In Tuban, a village in the East Java  province of Indonesia, earth is used to make “ampo” a creamy snack believed to have medicinal properties.

According to Rasima, the ampo cook of Tuban, there is no real recipe to making this bizarre snack. All she does is look for clean, gravel-free soil, in the village’s rice paddies, pound it into a solid block, using a stick, and scrape rolls out of it,with a bamboo dagger. The rolls of soils are then baked and smoked for an hour. Rasima then takes the earthy snacks to the village market, where she earns about $2, to supplement her family’s income.

Tuban is the only earth-eating village on the planet. There are people, around the world, who enjoy eating sand, or kaolin, but not baked soil. Villagers believe ampo is a natural pain-killer, and that it makes babies’ skin softer, if eaten by their pregnant mothers.

As for the taste of ampo, “it’s nothing special, it feels cold in my stomach” says one of the Tuban locals, who has been eating ampo, ever since she was a child.

via REUTERS

Photos by REUTERS via Daylife

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For over 25 years, California-based candy company HOTLIX has been creating weird sweets like chocolate-dipped-scorpions and bug lollipops. Think of it as a real-life Willy Wonka nightmare.

The first insect candy created by HOTLIX was a tequila-flavored lollipop with a worm inside it. This was back in 1982, but fast-forward to present day and HOTLIX insect sweets have spread worldwide and are more popular than ever. 70-year-old Larry Peterman was the man with the original idea of bug candy,and now he supervises the farm producing the insects needed to make these outrageous sweets.

Larry and his empolyees work hard at keeping the secret of his insect delicacies and so far they’ve stayed one step in front of the competition, despite several copying attempts. One thing they do reveal is the worms are fed things like apple and banana peal, as well as oatmeal.

If you’re wondering about the safety of eating chocolate-covered scorpions, you should know there’s no danger at all. Once dead, scorpions are no longer poisonous and their stinger is cut-off just in case. Bon appetit!

Photos by BARCROFT MEDIA

via Telegraph.co.uk

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A pest in the United States and pretty much everywhere else, Cuitlacoche, or Corn Smut, is considered a delicacy in Mexico.

Cuitlacoche is sold at a higher price than healthy corn and used to make tortillas. The diseases attacks the kernels, turning them into spore-filled tumors that apparently taste way better than healthy corn. The smut-infected corn is picked before it reaches maturity, so the kernels are still moist and taste sweet, savory, woody, and earthy.

After high-profile chefs and government officials tried to convince the American  people to stop regarding Cuitlacoche as a disease and start treating it like food, cans of Cuitlacoche found their way on to store shelves. But people are still reluctant to try it…I wonder why.

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I love a good omelet and I’ve been known to gobble down boiled eggs from tme to time, but Century Eggs? No freaking way!

Known also as preserved egg, hundred-year egg, thousand-year egg or thousand-year-old egg, the Century Egg is a Chinese delicacy used in many traditional dishes. Fresh duck, chicken or quail eggs become Century Eggs after weeks, sometimes months of preservation in a mixture of clay, ash, lime, salt and rice. The process of “cooking” Century Eggs is believed to date back 600 years, when someone apparently found some old eggs preserved in a pool of slaked lime. Upon tasting them, he decided to produce some more, but this time with some added salt.

After the preservation is complete, the hull mixture and egg shell are removed to reveal the now dark-brown egg-white and a dark-green, creamy and pungent yolk.  It’s the alkaline that raises the ph of the egg from 9 to 12 or more and gives it a strong smell of ammonia and sulfur.

Century Eggs are consumed either raw, or as ingredients in other Chinese foods. There are those who associate them with smelly cheese, pungent but really delicious. Sadly there are others (myself included) who just can’t get past the disgusting colors and smell.

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Because puppy, kitty and rat steaks taste so damn good.

During one of my daily internet surfing sessions, I stumbled on one of the weirdest sites I’ve ever seen. It’s called Rat Beef.com and it’s an online rat butchery (doesn’t that sound delightful). Sure, we’ve featured photos of cooked field rats before, but to see them commercialized online struck me as a tad bizarre. RatBeef states their rats are bred and raised in 100% natural conditions and they even offer a few cooking recipes.

While I was browsing the site’s pages, looking for some suiting pics, I found Rat Beef has two sister (to be read siNIster) sites, Puppy Beef and Kitty Beef which sell…well, you can guess. I know these types of meats are very popular in some Asian countries, but to see them sold on websites containing the words puppy and kitty is just ridiculous.

In case you don’t believe this is odd in anyway, at least you know where you can buy your exotic meats from now on.

Is this what they mean by brain food?

The disgusting-looking brain cupcakes you see below were baked by a girl named Pamela, back in August, but I just discovered them today and couldn’t help but share with you guys. Delicious red velvet raspberry cake, cream cheese frosting and chocolate brains, created with moulds, make up some of the weirdest deserts I’ve ever seen.

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Students from a Colombian cooking school presented their unusual “love dessert” at the Gastronomy 2009 culinary show, in Bogota.

The special pudding contains dissolved Viagra, passion-fruit and is garnished with whipped-cream and chocolate. The students, aged between 17 and 23, found a way to safely dissolve the magic blue pill in their dessert and create a new, sweet aphrodisiac. They say their recipe contains detailed instructions on how to dissolve the pill.

Because Viagra is a prescription drug, the Love Dessert can’t yet be sold, but once Colombia’s food and drug institute concludes its analysis of the dessert, you may find it in cafes and restaurants near you. Enjoy and make sure to wear baggy trousers.

Photos by William Fernando Martinez / AP

via IBN Live

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I’m not a big fan of canned foods, not since the whole chicken in a can post, but if you like them, you’re gonna love this.

It turns out they put everything in a can these days, even cheeseburgers. Honk, a brave German dude from the Something Awful forums, decided to try this weird dish and document his experience.

Apparently, all you have to do is boil the damn thing, open the can and stuff your face. Honk tried the cheeseburger in a can and said it had a very bland taste and left him with a bitter aftertaste. It doesn’t look as bad as I imagined a canned cheeseburger would look like, but the bottom bun does look a bit soggy.

Honk says he would eat one of these things again and admits he would appreciate canned cheeseburgers more if he was serving them on top of a mountain. Let’s face it, any kind of cheeseburger is better than dry bread or power bars, even a disgusting burger.

Sweets keep getting weirder and weirder these days. After the bacon-flavored chocolate, I present to you the honey baked ham cupcakes.

Stef, from the Cupcake Project blog, has baked what she says is the world’s first honey baked ham cupcake. Those who tried these weird delicacies said they couldn’t really taste the ham, if anything it just gives the cupcake a nice sweet-salty flavor. In fact, the ham only acts as an edible cupcake wrapping, through which you have to bite your way to the tasty cinnamon cream cheese frosting.

If you want to try these at home, just visit Cupcake Project page and check the recipe.

For some reason I never thought I’d use the word delicacy in the same sentence with words like cricket, caterpillar, frog, grasshopper, but I guess I was wrong. Apparently in Thailand all these are considered delicious and extremely good for the body. Grasshoppers are boiled alive so they keep their physical detail intact, but you shouldn’t eat the head and intestines…charming.

If you’re into this stuff, you might be thrilled to hear you could also try some roaches, beetles, ants, ant eggs and even cooked scorpions.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Photo: Takoradee/Wikimedia Commons

 

I have to say I’m not a big fan of exotic foods, but I’m sure I’d at least try some of them if I didn’t know what they were. But to take a whole bat and dump it in a pot of soup, then dump it in my plate…now that’s just disgusting. Apparently in the islands of Palau this is a delicacy and some tourists, like the lady in the photo, actually have the guts to try it.

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