Yes, the good durian I have had (from Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, mostly) is very different than that first experience I had with thawed frozen durian in Boston.
But, there are many varieties of durian; connoisseurs can tell you which they prefer, with Thai varieties usually considered best. I recognize a sublime durian when I get it, but I don’t keep track of all the different kinds.
Freezing durian is perfectly fine, by the way; I think the yuckiness of the thawed durian I had (and maybe what you had as well) had more to do with age/poor storage conditions than the freezing itself. Some places in Indonesia sold durian milkshakes, which were basically chunks of frozen fresh durian thrown into a blender to create a thick, icy beverage. Those were to die for.
Some people are really repulsed by the smell of durian, but I don’t find it that bad. It’s really strong - we could always tell when durian was on sale at the grocery store as our noses informed us the minute we walked in. But to me it just smells like slightly fermenting fruit; not a great smell, but hardly nauseating.
We also can get durian in Hawai’i, though not that often. We’ve got a couple of durian trees that we planted a few years ago; they are doing very well but are probably 5 or more years from producing fruit.
This. Considered a delicacy in Tonga, but not by me. It is the comparison for anything else I’ve ever eaten - “Well, it’s not as bad as raw sea urchin!”
Mine would be Surströmming, that stinky fermented fish from Sweden.
I didn’t really want to eat it, but while part of a tour group in Norway I partook in a game of “wheel of fish” where you spin a wheel, and have to eat the fish it lands on. I unluckily landed on Surströmming. The taste honestly wasn’t too bad; it was just kind of salty, but I just couldn’t get past the smell. I swear, the stuff smells like raw sewage.
It has to be more deliberate than that. The Greenland Shark is poisonous unless cured in a specific way. Someone had to want to figure out how to do it so they didn’t kill their friend. You would think that in a place like Iceland there would be plenty of other fish to chose from even to poor people.
Fishing for Greenland Shark is not sustainable. I wouldn’t eat it because it’s disgusting. It also seems to be a bad idea to kill a fish that takes 150 years to reach maturity just so you can pull a practical joke on a tourist.
Hmm - on this side of the pond “crackling” is crunchy pig skin. You can buy it as Pork Scratchings, a pub snack.
Is that the sort of thing we’re talking about? Not something I can eat these days, but I would characterize it as disgusting but delicious, if you know what I mean.
Pretty mundane, but in Honduras I ate with a local family and some of the food was good, but the chicken they served was as rubbery and inedible as a car tire. I think it was an old chicken, and old chickens should be stewed for a long time, not grilled.
I’m a tanner among other things, and the texture, smell and flavor of hakarl all pointed to ripe moose hide cuttings after an extended de-hairing soak, were I to put that health hazard in my mouth. Utterly terrible, by all sensory measures. But we are all different. Maybe all hakarl is not the same, either. Dunno.
In the States, that’s called pork rinds. To me, it resembles greasy Styrofoam that smells and tastes a bit like ham or bacon, and it’s a common “breading”, when crushed to powder, for people who follow gluten-free or low-carb diets.
I was once at a Chinese restaurant for dim sum, and the cart came by with what I thought were tiny octopuses. I thought I’d give them a try. When I bit into one, it was full of bones. It was a chicken foot. Four is not equal to eight. It wasn’t actually terrible, but it was basically tasteless skin filled with many tiny bones. Not sure what people see in it.
I once decided to try Limburger cheese, after seeing all the cartoons and jokes about it. I thought it would be like a very strong blue cheese, which I love. Nope, it’s like concentrated essence of dirty socks. I threw it away after one taste, and it took many days for the smell to clear out of my apartment.
Watching Zimmern’s show is interesting. If he doesn’t like something, he will not say so. He will give you a cold, clinical, scientific description of the flavors and textures.
But there was one set of foods for which he didn’t bother trying to be objective. He just flat-out said that they were disgusting:
U.S. Army MREs.
Really? I used to watch his show, and given some of the crazy stuff he used to eat, I’m kind of surprised. I’ve had kind of a mild fascination with MREs over the years and have eaten many (also, as I know a few others on the board here are, I’m a fan of Steve1989’s youTube channel, in which he eats and rates various MREs). For what they are, meals that are meant to be shelf-stable for years in a variety of temperatures and conditions, I think they are usually quite palatable, and many are downright tasty. Or as Steve1989 would say, Nice!
I love uni-- which is raw sea urchin in a sushi roll. It’s like fishy-flavored pudding-- yum!
Not sure it qualifies but I ordered roasted caterpillars from a restaurant while in Africa. Not bad in terms of flavor. The experience was like eating jerky made from nuts.
I was expecting something like an appetizer plate but instead it was the size of a heaping dinner plate, enough to be an entire meal just by itself. I wasn’t able to finish it.
Then he has an agenda. MREs aren’t fine dining. They get tiresome after you have to eat them for weeks on end. But quite a few modern MREs are pretty good. The key is using the enclosed heating packet. I would certainly take a MRE over yak’s asshole or whatever else he’s eating.
When I was in college in the early 1990s, I dated a man who was quite the foodie, and he loved to tell the story of the time when he was in a VERY genuine Chinese restaurant, and saw fish lips on the menu. For 99 cents, why not? You guessed it - they brought out a platter of some things that looked and tasted like gelatinous rubber bands. However, he said it was totally worth 99 cents to say he’d tried fish lips.
I’ve managed, barely, to get down tiny bites of balut, natto, and thousand year / century eggs. The balut is a textural hell, natto like a mouthful of latex wallpaint lumps, and century eggs, while simply gorgeous to LOOK at, invoke a primal spititoutnow response because of the overpowering ammonia stench.
I’ll add something that I didn’t find disgusting at all, but many people would. I still miss a most amazingly delicious dish I used to eat all the time from a little hole-in-the-wall stand near my office building in Jakarta. It was mostly bean sprouts, rice and flavorings, but the main feature that made it so good was ikan bilis - tiny dried fish, added whole to the dish.
The great thing about this dish is that the fish eyes would fall out as the food was being stir-fried, so the dish was peppered with dozens of tiny, tiny fish eyeballs staring up at me while I ate.