What is the worst food you ever smelled

Here is mine, if you want to call it food. It smells like someone is cooking vomit.

:puke:

When I was young I would throw the full cans away so my siblings wouldn't cook that crap.

see the worst foods I ever ate thread for an explanation.

That and veal are the only food I refuse to try.

They used to have an ethnic food day on my ship. Now and then, it's be chitlins. Stunk to high heaven, and even most of the brothers wouldn't eat 'em.

But I guess technically it's food.

They should leave it buried.

I like that smell:) It must be the German in me.

Until i smelled that nasty stuff! Then I claimed I was Italian.

They smell just like you would expect them to... urine.. :puke:

I don't eat organ meat - it's too nasty. Kidneys, livers...ick...

I don't see how you can cook something that smells that bad and then actually eat it... :puke:

:puke:

Like a bunch of wet pennies. That doesn't pique my appetite.

Good thing my stomach is fairly iron or else dinner would be making a reappearance. :D

Look up Balut on google. They had pictures.

:queasy:

True story from when I lived in the UK and worked in a pub: we had to soak the kidneys for the steak and kidney pie overnight in Draught Bass Ale. Why?

BECAUSE IT CUT DOWN ON THE URINE SMELL.

Unfortunately it didn't eliminate it. ALL the non-British people I worked with (quite a few, BTW) absolutely HATED scrubbing the kidney pot. Several even got the hurls while doing it. :puke:

If I never smell another cooked kidney again, it will be too soon. Bleargh!

That is how I gained my knowledge of the scent of cooking kidneys. I've never tasted one, and if they taste like they smell I never want to.

Smelled like rotten pungent onions with horseredish.

They are banned from the subways and most hotel rooms in Singapore because of the stench. However they're supposed to be delicious if you believe the stories. :P

...on which ones you get. Presumably, the ideal environment for Durian is Thailand, where the 'monthong' durian is highly regarded. Its a very large, spiny thing with the fruit portion in 4 or five sections within. The flesh is off-white, soft and surrounds a central seed. When they're good, its like a sweet, slightly vanilla-ish custard. When its bad, though, its like a mushy, sweet, overripe garlic.

I had always heard that durian was offensive - like old sweat socks - and banned in hotels room, taxis, airports, etc. Naturally, I sought them out while in SE Asia due to its infamy, but was disappointed because the odor wasn't nearly as spectacularly bad as I had been led to believe.

I love it. Wandering around the markets in Bangkok, before I knew what was what, during a certain season I always would smell this horrifying, sickly, sweaty kind of smell. But once I knew what it is, it wasn't so bad.

It's just absolutely delicious, if you get a perfect one. Rumor has it that the Malaysian ones are best, and the Thai ones are a little more variable. The best I ever had was in Singapore. They're also absolutely magnificent if they're cold, but you're in BIG trouble if you put them in the fridge -- double, triple plastic bags and sealed container and the whole house reeks. My very much opposed to durian partner only allows me to have them on the balcony at my place.

The weird thing about durians is that they really have a strange affect on one's body. There's even a few "durian deaths" every year. If you eat a fair bit (2-3 pods of a really good one), you end up with a sore throat for several days. I've had this explained to me by the fact that durians are "heating foods"; unless you combine it with "cooling foods", you end up sort of hot and bothered for a while afterwards. Ideally, you eat durian (king of fruits!) with mangosteen (queen of fruits!) and the two sort of cancel each other out.

The weird thing about durians is that they really have a strange affect on one's body. There's even a few "durian deaths" every year. If you eat a fair bit (2-3 pods of a really good one), you end up with a sore throat for several days. I've had this explained to me by the fact that durians are "heating foods"; unless you combine it with "cooling foods", you end up sort of hot and bothered for a while afterwards. Ideally, you eat durian (king of fruits!) with mangosteen (queen of fruits!) and the two sort of cancel each other out.

I've eaten a fair bit at a time and have never experienced that, nor had I been warned about it. Not to say it isn't true, mind you, just a new one for me.

Ah, mangosteen! I miss those (known as marquissa in Indonesia, I believe). Not to mention starfruit (belimbing) and rambutan (kind of a hairy version of lychee).

Ah, SE Asia! :)

I love all the fruit you can get. I don't eat pineapple anywhere else. I am currently on a serious guava kick, but it's only because the green mangos are out of season. Mangosteens are out of season, too, but they're my favorite.

I did a little research on the heating affects of durian:

Here's a little BBC article on it (I forgot about the danger of combining alcohol with durian!). And here's an article from Bangkok about a durian death last year.

Crazy stuff. Hoorah for fruit!

From the BBC article you posted comes the following excerpt:

Legend has it that this heating property makes the durian an aphrodisiac. A local saying goes, 'When the durians come down the sarongs come off!'.

So now I understand why she loathes durian so much. Its not that it smells or tastes bad after all; its self-preservation!

I always knew she was a sneaky one, that girl. ;)

in VietNam. I remember it had a very pungemnt odor. I didn't know the people who had it so I did not interfere to ask what it was.

My wife likes boiled Kale - the why of that is a long story, so let's just let that statement stand, shall we?

Anyway, there had been numerous occassions when I'd come home and get blasted with this foul, septic-tank blast when I'd open the door.

What's wrong?, I'd ask in dismay. Did the toilet explode, or did someone have an accident earlier?

It was quite a mystery for awhile, but I finally pinned it on the kale. I never knew something supposedly edible could small quite so rank.

That whole reply made me laugh.

Dear God, that's one horrible smell.

That part must be the Slovak in me..lol.

That's ok. :-)

and hell, I'm half Polish. I hate the stuff.

As kids we ate cow liver every Wednesday for supper and right before Chruch. (The pain, the pain) Yep, supper, not dinner. It was fried black on a grill and curled up on the ends. To this day, the scent makes me ill. I once went to Altanta Underground but never made it Underground since someone was cooking up liver and I had to run into a pub and down a cold beer to make me feel better and sooth my squelching stomach.

Durian.

Flame away lol ;)

I never really thought it smelled any different than regular beef. :shrug:

N/T

Kim Chee is the nastiest substance I have ever smelled, and my father's family is Swedish. Let's just say that I have had more than a few encounters with lutefisk, the next mentioned food on this thread...

:scared:

Julie

nt.

Horrible. It will kill the roses on the wallpaper. Urgh. :puke:

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:D

It's Polish (as I am) and it is worse than skunk.

But then, I'm a terrible Pollack.

I don't know if I spelled it correctly. Basically it is a fish sauce which is made by putting fish out in the sun to rot. An oily substance drips as the fish rot. It is collected then served mainly on rice but can be used on other foods as well.

I think I just smelled it by your description.

all my nose hairs have run away screaming!

it stays with you and emits its foul odor through the pores of the skin for days.

BTW, this is commonly served in SE Asia.

I cannot fathom such a thing...

Vietnamese or Thai fish sauce. It smells pretty funky, but just a little of it in a Vietnamese or Thai dish is very good. It adds a little bit of pungency and isn't really fishy or stinky once cooked.

it on your clothes it makes you irresistable to cats.

Fish sauce is as ubiquitous to Vietnamese cuisine as salt is to western cuisine and soy sauce is to Chinese cooking. Here it is seasoned with other ingredients to give a sweet and sour flavor. Feel free to alter the ratio of ingredients in this recipe by replacing the lime juice with lemon juice, or adding a bit of shredded carrot.
INGREDIENTS:

2 garlic cloves
5 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon fish sauce
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 cup warm water
1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon red chili paste, as desired
PREPARATION:

Finely mince the garlic. In a small bowl, combine all the ingredients until the sugar dissolves. Yields about 1 cup.

http://chinesefood.about.com/od/southeastasian/r/vietnamsauce.htm

as I turned 18 in 1974 (just in time as the draft ended) but as my brother was KIA in 1967 I became obsessed with finding out as much as I could about the war and have read/researched as much as possible about it. I also have a Ph.D. in history with military history as one of my principle fields.

One thing I learned was how smell was used to ID people in the jungle. LRRPs and other GIs would eat such food (like fish and nouc mam) in order to smell like the Vietnamese in order to blend in. This was also another way for dogs used by the US to sniff out the VC/NVA. They, on the other hand, having learned to counteract the abilities of the dogs, used American soaps to fool the dogs. However, the Vietnamese could rarely fool the dogs by disguising the odor of explosives.

Please forgive me with my verbal ramblings.

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:hi:

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Those of you who have been there know what I mean

OMG, people actually EAT this? Bleaagh. :puke:

Can't even imagine what it smells like.

that I actually ate one in the Philippines. I did it on a dare for $50; it was kinda crunchy. BTW, this was in the '70s when $50 went much farther than it does today.

I think would hurl.

Thanks for the correct spelling for nuoc mam.

But experiencing it in person is a whole different matter

and had no idea what it was. Not so sure now that it was worth learning. You didn't actually eat one, did you Mr. Scorpio?

She understood

I'm off to google to be sure. If so, never smelled it never want to, I don't even want to imagine what it smells like.


edit: yep, it is. :puke:

I used to go to a Vietnamese bar in downtown Los Angeles years ago named Dragon Lady. Every now and then they would order some unhatched baby ducks and the bar girls would all go wild and start eating them like a fancy dessert. They said it had a sweet nut-like flavor.

But the worst smell I've experienced is some kind of rotten aged eggs that the Chinese eat. I think it's literally rotten eggs and they're very expensive.

i don't consider that food.

but the worst thing I ever smelled was chitlins cooked with onions and vinegar. I actually vomited.

You should have put your vomit in a saucepan and cooked it up. People would have thought you were making Spaghettios.

Okay, I'll admit that this one doesn't smell, per se, its more in the 'hideous texture' category (which merits a thread all its own, but I'm not gonna let that small detail stop me):

So, while travelling in Indonesia in March of 2002, I got to try all kinds of interesting local cuisine. Most of it is quite good but, as you might expect when travelling to faraway places, there are also quite a few 'gotchas' to watch out for, and one of those is Weird-Body-Parts Masquerading-as-Real-and-Actual-Food (to us Westerners, anyway).

Since I speak and read not one whit of Bahasa Indonesian, I was at the mercy of my dining benefactors, who always served to allay my suspicions with a well placed, "Oooh, try this, its really good!"

Well, you know me (okay, actually you don't, but it makes for a good opening line) - in trying to displace the myth that all Americans are oulandish boors while travelling abroad, I tried it all, and even managed to to eke out a polite "its pretty good" for those things which might not normally meet with approval in Western culture.

One of those 'delicious' items that finally pushed me over the edge of polite discourse was fried beef lung, which was foisted on me in Jakarta by a girl who wound up becoming my wife - a breach that was easy to ignore while in the throes of mutual attraction, but which has reared its head in later years as a topic to be used whenever the issue of trust arises ("trust you? Like the time you made me eat fried beef lung? Never again, sister!").

Now, to be fair, Indonesian food is quite delicious, and it encompasses a wide range of flavors, texture and influences that any good cuisine does, but like a lot of Southeast Asian countries, the Phillipines and elsewhere, offal comprises a significantly larger portion of available 'meat' products that you might find in the good ol' US of A.

Needless to say, the Beef Lung was a bit of a shock, because not only does it taste like a disgusting, fried sponge, there is also an inevitable mental blowback that occurs when you learn you are eating food normally reserved for canned cat food in your own country.

While I still advocate adventurousness when dining abroad, one would also do well to heed the shopworn phrase, caveat emptor.

I didn't know anyone ate lungs, but I have eaten heart, so I guess someone could eat a lung. It was deer heart BTW, not human.

or cabbage like.

Asafoetida is a hard resinous gum, grayish-white when fresh, darkening with age to yellow, red and eventually brown. It is sold in blocks or pieces as a gum and more frequently as a fine yellow powder, sometimes crystalline or granulated.

Bouquet: a pungent smell of rotting onions or sulfur. The smell dissipates with cooking.
Flavour: on its own, extremely unpleasant, like concentrated rotten garlic. When cooked, it adds an onion-like flavour.

Used in minute quantities, added directly to cooking liquid, fried in oil, or steeped in water. Asafoetida is used mostly in Indian vegetarian cooking, in which the strong onion-garlic flavour enhances many dishes, especially those of Brahmin and Jain castes where onions and garlic are prohibited. It is used mostly in south and west India, though it does not grow there. It is used in many lentil dishes (often to prevent flatulence), vegetarian soups and pickles. It is also suited to many fish dishes and some pappadums are seasoned with asafoetida.

http://www.theepicentre.com/Spices/asafetid.html

You know the smell has to be foul if people thought it would be bad enough to drive ghosts and demons and supernatural nasties like that away.

rotting fish with cabbage. It also had a sauce made from blood.
It was NASTY!

I can shovel out a barnful of manure and not think anything about it. But fry an eggplant or zucchini in bread crumbs or cracker crumbs on the stove in hot oil and I can't stand it. Queasy feeling just like that.

I love it. I just got hungry thinking about it. But, OK... if you don't like it....you don't like it. It always smelled good to me.:)

about it that's upsetting to my stomach. I can smell cooked cabbage and even Lutefisk and not bat an eye. Maybe it's the way it smells in the hot oil.

:shrug:

Nasty stuff. Cat food would be an improvement.

I feel nauseous even typing the words...

I got some under my fingernails once (I sure wasn't eating it, long story how it got there) and it took over a week for the smell to leave, even with dawn and a nail brush and scrubbing my hands raw.

Alpo stinks :puke:

I hate fish, and the smell of it makes me want to :puke:

I do like spaghettios still.

We use to cook them for our dogs :puke:

loved it when we were growing up in the 50s and 60s. To this day I still won't eat liver.

Never was fond of cottage cheese either. Cottage cheese to me tasted like sour milk!

A recipe called for it. When it was mixed with the other ingredients it produced totally putrid toxic waste. I thought I'd never get rid of that smell. :puke:

But it's basically cabbage rolls. She first boils the cabbage, so the leaves are pliable, then rolls them up with this meat and rice filling, then bakes it, with some kind of tomato sauce on top. The horrible odor of cooked cabbage smells up the house for days. My Polish grandmother was an inspired cook, but the only dish that my mother ever learned how to make was that one.:puke:

That stuff really smells bad. :puke:

with nutmeg. god, i hate nutmeg on anything except desserts. this lasagna had a sweetish smell that was exactly like this projectile vomit i got as a kid after a day snarfing cotton candy and fried things at the amusement park. a different brand of vomit than spaghettios, but still vomit.