I’ve mentioned this before in similar threads. For me, it’s definitely surströmming. There’s literally nothing else I’ve eaten that I’ve really found much of a distaste for, so this is the only one. Uni (sea urchin), blood soups, blood sausage, giant blobs of fat (hey, I actually like that), chitterlings, various aspics, tripe (another one I actually quite like, especially as menudo), brain, eyeballs, etc. All those were fine. But this rotten fermented herring is something else. I love herring. I love fermented fish in the form of fish sauce. So I thought I might actually enjoy surströmming and everyone who doesn’t like it is just a wimp. Nope. As bad as advertised. I would try it again, though, as enough time has passed and I’d be curious to see if I have as much distaste now that I know what to expect as before.
Fermented shark in Iceland. Nasty, but hard to tell since it gets washed down with their schnapps, thank goodness. I washed it down whole, tbh.
I’ve never had natto, but I have heard that it’s meant to be a condiment, not a free-standing dish.
I thought cracklings were the connective tissue left behind in lard rendering, after the lard is strained, and to me, they look, smell, and taste like crumbly bacon. Maybe you had a different variety?
It was a bowl of rice topped with a portion of natto. Not just by itself. But again, flavor and texture were not to my liking, even mixed with the (quite good!) rice.
my father was of German and eastern European descent. His family growing up used to make sultz, and he often made it himself when I was a boy. It is essentially gelatinized pigs feet meat, and it is as horrible as that sounds. The bonus was that as bad as it tasted, the smell it produced in the house for the hours the feet boiled was even worse. Truly gag inspiring.
Years ago, a Black friend took me to a soul food restaurant and ordered the most iconic food for me, including chitlins. She said, “I’m not going to tell you what this is, just give it a try.”
So I did. I took one forkful, and said, “you don’t have to tell me what it is. I can tell exactly what part of the pig this came from.”
There’s a Chinese place close to me with a 2nd menu for Chinese people which includes several dishes with pig intestines and other unappetizing-sounding ingredients. My daughter is very interested in trying stuff like that, so we’ve had a couple dishes from there that, while we appreciated the taste, we couldn’t finish. The one I can recall is Stinky Tofu. I’ve blocked out the other one.
Didn’t he try a flash fried tarantula?
In Algeria, I was served something that looked like a bladder (?) so puffed up it seemed about to burst. I felt bad for my hosts who obviously considered whatever this was as a delicacy but I passed.
About 15 years ago, I once came back from work to an absolutely revolting smell in the hallway. I remember feeling pity for my neighbour’s kids who had to eat that awful-smelling dish. Then, I opened the door and realized it was coming from inside my apartment. My ex-wife had cooked sheep bowels, another North African delicacy. I passed again.
On the whole, I like Maghrebi cuisine just fine, but these two particular dishes were not getting anywhere near me.
Makes you wonder how some of these disgusting food items became a thing. Like the hakarl - did some guys find a dead, rotting shark on a beach and one of them goes “I dare you to take a bite” and another one goes "hold my schnapps! - and then a unique, regional and internationally known food is born?
Regarding the tripe in soup - in my youth I did the backpacker Eurail thing and was staying at a friend’s gasthouse in northern Italy, the part where they speak German. My friend went off to work and I went out hiking for the day. When I got back her mother had made a nice pot of steaming soup and promply served me a bowl and a nice hunk of dark, grainy bread to dip in it. She only spoke German and my German was terrible to non-existent. I was hungry so dug right in, and after reaching the halfway point in the bowl, I realized what those tender, honeycombed chunks of meat were. The slight grassy taste and aroma was the hint. But, I finished the bowl, not wanting to insult my host, and she promptly refilled it. I have not tried menudo.
There are actually 5 things he won’t eat, I think. I’m too lazy to look them up. But durian is one of them along with the walnuts. His producers wouldn’t let him eat something that had spinal cord in it.
Walnuts? Really? Huh. They’re my favorite nut and I have all sorts of childhood associations with them. I even prefer them to pecans and cashews.
Yeah, I love walnuts. They make a great snack with crackers and cheese also.
Heretic. Walnuts taste like dirt.
Poverty is often an answer for many items. Poor people invent a lot of foods using parts thrown away by people who are not poor.
But rancid shark meat? Lots of drinking in Iceland and someone tried it.
I guess between drunkenness and poverty, lots of things have been attempted.
That’s interesting to me, because I think durian tastes a bit like walnuts. Maybe Zimmern does too!
(FWIW, I like both.)
Interesting. I was in mind of an oniony banana with other tropical notes, but I had it stateside, so clearly not the freshest thing in the world.
Yeah, the first time I had durian it was in the US, and it had been frozen and thawed. It tasted oniony to me.
Well, since I have you here, was it much different in Indonesia? I assume so. Given the horror stories about its smell, I was quite surprised at just how tepid it was overall. I mean, it was a strange mix of flavors for a fruit, but it wasn’t anything even in the same stratosphere as rotten fish. Surströmming smelled (and tasted, as taste is mostly smell) like a cross between a rotting animal corpse and a dog’s stinky fart. I’m not trying to be poetic or whimsical in my description – that’s what it reminded me of.