Ever wish you could turn rock-hard ice cream from the freezer into soft-serve ice cream without having to wait for it to melt? Well, now you can, thanks to this bizarre-looking utensil from Japan.

Is it a fork? Is it a spoon? Is it a mixer whisking attachment? Well, it’s a little bit of all of those things. This is the アイホイスプーン (Aihoi Spoon), a special tool designed by a soft-serve ice cream lover for the sole purpose of turning hard tub ice cream into velvety-smooth soft-serve as quickly as possible. And while it may look like just a modified fork, after reading the inventor’s description, you’ll be surprised how much thought went into making the Aihoi Spoon.

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A legendary butcher shop in Takasago, Japan allegedly makes Kobe beef croquettes so delicious that people are willing to wait years, even decades just to try them.

Meat & Delicatessen Asahiya, a popular butcher shop in Takasago, Japan’s Hyōgo Prefecture, has been making crispy beef croquettes since it opened, in 1918. You can go right in and order yourself a couple of these fried treats, and you’ll most likely love every bite, but if you’re looking to try the very best croquettes Asahiya has to offer, you’ll have to wait in line. The butcher shop’s famed Kobe beef croquettes are in such high demand that people have to wait years, even decades to receive their order. 

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Of the more than 1,200 varieties of watermelon grown around the world, none is more expensive or more sought-after than the famous Densuke black watermelon.

Grown only on the northern island of Hokkaido, in small quantities that rarely exceed 100 units per year, Densuke is regarded as one of the rarest watermelons in the world. It’s not the type of fruit you expect to find at a market or a grocer. Instead, the few fruits available every year are auctioned off to the highest bidder in highly anticipated events, for hundreds, and even thousands of dollars. The most expensive Densuke watermelon in history was auctioned off in 2019, for a whopping 750,000 Japanese yen ($6,000). Prices have dropped in the last two years, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but the black watermelon remains the most expensive variety in the world, by far.

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The Opuses restaurant at The Royal Park Hotel in Ginza, Tokyo recently got a lot of attention because of an intriguing dessert shaped like pieces of wall plaster.

On the list of least appetizing things in the world, wall plaster ranks pretty highly, so most people wouldn’t call it the most inspired choice for designing a dessert. Still, that’s exactly what the chefs at Opuses, a high-class restaurant in Tokyo, Japan seem to have done. Photos of this dubious-looking dish were recently posted on Twitter by user @mimimimimitsu32 and ended up getting over 200,000 likes, 26,000 retweets and hundreds of comments. The general sentiment was that the dessert looked remarkably like plaster.

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Food technology company Primeval Foods plans to launch an entire menagerie of exotic meats that didn’t actually come from animals, including lion burgers, tiger nuggets or giraffe ham.

As the meat-alternatives market becomes increasingly competitive, food tech companies are coming up with new and ingenious ways of making their products stand out. Primeval Foods, a London-based startup specializing in cellular agriculture, plans to start selling exotic meats cultivated in a laboratory. And we’re not talking expensive and hard-to-come-by beef either, but the types of meat most people never even imagined were edible, like lion or tiger meat.

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Corbezzolo Honey is a unique type of honey famous for tasting nothing like we expect honey to taste. To say that this Sardinian treat is not sweet would be an understatement, because it’s downright bitter.

Italians have been making corbezzolo honey in Sardinia for a very long time. How long, is impossible to say, but there are references to it in the writings of famous ancient figures like Cicero, Virgil and Ovid, who noted the contrasting taste between Sardinian honey and the sweet honey of the Hyblean Mountains. But if you can get past the bitterness, you’ll discover an amber nectar full of nutrients and natural medicine. It’s packed full of vitamins and minerals, has anti-inflamatory properties, and has been used as a sleep inducer and cough sedative for generations.

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Hematogen, or gematogen, is a Soviet-era supplement notorious for containing at least 5 percent black food albumin, a technical term for cow’s blood.

In the Soviet Union, even sweet treats had a practical purpose. In the case of Hematogen, its controversial secret ingredient helped consumers treat anemia, malnutrition, and fatigue. It was consumed by both children and adults, who loved both its sweet vanilla flavor and the effect it had on their health and overall food. Once only sold to the public in pharmacies, Hematogen can now be found in a variety of stores and shops in ex-Soviet countries like Russia and Ukraine, and even as far as the US and Canada. You can even order them on Amazon.

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Creating meat literally out of thin air sounds like technology you’d only expect to see in sci-fi movies, but according to Air Protein, it’s very real and viable.

Air Protein, the startup behind the air-based meat project, was co-founded by Dr. Lisa Dyson, an award-winning research physicist and strategy consultant, with the goal of producing meat alternatives. Such plant-based meat alternatives like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat are all the rage these days and touted as the sustainable future of the meat industry, but Air Protein is taking sustainability to a whole new level with its air-sourced proteins. They are basically relying on a bunch of microbes capable of converting CO2 into amino-acids, with the final product being a protein-based flour that can be used to make a bunch of meatless products.

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China is famous for many weird traditional foods, but the snake and whole scorpion served in Guangdong province is definitely among the most bizarre and downright scary dishes in the Asian country.

Arachnids and insects have been a part of Chinese cuisine long before the West even considered their nutritious value, but even here scorpion soup is not really considered mainstream. In northern China, deep-fried scorpions skewered like grilled meat are very popular as street stall food, but in the south, the arachnids are preferred as the main ingredient of a soup that also contains chunks of snake and pork meats, as well as a mix of spices. Despite the toxic poison of the scorpion, the dish is actually considered a detox dish.

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When it comes to dairy alternatives, we already have a lot of “milks” to choose from, but the latest alternative could prove to be a game-changer due to how available and cheap its main ingredient is.

Potato milk doesn’t sound like the most delicious thing in the world, but then again, neither does oat milk or soy milk and look how popular they turned out to be. Not to mention that this new dairy alternative is apparently “deliciously creamy” and works great for homemade lattes and cappuccinos. Plus, the humble potato uses a lot less land and resources than other plants that are currently used for milk, which makes both the vegetable and the milk more affordable.

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A Japanese restaurant has been getting a lot of attention for its unique Miso ramen dish which comes with a soft serve cone melting in the center of the bowl.

If you were to make a list of ingredients that you think best complement Miso ramen, milk and chocolate soft serve probably wouldn’t be at the top. But that just proves you’re not a gourmet visionary, like the people at Franken, a restaurant in Osaka Japan. On January 4th, Franken started selling its unique sweet-and-sour red miso ramen dish with a soft serve cone melting in it. Apparently, they went through many types of desserts, and the soft serve was just unexpectedly compatible with the ramen dish.

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With only about 2,200 heads of cattle bred specifically for it, of which only a few are harvested every month, olive wagyu is regarded as the rarest type of steak in the world.

The history of olive wagyu is closely tied to that of Shodoshima Island, in Japan’s Kagawa Prefecture. Also known as “Olive Island”, because of its microclimate, which is comparable to that of the Mediterranean, Shodoshima is the native home of Japan’s olive cultivation. It’s also a place where Wagyu cattle have been raised since the 8^th century, mainly as animals of burden, cultivating rice paddies and hauling heavy loads thanks to their ample energy reserves. But until one local farmer came up with a way of incorporating Shodoshima’s main export into the cattle’s diet, Wagyu couldn’t stand the bitter taste of olives.

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Aptly named Cat Poop Brownies, these Halloween treats created by Singaporean cafe Nasty Cookie really look like something you’d only expect to find in a cat’s litter box.

When it comes to disgusting-looking food, we’ve featured a few examples over the years, with notable mentions including milkfish intestines and alien dumplings, but most often than not, the unappetizing look was not by design. In the case of Cat Poop Brownies, however, the bakers at Nasty Cookie tried to make the chocolatey treats as “crappy” as possible. Shaped just like cat poop and placed on a layer of crumble that looks just like litter sand, this brownie dessert looks hard to stomach, to say the least.

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Generally speaking, frosted cookies are among the simplest, most basic desserts you can find, but that description certainly doesn’t apply to the artistic masterpieces created by Japanese food artist Izumi.

Saying that Izumi’s frosted cookies look too good to eat is an understatement. It’s damn near impossible to believe that they are 100% edible, not to mention eating one of them must feel like ruining a timeless masterpiece. The Japanese food artist uses his talent to create incredible three-dimensional cookie decorations by hand and has developed the skill to recreate almost any anime character.  The 3D aspect is also awe-inspiring, with some characters looking ready to jump off of the cookie.

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Ram Kand Mool, a drum-shaped tuber that has been sold as a hearty snack on Indian street corners for at least several decades remains a mystery to scientists, as no one can figure out what plant produces it.

Indian botanists developed an interest in ram kand mool in the 1980s, after trying and failing to find out the origins of the almost paper-thin snacks cut out of giant reddish tubers by street vendors. None of them were willing to reveal the plant that produced it, and those that did gave conflicting answers. Some claimed that it was a root, others that it was the stem of a plant, but most either refused to answer or claimed that they bought the tubers from third parties and genuinely didn’t know the source. Stranger still was the fact that not even science could provide a clear answer to the botanists’ questions.

Ram kand mool is often advertised as the only food source of Lord Ram when he was exiled to forests along with his wife Sita and brother Lakshman, and vendors claim it can cool you down during the summer, quench both hunger and thirst, and provide all sorts of medicinal relief. It is served with all sorts of seasonings, from chili and salt, to lime and sugar. It’s cut and served as very thin slices out of tubers that can reportedly weigh up to 300 kilograms.

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