Objectively speaking, probably uni (raw sea urchin gonads).
Wax paper. It was decidedly unpleasant, I would not recommend.
(You didn’t say it had to be things that are intended to be eaten!)
I’ve eaten dog soup in Nanking, but I’d say the strangest texture was stingray - not quite fish, not quite chicken and all covering a strange cartilage structure like lined up finger bones.
Crickets and meal worms, both deep fried so they were just crispy little bites. They turned out to be more boring than I expected.
I ordered giant leaf cutter ants from ThinkGeek. They were more weird than the crickets and worms - they had a strange nutty flavor and sometimes the legs would get caught in your throat and you’d have to wash them down (with beer!)
I’ve had thousand-year egg and natto, both of which were experiences I do not want to repeat. Egg due to the flavor and natto due to the horrible horrible strings.
Skate (which is a type of ray) is still pretty popular in UK fish restaurants. Classically served with a nutty brown butter and capers it is delicious.
I know what you mean about the cartilage “fingers” or “ribs” that support the wings. When such fish is properly cooked you should be able to scrape your fork down these as oodles of tender white meat results. Yum.
Balut. A food found in the Philippines and where Filipinos live in other parts of the world. Basically a fertile duck egg allowed to grow for 15 days, then hard boiled. The result is a little duckling with a yolk sack still attached and swimming in juice. You crack one end open and drink. Then consume the contents which are a little crunchy, etc. Puts hair on your ass. So they say…
Hmm. My “weird” food is downright normal compared to many of these. I’ve had octopus, and escargot, and squid, the latter in several forms. And, as someone observed above about alligator, if properly prepared, squid can taste like chicken (not so octopus, which in my opinion has the chewy consistency of Old Inner Tube)
But the weirdest thingI’ve had was served to me in the home of my friend’s parents. It wa a pink mousse-like confection served on a large scallop shell.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Just try it first,” they said.
I will never "just try " something again.
It was slightly salty and fishy tasting, reinforcing that scallop shell. What was it? It wasn’t at all the same taste or comnsistency of the styrofoam-peanut-like shrimp puffs some of the Asian grad students once served us.
“It’s calf’s brain.”
I’ll add that this was before we all knew about Mad Cow Disease/Creutzfeldt-Jakob/prion-caused illnesses.
The mention of pickled foodstuffs reminds me that I once had a big ol’ pickled turkey gizzard from a jar at a bar in Wisconsin. The thing that surprised me most was how big it was. I guess I had just never paid attention to their size before, but they really seemed to be a bit bigger than what’s usually in the turkey giblet bag.
I’ve had most of the offal mentioned in this thread (including sheep brains in a curry in Mumbai) but never spleen. That doesn’t sound terribly appetizing, and it sounds like it’s not. While we’re at it, I’ve noticed in the Filipino part of the freezer section of an Asian grocery store I used to frequent, they sold bile. I can’t for the life of me imagine what bile is used for, if it tastes anything like what comes up when I’m about to puke or burp funny.
Maybe not super weird but all in my travels in Asia:
-
- Fugu - blowfish - served up 4 ways - all of them delicious except the fugu skin salad
Snake soup - when I asked the waiter all he could tell me in broken English was “good snake!” - the meat was shredded, delicious and the texture was between chicken and egg drop soup
- Fugu - blowfish - served up 4 ways - all of them delicious except the fugu skin salad
- Roast Pigeon - a little gamey but good
- Sea Cucumber - Not a fan and did not like the texture at all
and several other miscellaneous things that were delicious but not revealed to me what they were. I thought it better that way.
Baby octopus at the sushi bar. They look like little bathtub toys. Taste great though.
Nothing too unusual. Alligator, ostrich, goat, and snake.
In non-meat categories, I ate some salt-pickled lime once.
I would agree with this. Pretty much, if you deep fry small chunks of anything, it tastes like chicken nuggets.
I tried them in Korea, but I was somewhat intoxicated and I don’t remember much about them.
I tried it, didn’t like it. Then again, I’m not a huge fan of sushi.
Aside from those:
Goat (roasted and curried)
Beef tongue tacos
Shark (not shark fin soup)
Octopus
Cuttlefish
Squid (fried, simmered, dried and on a pizza!)
Squid ink pasta (if you have ever smelled a dead carp, it’s like that, but salty)
Turtle soup
Bison
Elk
Wild boar
Escargot
Conch
Ostrich (I ate ostrich for 2 meals a day for over a month. In North Dakota)*
Beef tendon
She crab soup (I tend to hate all things roe, but I love this)
Crawfish
Bitter melon**
Things that I had the chance to try, but refused for silly reasons:
Jellyfish - I was once stung by a jellyfish.
Eel - I was fishing with my dad when I caught an eel. It just freaked me out.
*A local grocery in Minot, North Dakota started stocking some odd things, like bison, elk, wild boar and ostrich. Most of it was fairly expensive, but apparently, nobody bought the ostrich, so the price dropped quickly. When it dropped to around $1 per steak, I filled my cart.
**Bitter melon lives up to its name. One of the worst things I’ve ever tasted.
I’ve had a few things that are strange in isolation- balut, viper, porcupine, monkey meat, stir-fried bee larvae, mangrove worms, etc.
But the strangest meal I’ve ever had was at a hot pot restaurant that specialized in…duck throat. My friends took me there, and so I ate a nice big pot of duck throat. Apparently this is not just something people eat, but something people go out of their way to eat in great quantity. I still wonder how many ducks throats I chowed down that night (FWIW, it was presented as a bunch of rubbery squares.)
The large Makro supermarket in our region has frozen crocodile and frozen ostrich. We’ve tried each once but – perhaps our life is over-tame – we prefer my wife’s marinated chicken or even chopped pork with basil.
Noodle soup often comes with large chunks of congealed blood, which I eat, but squeamishly.
I eat fried grasshoppers as a novelty sometimes, or fried giant water bugs, or even fried scorpions.
Snakes are considered a food luxury here: they enhance virility. The more poisonous the snake, the greater the enhancement. But I, skeptical, let others eat my share, just taking blue diamond-shape pills if I get desperate. :o
An odd incident in Bangkok from 25 years ago was when I was invited to join in a snack of sticky-rice-and-something in a dark bar … too dark to see what the something was, but I joined in to be sociable. By the time the plate of something was almost empty, the outlines were visible and I could see small insect parts – a mild shock in a way that knowingly eating a grasshopper isn’t. This has stuck in my memory not because it was strange, but because it wasn’t, at the time…
I’ve had uni a number of times, it’s tasty when it’s fresh. When not, it’s not good eats.
But this reminds me, I’ve also had milt in fish soups in Hungary (where it’s called “halikra” as well as “haltej,” which literally means “fish milk”), as well as deep-fried. Milt is essentially male fish gonads that contain sperm. Here is a picture.
Ocean ray or flying fox. On an uninhibited island off the coast of Malaysia. Neither one tasted like chicken!
Moose gut and moose nose. On a remote reserve in Quebec. As one of two non-natives at the feast, honour demanded that I keep it down. I managed - barely. The other moonias didn’t. He spent the rest of dinner tossing it up in the bush outside.
Rabbit stew was my deal breaker. The stew smelled delicious so I fished around and brought up a lovely ladleful of rabbit skull and rabbit brain. End of meal.
I really liked ostrich the times I’ve had it and it’s the high price that keeps me from eating it on a regular basis. At a dollar a steak, I’d have stocked up too.
Wow, some of the stuff in here has me thoroughly covered.
Most exotic things I’ve eaten I guess most people would consider tame. Crocodile, Emu, Kangaroo.
The most horrible was lambs brains. One bite and spat it out.
Maybe the weirdest, only because it’s not a very bright thing to do, is chomp a whole Habanero pepper. Doesn’t that bring tears to your eyes quickly.
Probably the most unusual thing I’ve eaten is black bear. A friend of my grandfather’s had to kill one in self defense, and hey, you don’t let meat go to waste. I liked it, but I expect that was largely psychological.
The most disgusting thing I’ve eaten is probably Mt Dew-flavored Doritos.
And CalMeacham, I’m sure you could make squid taste like chicken, but why would you want to? Calamari, prepared properly, is one of the most delicious foods ever, far and away above anything chicken could ever aspire to.