I’m surprised no one’s brought up wine and beer. Take crushed grapes or parts of plants you would never eat otherwise, mash it up and let it ferment to just before complete spoilage. Drain off the solids left behind and drink the liquid. Yum!
Just FYI, beer isn’t made from “parts of plants you would never eat otherwise”, and neither is wine.
Wine’s made from fruit, typically grapes that are crushed, fermented, and often aged. Beer is made from grain- barley, and sometimes a proportion of other grains, typically wheat, rice and corn that’s mashed to allow the enzymes in the grain to break down the starch into sugar, and then that resulting sugary mixture is fermented.
The only alcoholic beverage that I can think of that is/was clearly derived from a waste product is rum, in that originally molasses was a waste product of sugar refining without many alternative uses except being fermented and distilled into rum.
When you ferment something, the other byproduct of yeast is carbon dioxide. In modern production, it is used to provide a protective layer so that the product normally doesn’t even approach spoiling as it is not in regular contact with oxygen. And in most cases (e.g. not lambic) you don’t “let” it ferment but control that carefully.
But of course, that’s not true. All of a chicken is deboned and turned into nuggets. The breast, legs, thighs, etc,- except the wings.
Grappa? :dubious: Made from must, the waste from making wine. Tastes like diesel fuel, yeccch! :mad:
I’d forgotten about grappa(and marc, the French equivalent). I’d say it tastes more like kerosene with a grape tinge. But yeah, godawful stuff.
That reminds me of an old “Dirty Jobs” episode where Mike Rowe is harvesting geoducks (giant clams; it’s pronounced “gooey-duck” but they are neither ducks nor gooey) and one of them creates a fountain out of one end. He asks a scientist, “Did this thing just pee on me?” and the scientist replies, “No, it’s excreting secretional water from its gonad.”
:dubious:
Ever seen the Oscar-winning Danish movie “Babette’s Feast”? (Wonderful film.)
It’s about some peasants in a desolate Danish village, set in the late 1800s, and two sisters with interesting (in a good way) pasts who take in a French refugee who “knows how to cook.” She wins a lottery and prepares a feast for the sisters and their friends, including a high-class gentleman known as “The General.” Turns out that “The General” is the only person who knows how to eat many of the things Babette prepares, including a dish called “Cailles en Sarcophage”, which was quail in pastry, with the head placed appropriately. You guessed it - “The General” bites the head open and eats its brain.
What do you mean? They really are … eggs.
And then our ancestors found out that the resulting product tasted good, and also enabled preservation of excess milk.
Ever since I took human anatomy, which in my case was textbook-only, I cannot eat chicken breasts or tenders without being reminded, in my mind, that the large part of the breast is the pectoralis major muscle, and the small inside portion, aka the “tender”, is the pectoralis minor.
Poultry thighs have that lump of fat halfway down. So do human thighs, and so, for that matter, do hams or a baron of beef, which is a cow femur with all the meat on it. I worked many a buffet in college where a baron was at the end of the table, with a chef carving it to order, and halfway down, he would always remove a fist-sized chunk of fat.
Several years ago, I attended a presentation by the autistic cow expert Temple Grandin. “Pink slime” was a big news story at the time, and in the Q&A, someone asked her about it. She replied that she was all for it, because the process extracts about 15 more pounds of usable (not necessarily edible) products from a cow carcass, and why not use it all if you can?
Have you read his latest book? One wonders whatever possessed some people to eat hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms; not mentioned in the book is a certain Siberian plant that doesn’t have any psychogenic effect in people, but a renal metabolite does.
Think about THAT for a few minutes. :eek:
I’ve tried them. They’re mostly fat with almost no true meat on them. A while back, “All Things Considered” did a piece about a Pacific island where they’re considered a delicacy, and someone looked into banning, or at least reducing, their importation because of obesity issues among the residents.
Has anyone ever bought a stewing hen and made stock or soup from it? I see them at my local ethnic markets; they’re scrawny things that I’m guessing are quite likely too tough to eat, but I’ve heard they’re very flavorful.
“Craft” grappa seemed to be almost a thing for awhile, but I haven’t heard lately. It wasn’t terrible, not like the bottle a relative made and we kept around for years.
Primarily Samoa. Not so much as a delicacy I think as it’s a cheap but unhealthy source of protein. They also got the sides of mutton/lamb imported from New Zealand.
Yechh. I had sweetbreads once. It’s not so much what they are or how they are made, but the food itself which was disgusting. It was like little bittly lumps of brain in a bed of slime.
I had venison brains once, years before I knew about mad cow disease. As best as I can remember, the consistency was similar to fois gras, but the flavor is very mild, barely meaty, more a very mild nutty flavor.
Given the ratio of grossness to pleasure derived, I don’t plan to eat it again. But if I were hungry enough I would.
My cat loves brains, and back when she was younger and routinely killed things, we’d often find a snake or a bird or a bunny just missing the head.
I’ve only had them fried I think, and they were delicious.
There is no evidence that chronic wasting disease spreads to humans, though I personally would not eat brains for that reason, and very wary of the meat.
Squirrel brains are eaten in the Kentucky area, and as I understand it while some people in that area got a prion disease, it cannot be definitively linked to brain consumption.