Reviving/encouraging the Artisan cheese was mostly a good idea. Sour dough bread is great for those who like it. Artisan yoghurt stepped the pace up a bit, and has (with Siggi’s for instance) gone the way of sourdough, becoming an acquired taste for those who are into the sour tang.
But then we got into the fermented teas, and folks mixing up batches of bacteria in their garages, and now it’s beginning to get out of hand completely. These folks are starting to sound like they think they are founding a new genre of food prep. I’ve got news for them, it’s an ancient form, and was abandoned for good reason. Once we had refridgeration, we no longer needed this vile disgusting method.
There was a time when such methods were necessary in order to survive the Winter. Now, we can throw a few bits of food in the freezer, or ship fresh food in from warmer climes. There is no longer any need to resort to simply trying to encourage the rotting organisms least likely to make us sick.
Yuck. Please stop them before they discover Hongeohoe.
I suspect you’re right about Casu Marzu – Cheese flies laid eggs in the cheese which ruined it. But probably people were starving with nothing else to eat, and so made a virtue of necessity by eating the spoiled cheese, and eventually developed a taste for ir. Despite the fact that the larvae can survive in your digestive tract, bore through the side into your guts, and cause problems.
but hakarl is something else entirely. The shark it’s made from does weird stuff with its ammoniacal waste, rerouting it through its body, which makes its flesh at least unappetizing, at worst poisonous. I have a suspicion that this evolutionary quirk evolved to keep the shark from getting eaten by larger, more aggressive fish. And people. And, at first, this worked.
But people discovered that if you bury the shark meat in cold ground for a long time and let it ferment (not an unusual method of preservation back in the Old Days, Before Refrigerators), it would change to something that, while still powerfully scented and tasting, at least wouldn’t kill you. If you’re a poor fisherman in Iceland, with little else besides samples of this shark to eat (and no other way to process it), you end up eating fermented ammonia fish. 'Cause there ain’t nothing else.
Refrigeration wouldn’t help in this case. In fact, it’d hurt, because the fish wouldn’t ferment and it’d be as poisonous later as it is now. It’s lack of alternate food sources that causes the problem.
Of course, today people have alternate sources, many of them because of refrigeration. But the rationale for eating hakarl is completely different from that for eating casu marzu.
don’t put “spoiling” down. If it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t have wine and cheese in general, and not bleu cheese and sauterne in particular. Heck, by many accounts, we wouldn’t even have anything with yeast, like bread.
By “live food” I thought you meant what my brother had when traveling through china/Japan/elsewhere. He had sushi cut from a live fish, table side. Now that is hardcore.
Ew. I’m glad the kosher laws prohibit this. We’re OK with live microorganisms, but no live macroscopic animals, or pieces cut off of live animals. That is a part of the kosher laws that I have absolutely no problem following.
Isn’t there something you can do with shark meat involving bleeding it immediately, like you were kashering it, that also takes care of the ammonia problem? It seems to me that’d be a more attractive option than letting it pickle in its own ammonia.
Basking sharks are one source of hakarl, and are perfectly edible. The Greenland shark is the toxic one Cal is talking about. It is also one of the largest toothed sharks (basking are filter feeders), at about 6 m/20 ft or more, so yes I don’t think they need to avoid being eaten, although I think they’re unaggressive for their size.
I have no idea which percentage of eat sharks make hakarl, or whether the first guy who made hakarl used Greenland shark.
That is just utterly disgusting. There is being at the top of the food chain, and then there’s gratuitous cruelty. Yuck! I apologize for having brought such an image to your head.
I’m still planning evil revenge for the Doper who once linked to a video of that without warning me.