this stuff into his mouth, then recoil in mortal shock as he was presented for the briefest of moments with a short preview of what Death Itself would taste like.
So I’m one of the lucky ones, I guess.
As for nasty things I’ve actually had the courage to eat, I’d have to say hákarl – an Icelandic dish consisting of a piece of moldy shark meat on a toothpick – is just about the nastiest.
When I was little, there was no objection to eating sea turtle eggs. I actually found them tasty, but the awareness of how endangered they are now in Mesoamerica, together with a chalky aftertaste they leaved, has led me to currently feel revolted that I used to eat them.
Oh, you want me to describe them? Imagine a ping-pong ball that somehow had turned soft. You could peel the surface, the inside looked like the standard chicken egg: clear around and a spherical yellow yolk. One then added sauce, salt and lemon. Finally one needed to make a small hole on the other end and since the surface was soft, you could squeeze the egg or extract the contents by suction alone. 5 eggs was a usual serving . . .
. . . Followed by oysters.
[sub]P.S. I forgot to mention: the turtle eggs were always raw, just like the oysters![/sub]
When in Japan on a business trip, I samples a snack food which is essentially small fried whole fishes coated in some kind of honey glaze. I don’t know what posessed me to try them - part of the whole trying to experience a foreign colture thing. The taste wasn’t bad - mildly fishy with an very sweet coating - but the texture was almost unmanageable. Picture a substance that sticks to your teeth with the power of industrial epoxy, filled with thousands of tiny needle-sharp fish bones. By the time I was finished with the package, I had many small bleeding holes punched in the roof of my mouth, and shard of razor sharp fish bits still near-permanently glued to my teeth.
Years ago at a local restaurant I had the house special, which was a pasta-and-shrimp dish covered with what the restaurant called “Dancing Bonitoes”. These turned out to be raw tuna meat, aged, treated, and shaved paper-thin. When dumped on the just-cooked pasta dish, the raw aged tuna meat responds to the heat and starts twitching and flexing. So when they bring you your meal, it’s covered with translucent shavings that are waving at you. The taste wasn’t bad - the tuna meat was kind of rancid tasting, but there was little enough of it that the taste of the pasta, shrimp, and sauce won out - but the fact that it’s moving is kind of disturbing.
And I’ve had sea urching sushi. Not actually bad, although the texture is revolting.
AndrewL, I love those fish. I second the natto thing, although I have a good buddy from Tennessee who loves natto and says it takes just like one of his home town favorites. To each his own.
I’ve lived in Asia for over 15 years. Tried quite a bit of stuff and most isn’t that gross once you get over the virgin factor (that is, trying something pretty icky for the first time).
