extreme cuisine
It's not all bad – it just looks that way.
Half the fun of travel is eating out. You get to go to a different restaurant every night, sample local delicacies and down a few local bevies. This is all well and good until you come across a few of the strange foods below. Bon appetit!
To jump to your weird food of choose, click on one of these links.
Better still, perhaps you have a few photos or recipes of your own that you want me to add to the link above. The only catch is the food must be edible and unusual. It can't just be a shot of a 2 year old broccoli that you found in the back of your fridge (not that broccoli isn't weird) it just has to be culturally unusual – like Cambodian coiled snakes. If you have such a pic, feel free to email me.
Reptiles & Amphibians
The weird thing about reptiles and amphibians is that they really do taste a lot like chicken. Trust me, next time you have your friends over chuck a few frogs into the chicken stew and see if anyone tastes the difference – just make sure to peel 'em first otherwise the colour gives it away.
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Snake wine – a drink with real bite |
Monitor lizard – alive and still kicking (well it would if its legs weren't tied behind its back |
Peeled frogs – Cambodia |
Snake
Snake wine
And while I haven't tried eating snake I have drunk snake wine. Snake wine is basically a big jar of lighter fluid with a dead snake in it. It's the kind of drink that makes you stamp your feet and flare your nostrils excitedly. Click on the link to see my wife, Debbie, drink a glass in Laos.
DEBBIE DOES SNAKE
Texas rattlesnake*
1. Find and capture a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake.
2. Kill, skin and remove entrails.
3. Cut into edible portions.
4. Make a batter of flour, cracker meal, salt, pepper and garlic.
5. Roll your snake portions in the batter.
6. Fry in deep fat, heated to a temperature that will ignite a floating wooden match.
7. Fry until meat is a golden brown and eat it!
*Courtesy of the the Sweetwater, Texas, Chamber of Commerce. The Sweetwater Jaycee's 'World's Largest Rattlesnake Roundup' is held each year in March and hundreds of pounds of rattlesnake meat is cooked and served by Chief Chef Corky Frazier.
Insects
Bugs
Actually these aren't bad. Most bugs when fried are crunchy – hell even when they aren't fried they are crunchy. It's the squishy ones that I can't stand, like the huhu grubs in New Zealand which resemble big globular sacs of something you might cough up if you had lung cancer mixed in with a little peanut butter. The crickets I had in Mexico were positively divine by comparison and even the scorpions – cooked live while threaded on a stick in China – were better.
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De-winged locusts for sale in a Laos market |
Maggots by the bowlful in Cambodia |
Unidentified bugs in Laos. These are the squishy kind I don't like. |
Chocolate Cricket Chip Cookies
2 1/4 cup flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
2 eggs
1 12-ounce chocolate chips
1 cup chopped nuts
1/2 cup dry-roasted crickets
Preheat oven to 375. In small bowl, combine flour, baking soda and salt; set aside. In large bowl, combine butter, sugar, brown sugar and vanilla; beat until creamy. Beat in eggs. Gradually add flour mixture and insects, mix well. Stir in chocolate chips. Drop by rounded measuring teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 8-10 minutes.
Recipe courtesy of weird-food.com
Mammals
Mammals taste good – except their guts and brains, which taste bad. After all, if God didn't want us to eat cows he wouldn't have made them so delicious. My only advice – don't eat anything that one day might feature in a WWF wildlife calendar and you'll see no Rhino horns or tiger wangers in the pictures below.
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Moles – way too cute for most people to eat, although they're conveniently bite sized. |
Smalahove – Norwegian smoked sheep's head. You eat all of it, incl. the sheep's eyes and tongue |
Some kind of weasly, ratty rodent thingy for sale in a market in Laos. |
Seal
Canadian Seal Flipper Pie*
4 seal flippers
1/2 cup diced pork fat
1 tsp flour
cold water
2 onions, chopped
1 tsp soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp worcester sauce
Soak flippers in water and soda for 1/2 an hour. Trim excess fat. Dip the flippers in seasoned flour and pan fry in the pork fat until browned. Add the chopped onion.
Make a gravy of flour, 1 cup water, and Worcester sauce. Pour over the flippers. Cover and bake in a moderate oven (350ºF) until tender.. which should be two to three hours. Cover with pastry and bake at 400ºF for 1/2 an hour.
*Courtesy of Rachel M. Brodie.
Birds
Birds are bony and stringy. If they are small enough like sparrows you can just crunch through the bones with your teeth. Big birds, like emu and ostrich, are far more appealing. I recommend starting with these and working your way down. Eventually you'll be able to eat those eggs that they have in China with the half-formed embryonic chicks cooked inside.
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Wild birds – Laos |
Dried Black Chickens – Vietnam |
Seafood
A lot of seafood is disgusting. I'm not even going to try to pretend that I like it.
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Fermented Fish Sauce |
Pickled Crab |
Dried Fish |
Fish
Fermented fish sauce
For many Asians, fish sauce made from fermented fish – yes that means 'rotten' to you and me – is the quintessential ingredient for many of their dishes. I don't know if you ever seen a bucket of rotten fish, but if you have you'll have an idea of the stench of this stuff – it's revolting. While taking the photo above I had to pull me tee-shirt up and over my nose. Essentially all you need to do is take a barrel of fish and salt and let it sit in the sun until it stinks like cat's shit. When your gag reflex stats to kick in whenever you approach it, it's done. Take a board and press a board down on the rotten fish to collect the liquid that dribbles out.
Fruit & Vegetables
The world's full of exotic fruit and vegetables – most of it is delicious, except durian which has been banned in Singapore because it smells like vomit.
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Mangosteen |
Durian |
Durian – "like eating pudding in an outhouse"
Durian is fruit like no other. It is hard to imagine that something that smells so terribly could possibly taste any good. But apparently it does and this most unlikely of fruits has been given the title "The King of All Fruits". But the thing about durian is that it stinks. It reminds me of vomit, but others have described the smell to be that of rotting flesh, sewage or dirty socks. The smell is so bad that you have to pick your moment to try it.
Many hotels in South-East Asia forbid it on the premises and it is illegal to carry them on the trains in Singapore because they were making fellow commuters throw up. Malaysian car rental firms have banned them and it is not uncommon to see special signs, kind of like no-smoking ones, of a durian with a line through it banning them from public places. Inside their flesh is like custard – yellow and creamy.