Most odd/different/disgusting thing you ever ate.

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Live shrimp for me. They put the shrimp in a small bowl and add rice wine to make them drunk so they don't hop all over the place. You just take one, peel them, dip in sauce and eat. I loved these when I was 4. Not sure I'd be able to eat it now.

I think just about all non-Chinese (and even some Chinese) people have a strong aversion to stinky tofu which is another one of my faves that I still eat all the time.

I've had durian which is another thing that people either love or run out of them room from.

Apart from that, just typical Chinese fare: duck tongue, cow tongue, probably some other stuff I haven't had before.

What has been tasted cannot be untasted.

I have traveled through Southeast Asia. What I can speak about will haunt your nightmares.

A salad, and no I'm not kidding a normal garden salad is the most disgusting thing I have ever eaten. Meat and potatoes all the way baby!

I'm a sushi fan, but I made the mistake of trying Uni (sea urchin).

IMAGE(http://shizuokagourmet.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/research-uni.jpg)

It actually doesn't taste too bad, per say, but the texture is totally vomit inducing. It's mushy like runny oatmeal and totally puke-tastic.

I think this description speaks for itself:

"Uni (oo-nee) is the Japanese name for the edible part of the Sea Urchin. While colloquially referred to as the roe (eggs), uni is actually the animal's gonads (which produce the milt or roe)."

I love Uni. That rich earthy, savory flavor is out of this world. Buy yeah it totally feels like you cleared your throat.

I will try most anything once. By and large I am grossed out by rather mundane things-mayo and miracle whip are two things I can barely look at. Double gross if they are warm.

I am not a fan of salted fish. I think the texture is off and often it is impossible to be rid of the overpowering salt taste.

But I love weird foods(from an American standpoint)-beef tongue tacos, fish head, sweet breads, the aforementioned Uni, roasted goat. My two favorite sashimi are octopus and squid(heaven rolled with rice).

Aaron D. wrote:

"Uni (oo-nee) is the Japanese name for the edible part of the Sea Urchin. While colloquially referred to as the roe (eggs), uni is actually the animal's gonads (which produce the milt or roe)."

I like sushi a lot. I usually stick to the standard stuff, but I've had Uni quite a few times. Now that I know what it is I don't think I'll be able to eat it again. There's just something about eating the reproductive organs of another animal that I'm not so hip on.

Hákarl,, by far the most disgusting things I've eaten.

Most odd/different/disgusting thing I ever ate? Her name was Nina and ....

I jest!

I really hate Brussels Sprouts. They taste sour and nasty to me. Maybe if I put enough Velveeta on them, I could choke them down.

Salty herb cakes in Taiwan. No one gave me any warning that the soft, tasty-looking cake was not like the other, sweet pound cakes we'd had earlier. I was also offered fresh, raw cuttlefish at a restaurant that night, but I declined.

Chicken heart soup is up there too.

Tripe, stewed cow stomach, is the grossest thing I've ever eaten. The flavor wasn't bad, since it was heavily spiced, but the texture and the chewiness really got to me. My friend who tried it with me literally took one bite and turned green.
IMAGE(http://www.foodmall.org/images/r_tripe.jpg)

Chicken feet. Not the legs with all the meat on them, but the claws. Both taste and texture were unpleasant.

I don't eat gross sh*t.

I was eating lasagna with red peppers once and they'd accidentally put some of the pepper seeds into the lasagna. What I thought was a bit of ricotta turned out to be a cluster of seeds with a texture exactly opposite of what I was expecting. I choked it down before I could really think about it and it nearly made me sick.

Had some eel at a sushi place once. Very rubbery. Unpleasant.

Kraint wrote:

Chicken heart soup is up there too.

BBQ'd chicken hearts on a stick were good, kind of an odd texure.

Oddest thing? Dunno, pig intestine and cow stomach? Growing up as a very land-locked American, squid and octopus was odd at first but now I love the stuff.

What I *love* chicken hearts... Gizzards are pretty good too, if properly prepared (making them non rubbery takes some work)
Then again I'm somewhat proud of my habit of being willing to eat anything at least once, as long as it won't kill me (hence Fugu is iffy). My trip to Japan was amusing as they kept trying to not tell me what it was before I ate it, thinking that I wouldn't if I knew. Usually I identified it anyway
Tripe, Tongue, heart are all good... haven't head brain or testicle yet (I don't think)

An old girlfriend was one generation removed Greek and their family loved to use mint in everything. One night she comes up to me with a plate full of what looks like a great macaroni pasta dish using a white cream sauce and fresh crumbled parmesan. She proceeds to scoop up a big portion and stuff it into my face.

It actually engaged my gag reflex so fast I couldn't even save face by wandering off to spit it out. My body utterly rejected it on an instant and proceeded to eject the offending material very unceremoniously. Yeah... I lost lots of points that night.

Imagine old sweaty socks that have been left in a gym locker for months covered with a sauce comprised of watery mint toothpaste and enough garlic to choke a goat.

To this day mint will sometimes make me gag.

Chicken testicles are smooth on the outside and slightly creamy on the inside. Pretty big too. Fish testicles are creamier.

I guess my food experience is actually pretty limited. I've never been to Asia, where it seems most of the perceived food atrocities come from. One thing I like that seems to gross everyone else is blood sausage. Love that stuff, but most people retch at the thought.

Oh and for all of you that think "rotten" food should never be eaten, remember that all alcohol is rotten foodstuffs.

Nosferatu wrote:

What I *love* chicken hearts...

I've heard people rant and rave about how good they are. You know of anywhere local that serves them? I'd hoped that Fogo De Chao served them, but they didn't :(.

Odd things I've eaten and liked: Most offal; tripe, kidneys, chicken giblets, any liver, warthog, porcupine, shark.

Nowadays I'm something of a protect the shark zealot, so that one embarrasses me a bit.

Odd things I don't get the point of: Snails. They just take like balls of rubber made in the sauce that they are cooked in.

Grossest thing I ever did eat: Roll mops. Just balls of pickled herring with the most god awful texture.

I like to think that I will try anything once, but I don't see myself ever eating walkie talkies. That's chicken heads and feet, boiled and then cooked over the fire. And it is a ridiculous inconsistency, but probably not any land insect, despite my fondness for prawns, which really are the cockroach of the sea.

Dirt wrote:

Chicken testicles are smooth on the outside and slightly creamy on the inside. Pretty big too.

OH MY GOD I'M A CHICKEN

MrDeVil909 wrote:

Grossest thing I ever did eat: Roll mops. Just balls of pickled herring with the most god awful texture.

PISTOLS AT DAWN, SIR!

DanyBoy wrote:

Tripe, stewed cow stomach, is the grossest thing I've ever eaten. The flavor wasn't bad, since it was heavily spiced, but the texture and the chewiness really got to me. My friend who tried it with me literally took one bite and turned green.
IMAGE(http://www.foodmall.org/images/r_tripe.jpg)

I guess you have to grow up with it to acquire the taste, but that sh*t's awesome.

As for myself, I present Balut.

After I took a small bite, (I had no idea what it was at the time) I immediately spat it back out. The friend who was with me (and persuaded me to try it) couldn't stop laughing. He said the screwed up face I made was priceless.

Indeed, sir. Indeed.

Edit: Changed link to work

ELewis17 wrote:
Nosferatu wrote:

What I *love* chicken hearts...

I've heard people rant and rave about how good they are. You know of anywhere local that serves them? I'd hoped that Fogo De Chao served them, but they didn't :(.

I usually make my own, they are in the grocery stores, just you have to find out what days they go out... Obviously there is a lot more chicken meat that is non heart than heart.

LightBender wrote:

To this day mint will sometimes make me gag.

I once drank a swallow of pure undiluted mint extract. It was pretty horrific.

Marsman wrote:

Most odd/different/disgusting thing I ever ate? Her name was Nina and ....

I jest!

I really hate Brussels Sprouts. They taste sour and nasty to me. Maybe if I put enough Velveeta on them, I could choke them down.

I'm with Marsman on the Brussel Sprouts. Things are nasty, I don't care what you do with them. My wife has an awesome recipe using butter, garlic, shallots and bacon, and the brussel sprouts ruin everything else in the dish. It's like a crime against bacon to me.

Oh, and since there's a goodly contingent of 'grossest thing I ate that I like', I'll toss kimchee out there. Love the stuff, especially cucumber and daikon.

This thread informs me that I've never eaten anything weird. If it sounds like it's bad, or looks bad, I'm not touching it.

Given that, weirdest thing I've ever eaten was frog legs. But those taste just like chicken. So does snapping turtle, if anyone's interested. Neither of those is that weird. In fact both seem downright everyday average compared to some of the stuff mentioned in here so far.

Worst thing I've ever seen someone eat in person was Chitterlings, or chit'lins as people tend to call them. Pig intestines. Horrible. HORRIBLE. Couldn't even standing looking at that woman while she ate that crap. It was in our lunch room at an old job and she sat at my friggin table. It smelled bad and looked worse. I ended up throwing away my food and just going back to work early.

*and an edit to third the notion that Brussel sprouts are friggin horrible. Seriously, those things are nasty. The only thing I find to be worse is Asparagus. Stuff activates my gag reflex pretty much every time.

Put me down for the brussels sprout hate, as well. Though I do have to say, AnimeJ's wife's recipe sounds potentially kind of good. The grossest thing I ever ate I think would be tuna belly sushi though. I love sushi and sashimi both, but for some reason tuna belly in particular just grosses me out so hard I can't handle it. I think it's the fattiness of it. Awful stuff. Beyond that I usually like weird food; BBQ chicken hearts and beef feet wrapped in bacon are both good, and I had this great mexican dish last weekend that was basically a bunch of burrito filling in a bowl with beef tongue. Korean style squid was really nice too, cooked in a spicy red sauce with pasta and veggies. There's not much I wouldn't try once, though I think I would draw the line at live stuff.

I always wondered why some people have such a vehement hatred of certain veggies, but it seems there may be a genetic component:

There may be more to a dislike of veggies than being picky. Recent research has uncovered a group of people called supertasters who are genetically sensitive to bitterness. Like color-seeing people in a color-blind

Until the late 1970s, taste researchers grouped people as "tasters" or "nontasters," depending on their ability to taste a chemical called phenylthiocarbamide, a crystalline compound, C6H5NHCSNH2, that tastes intensely bitter to people with a specific dominant gene and is used to test for the presence of the gene. Then Linda Bartoshuk, Ph.D., a taste researcher at the Yale University School of Medicine, began to test people for sensitivity to a similar chemical, called 6-n-propylthiouracil. Her research revealed a subset of tasters who were particularly sensitive to the bitter flavor. She dubbed such people "supertasters." About 25 percent of the population are supertasters, 25 percent are nontasters, and the rest regular tasters. Almost two thirds of supertasters are women, and Asians and African-Americans tend to be more sensitive than Caucasians.

Raw horse flesh, given to me by some Taiwanese friends who didn't tell me what it was until after I'd tried it. Wasn't awful, but had little taste. Meat just needs to be cooked to be palatable, however raw I like my steaks.

Paleocon wrote:

What has been tasted cannot be untasted.

I have traveled through Southeast Asia. What I can speak about will haunt your nightmares.

So you too had the meat on a stick in Korea right outside the gate at 0300. You never asked where it came from because honestly you did not want to know, but after a night of drinking it was damn good.

I too am well traveled in SEA as well as SWA. But what takes the cake for me is Balut. My stomach still does a flip whenever I think of it. I thought I was so badass when my team was laid over in the Philippines and the buddies and I went out on the town and I tried it. The taste was fine because it was in this red pepper sauce broth that burned the hell out of my taste buds, but the squishy/rubbery texture really did me in.

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