Photo: Matt RuddThe Sunday Times (UK)
Matt Rudd checks out tarantula, puffer fish and puffin, and asks you to tell us your most adventurous foodie tales
Tell us about your most horrifying or delectable food experiences from around the world for a chance to win a gourmet hamper that includes chocolate-covered giants ants and cricket crisps. Use the comment form at the end of the article to enter your tale
Joe Staton, formerly of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, spent an unhealthily long time studying whether everything really does taste of chicken. He concluded that taste is, in large part, to do with the evolutionary origin of an animal. So, birds all taste like chicken, and so does crocodile, since dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds too. But why do tarantulas taste like chicken? And is fugu worth the risk?
Here are seven of the world’s more exotic delicacies, what they actually taste like – and where you can try, or avoid, them.
TARANTULA, Cambodia
If you’re an arachnophobe, you can get your own back in Cambodia by eating the hairy eight-legged monsters. What do you mean, it doesn’t work like that?
These aren’t incey-wincey house spiders, they’re stuff-of-nightmares tarantulas. The last correspondent we sent to try one described it thus: “The legs are the size and colour of a Cadbury chocolate finger, though if your chocolate finger was as hirsute as this, you’d definitely take it back to the shop. They’re cooked whole, which is particularly repellent – eyes, fangs, the lot. Pulling the legs off without squeezing the pus out of the abdomen is tricky.” Off you all race to Cambodia.
Tastes like: scrawny chicken wings coated in especially sweet plum sauce. With hairs on. There is some debate as to whether you should eat the abdomen. Some gourmets say it’s the sweetest part, with the texture of a soft goat’s eyeball and tasting just like cold duck.
Mmm, I want some: available from kids in the streets of Skuon, as you pass through by car to more notable places. They cost a few pence each – which is less than a penny a leg.
Click here to read the entire article.
Tell us about your most horrifying or delectable food experiences from around the world for a chance to win a gourmet hamper that includes chocolate-covered giants ants and cricket crisps. Use the comment form at the end of the article to enter your tale
Joe Staton, formerly of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, spent an unhealthily long time studying whether everything really does taste of chicken. He concluded that taste is, in large part, to do with the evolutionary origin of an animal. So, birds all taste like chicken, and so does crocodile, since dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds too. But why do tarantulas taste like chicken? And is fugu worth the risk?
Here are seven of the world’s more exotic delicacies, what they actually taste like – and where you can try, or avoid, them.
TARANTULA, Cambodia
If you’re an arachnophobe, you can get your own back in Cambodia by eating the hairy eight-legged monsters. What do you mean, it doesn’t work like that?
These aren’t incey-wincey house spiders, they’re stuff-of-nightmares tarantulas. The last correspondent we sent to try one described it thus: “The legs are the size and colour of a Cadbury chocolate finger, though if your chocolate finger was as hirsute as this, you’d definitely take it back to the shop. They’re cooked whole, which is particularly repellent – eyes, fangs, the lot. Pulling the legs off without squeezing the pus out of the abdomen is tricky.” Off you all race to Cambodia.
Tastes like: scrawny chicken wings coated in especially sweet plum sauce. With hairs on. There is some debate as to whether you should eat the abdomen. Some gourmets say it’s the sweetest part, with the texture of a soft goat’s eyeball and tasting just like cold duck.
Mmm, I want some: available from kids in the streets of Skuon, as you pass through by car to more notable places. They cost a few pence each – which is less than a penny a leg.
Click here to read the entire article.
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