Not even with my OP example, kimchi? I’m guessing with your adventurous palate, you’ve had it before.
French fried potatoes not as good as they smell? This has definitely not been my experience. They smell and taste too damn good.
Fafaru. It’s raw fish that has been soaked in fermented crushed crabs. It smells like diarrhea. If you can get past that (unlikely), it actually is really tender and tastes pretty good.
I love kimchi and I love the way it smells. It tastes just like it smells: funky, acidic, slightly spicy.
I just ate a can of herring in dill sauce for lunch. It’s a little stinky and a lot linger-y but tasted great. Most canned seafood is like that, I guess.
My favorite stinky cheese is Tête de Moine. When it arrives, you’re supposed to take off the plastic and let it air. I got some to share with my son and my daughter-in-law made him air it in the garage.
You use a special tool to shave it into rosettes, partly to air it further. It tastes great. Good on a cheese board with fruit.
Stinking Bishop definitely falls into this category. Hard to find on this side of the pond, but I’ve found it a few times. Expensive, stinks like fermented gym socks, tastes delicious!
The owners say the name was intentional, so that buyers knew what to expect, smell-wise!
“Stinky tofu” in China smells pretty awful, but the good stuff tastes great. Note: within the stinky tofu category, it does contain a “tastes worst than it smells” on one end of the spectrum.
Fish paste condiment from SE Asia and southern China also smells pretty gnarly, but is really good in a lot of dishes.
Someone already mentioned fish sauce, which is totally awesome and should be in everyone’s larder.
Japanese natto fermented bean tastes even worse than it smells. That said, a buddy from Tennesse loved the stuff and said it was just like something from back home. His Japanese was quite good, and he was adept at winning bets with incredulous native Japanese that he loved the stuff and would scarf down impressive amounts with great satisfaction whilst taking their money.
I’ve had Stinking Bishop a couple of times (we have friends in Gloucester, close to it’s origin); I have no memory of it smelling particularly bad or, for that matter, tasting particularly good.
As I understood it, the name is derived from the perry (Stinking Bishop) used as a wash in the cheese production; the perry is named for the pear that it’s made from, Stinking Bishop; and the pear is named for the man who developed the cultivar - Stinking Bishop.
The name ‘Stinking Bishop’ refers to Frederick (or Percy) Bishop, who owned Moorcroft Farm in the early 1800s and was presumably the cultivar’s breeder. Bishop allegedly had an ugly temperament. In a 2005 American National Public Radio interview, Charles Martell, the maker of Stinking Bishop cheese, related a story that Bishop got angry at his kettle one day for not heating fast enough and in retaliation shot it. This story, although apocryphal, illustrates the sort of behaviour that earned Bishop his reputation for irascibility.
j
I bet this cheese would pair well with a nice Bishop’s Finger or two…
Stinking Bishop is pretty similar to Epoisses. Rind-washed cheeses in general tend to be a bit guffy. ‘Outdoor cheese’ my kids used to call it (I think because they just wished that’s where I would take it).
Even some of the more common matured cheeses like Pecorino, Stilton and even vintage Cheddars smell pretty awful if you didn’t know it’s cheese you are sniffing.
Absent knowledge that the aroma is coming from delicious cheese:
Vintage Cheddar: “Who threw up in here?”
Stilton: “Who threw up on dirty socks in here?”
Pecorino: “Did some animal throw up on dirty socks in here?”
Same here. A strong is not the same as a bad odor. Strong or not, something that truly bothers my nose will certainly not taste any better.
As I’ve posted before, I once brought a durian to a friend’s barbecue. This was a gathering of wonderfully offbeat people, so I figured that if anyplace was appropriate for the famously bad-smelling good-tasting fruit, it was here.
1.) It didn’t smell anywhere near as bad as it was advertised to be. Nonetheless, people insisted I take it far away from the general food area.
2.) It tasted nowhere near as good as advertised.
3.) I found one guy who really liked it, and who was persuaded to take the rest of it home.
4.) I was advised by the hosts that they were glad I brought it, but that I Should Never Do That Again.
In short, durian doesn’t live up to its hype, IMHO.
Don’t ask me about the breadfruit I tried later on.
I’ve got to think that like any fruit there are good durian and bad durian. Maybe you just had a bad/underripe/overripe example. Clearly you need to experiment by buying several dozen more.
I think in the case of Surströmming and Hákarl they smell a lot of ammonia but (having never tried them) I’d be surprised if they tasted like ammonia. I might be wrong. I’ve never drank ammonia before either (and no one should). But I got a little splash in my mouth once while cleaning (like a drop or two). Not pleasant.
I have a fairly adventorous palate. And will try most anything. I’ve had the privilege traveling broadly and have eaten many local items that most people would abhor.
- barnacles in Spain
- chicken feet and scorpions in China
- ants in Mexico
- termites in Belize
- chitterlings in the southern US
- raw chicken sashimi in Japan
- fresh uni in Greece
And in most cases these items taste much better than they appear.
However, there is one item that I tried and could not keep down, even at the expense of being impolite to my hosts.
Hongeo in South Korea. Hongeo is a skate or ray type of fish, that is prepared raw sashimi style.
“This fermented skate dish has a sharp, pungent aroma – one might describe it as a heady mix of public toilet and wet laundry left untended for days – and a hard-to-swallow texture of chewy flesh and crunchy cartilage.”
“The skate doesn’t pee like other animals,” explains Kim Mal-shim, owner of Deok Inn Jip, a local hongeo restaurant in operation for 33 years. “It releases urine through its skin.”
Asafetdita smells pretty terrible, but it really brings Indian food to life. Reminds me that we’re getting into what I think of as curry season.
Uni is the only thing from your list I’ve tried. I love uni, and have had it many times as sushi, though probably not as fresh as your uni in Greece. My BIL is from Greece, and told me a story that as a kid, how he would dive for sea urchins, crack them open, and eat them right on the beach. Now that’s fresh!
I would be willing to try most of the others. I was going to order chicken feet at a dim sum place years ago, but they were all out at the time. Raw chicken sashimi I’d be willing to try if I was reasonably confident enough that it was either raised or prepared in such a way that I wouldn’t get food poisoning.
Chitterlings, on the other hand, a big no from me. This is also the only thing from your list that I imagine has a particulary strong, objectionable smell. I don’t do offal (can it be a coincidence it rhymes with awful?). Once years ago, in my 20s, I ordered Menudo at a Mexican restaurant for lunch one Saturday, as I heard it was a good hangover cure-- could not do it. The sight of those rectangular blobs of stomach or intestinal lining with the honeycomb pattern, and the sewer-like smell wafting off the soup did absolutely nothing good for my hangover.
You kinda buried the lede there… 
Hongeo is skate fermented in its own urine and served sashimi-style.
Curry season begins at 12:00 AM January 1, and ends at 11:59 PM December 31.
I kinda wonder if biologists would agree with this one.
I don’t know if it’s true that this skate doersn’t uriunate, but the situation seems very similar to that other food mentioned above, hakarl, which is made from the Greenland shark whose tissues are similarly permeated with urea, which makes it poisonous.
If I were trying to take that and make it edible, I’d probably give it a long rinse or even boil it at length in water, changing it frequently. I suspect that was either too difficult or too labor intensive for the Icelanders, who basically buried the shark for six to twelve weeks, which is apparently long enough for enough of the urea and trimethyl oxide to chemically change into something less lethal (if no more appetizing).
Thank you. Ignorance fought!