5 Food Preparation Methods That Will Make You Say ‘I Actually Just Ate’
As a species, we’ve had a good long time to figure out how to cook our food. Millions upon millions of mouths have served as a testing ground for us to narrow down the cooking methods that maybe don’t work. At best, grimaces, and at worst, fatal diarrhea has dictated how we do our dinners.
Yet, even now, in the year 2024, there are still a few foods that there has to be a better way to prepare. I understand that some of these might be in service of tradition or ritual, but still. What's so wrong about a simple stir-fry?
Hakarl
So you want to make Icelandic hakarl. The first thing you have to do is get ahold of a Greenland shark, which weigh, on average, 1,700 pounds. Then, take said shark, haul it to a hole you dug in the sand, dump it in, cover it in rocks and walk away. For six to twelve weeks, while it bathes in the ammonia and uric acid leaking from the corpse. Again, this isn’t a banned method of shark disposal, but part of a recipe.
Once the shark has “fermented” (read: become actively antagonistic to every human sense), you dig it up, and dry it like jerky. To Iceland’s credit, this preparation is at least necessary, since Greenland shark meat is toxic otherwise. Counterpoint: Maybe you’re not supposed to eat it.
Oh, and according to Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay, it tastes horrible.
Century Egg
First off, to the detriment of intellectual interest but probably better for anyone actually being able to prepare and eat one in a single lifetime, a century egg doesn’t take 100 years to make. Also, compared to hakarl, it does have a reputation of at least having a genuinely good and interesting flavor. The problem is, the barriers to entry you have to cross in order to get it in your mouth.
To add the prefix “century” to your egg, bury it in a mixture of quicklime, salt and ash, cover it in rice chaff, and let sit for a measly three months. Pick it out and peel it, and admire an egg where every single part is the completely wrong color, coupled with an overwhelming sulfuric smell. Being that the smell of sulfur is often compared to rotten eggs, I can’t say that’s surprising. The taste itself, though, is compared to strong cheese or just a much richer egg.
Casu Marzu
Despite, on paper, cheese production being kind of icky, most of us have been able to get over that. Even cheeses with visible mold, like Stilton, are happily handed out on oak boards with no warning to nearby diners. If you’ve ever wondered where the line is drawn on how much visible decay most people will forgive on cheese, I’m here to tell you that line physically exists, and it’s casu marzu.
When the progenitors of rot in a cheese are things like bacteria, it’s a little easier to (literally) swallow, since they’re microscopic. Casu marzu is instead chock-full of a bit of decomposition more visible to the naked eyes: maggots. Maggots that are still live and wriggling mid-wheel when the cheese is served.
Balut
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Describing standard grocery eggs as “baby chickens” might be fun, but it’s not scientifically accurate. The eggs we cook and eat are, at least outside of unlucky mistakes, unfertilized. It would be more accurate, and marginally less gross, to describe them as chicken placentas, which is a good thing, since most of us don’t want to accidentally crack a gasping embryo into our frying pan before we’ve even had our coffee.
If you’re eating balut, on the other hand, the fact that there’s a developed bird embryo inside the shell is the whole point. By developed, I’ll elaborate: At this point, the bird embryo likely not only has a couple feathers but a beak too. This embryo is a duck, traditionally, though poultry species is probably not the dealbreaker for most people here.
As if eating a developing almost-duck wasn’t bad enough, it's also fermented for two and a half weeks. To answer your most feared question, yes, it's crunchy.
Snake Blood Wine
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If you want to get all pedantic about whether making wine counts as food preparation, I invite you to type out your thoughts and then immediately delete them and think about how people react to you in casual conversation.
Now that we’ve covered that, onto snake blood wine. A detail here that really begs the question “Why?” is that you start with perfectly good rice wine. Then, you stuff a live snake in there, possibly decapitating or eviscerating it immediately beforehand. Next, you let it sit. Months or years later, if you’re a very different person than myself, you drink it.
