WORLD STRANGEST FOOD

  World Strangest Food-Dare to  Try Them ?

Strange  food

They say one man's  trash is another man's treasure. The same could be said about  food: one man's nightmare may just be another man's delicacy. From  cow's tongue and pig's snout to chicken's feet, from fried worms  and frog's legs to sautéed snails, the list of weird stuff we eat  is endless (and often quite tasty). If you've been indulging  lately and need a reason to diet, take a read, you may just lose  that appetite.

Balut
Balut seems to be on every  "strange food" list, usually at the top, and for good reason.  Though no longer wriggling on the plate like the live octopus in  Korea, the fertilized duck or chicken egg with a nearly-developed  embryo that is boiled and eaten in the shell is easily one of the  strangest foods in the world. Balut is very common in the  Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam and usually sold by street  vendors. It is said balut tastes like egg and duck (or chicken),  which is essentially what it is. It is surprising to many that a  food that appears so bizarre-often the with the bird's features  clearly developed--can taste so banal. In the end, apparently  everything does indeed, just taste like  chicken.

Sannakji
With sashimi and sushi  readily available the world over, eating raw seafood is no longer  considered a dining adventure. The Korean delicacy sannakji  however, is something quite different, as the seafood isn't quite  dead. Live baby octopus are sliced up and seasoned with sesame  oil. The tentacles are still squirming when this dish is served  and, if not chewed carefully, the tiny suction cups can stick to  the mouth and throat. This is not a dish for the faint  hearted!

Casu  Marzu
Found in the city  of Sardinia in Italy, casu marzu is a cheese that is  home to live insect larvae. These larvae are deliberately added to  the cheese to promote a level of fermentation that is close to  decomposition, at which point the cheese's fats are broken down.  The tiny, translucent worms can jump up to half a foot if  disturbed, which explains why some people prefer to brush off the  insects before enjoying a spoonful of the pungent  cheese.

Fugu
Fugu is the Japanese word  for the poisonous puffer fish, filled with enough of the poison  tetrodotoxin to be lethal. Only specially-trained chefs, who  undergo two to three years of training and have passed an official  test, can prepare the fish. Some chefs will choose to leave a  minute amount of poison in the fish to cause a tingling sensation  on the tongue and lips as fugu can be quite bland. Perhaps the  fuss of fugu is more in surviving the experience than the actual  taste of the deadly fish.

 

 Hakarl

Anthony Bourdain, known for  eating some of the strangest foods in the world, claims that  hakarl is the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten. Made by  gutting a Greenland or Basking shark and then fermenting it for  two to four months, hakarl is an Icelandic food that reeks with  the smell of ammonia. It is available all year round in Icelandic  stores and often served in cubes on toothpicks.

Stuffed  Camel
The recipe for a whole  stuffed camel kind of reads like a bad joke, with ingredients that  include one whole camel, one whole lamb and 20 whole chickens. The  Guinness Book of World Records lists the recipe as the largest  item on any menu in the world, conveniently leaving out any  concrete examples of this dish actually being eaten. Legend has it  that that a whole stuffed camel is a traditional Bedouin dish  seemingly prepared like a Russian Stacking Doll, where a camel is  stuffed with a whole lamb, the lamb stuffed with the chickens and  the chickens stuffed with eggs and rice. The entire concoction is  then barbecued until cooked and served. Fact or fiction, the shear  amount of food created by this dish makes it deserving of a place  on the list.

Rocky Mountain  Oysters

What is so strange about  oysters? Probably the fact that they're not the kind you find at  the bottom of the ocean, but rather a fancy name given to  deep-fried testicles of a buffalo, bull or boar. Rocky Mountain  oysters (also called Prairie Oysters) are well-known and regularly  enjoyed, in certain parts of the United States and Canada,  generally where cattle ranching is prevalent. The testicles are  peeled, boiled, rolled in a flour mixture, and fried, then  generally served with a nice cocktail sauce.

Bugs
The practice of eating  insects for food is called entomophagy and is fairly common in  many parts of the world, with the exceptions of Europe and North  America (though bugs are apparently a favorite with the television  show "Fear Factor"). It is not uncommon to find vendors selling  fried grasshoppers, crickets, scorpions, spiders and worms on the  streets of Bangkok, Thailand. Insects are high in protein and  apparently consist of important fatty acids and vitamins. In fact  flour from drying and grinding up mealworm can be and is often  used to make chocolate chip cookies. So next time you think there  is a fly in your soup, it may actually just be part of the  presentation.

Haggis

A traditional Scottish  dish, haggis is made with the minced heart, liver and lung of a  sheep mixed with onion, spices, oatmeal, salt and stock, and  boiled in the sheep's stomach for a few hours. Larousse  Gastronomique, a popular encyclopedia of gastronomic delights,  claims that haggis has "an excellent nutty texture and delicious  savory flavor." Haggis is available year-round in Scottish  supermarkets and made with an artificial casing rather than a  sheep's stomach. In fact some are sold in cans to be heated in a  microwave before eating. Similar dishes can be found in other  European countries with goat, pork or beef used instead of  sheep.

Fried - brain  sandwiches
Long before the era of  Mad-Cow Disease, a sandwich made from fried calves' brain, thinly  sliced on whitebread <http://www.articlesbase.com/restaurant-reviews-articles/top-ten-strangest-foods-from-around-the-world-520186.html> was a common item on the  menus in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. The sandwich is still  available in the Ohio River Valley, where the brains are now  heavily battered and served on hamburger buns. In El Salvador and  Mexico beef brains, lovingly called sesos in Spanish, are used in  tacos and burritos. The brains have a mushy texture and very  little flavor on their own so the addition of copious amounts of  hot sauce definitely helps.