The “Water Cooler” is a feature on Claycord.com where we ask you a question or provide a topic, and you talk about it.
The “Water Cooler” will be up Monday-Friday at noon.
Today’s question….
QUESTION: What’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever eaten or tasted?
Talk about it….
Liver
Chicken liver. I was in love with the woman who served it. I ate a few but with 1 in my mouth my stomach told me absolutely no more and it would revolt in another came down my thought. Politely as I could I had to spat it into my napkin. And I thought I’d do anything for that woman.
If liver is prepared by frying topped with crispy bacon and with onions, it is delicious. I make it. Has to be calves liver.
I like all foods here except, sheepshead, Dorian and Brussel sprouts.
Rumaki is actually pretty good.
If brussels sprouts are prepared by parboiling, then sautéing in olive oil until a crust forms, and finished with a sprinkling of balsamic vinegar and Parmesan, they’re delicious. I make them. See how that works?
Truffles. Oh, man. Horrible. I was looking forward to them, thought maybe they would be like sauteed mushrooms. It was unbelievable bad.
Parmesan cheese performs miracles on Brussels sprouts.
They used to have some interesting items in supermarkets when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s that they must be doing other things with nowadays. Like, where have all the calf’s brains gone, long time passing? Liver was said to be very nutritious and so my mother wanted to feed it to me, either that or she had a fair sized sadistic streak, I never figured that out. but they sold chicken livers which were completely different than the beef liver which is the only kind I ever see now. She would never buy that. Chicken livers are very delicate, mild, smooth and creamy. I bet it would make killer liver and onions. I haven’t seen chicken livers in a store for 50 years, and I doubt they’re throwing them away. I wonder what’s happening to all of the chicken livers? Another thing she’d bring home were lamb’s tongues. Cute little lamb’s tongues, sitting on your dinner plate, looking just like what you see when you stick out your own little tongue in the mirror. They were pretty good sliced up and salted, though. Yum.
Most disgusting??! Rancid meat.
Silva, I love chicken livers, you are right they are very tasty. Growing up in the country in Denmark, my mother would get a whole chicken, sometime had to pluck the feather from it, then dissect it, so we ate the livers, the heart, usually fried in butter. I never thought about it, it was something I was use to as far back as I remember. We also ate pigs liver, which I also liked, cooked with a lot of onions. Now as an adult and an animal lover I might have problems with the whole chicken and then eating the heart. We also ate tongue, but as a cold cut, it was sliced and looked kind of like ham, then we put it on dark buttered rye, and garnish it with pickles and shaved fresh horseradish. God this subject is interesting, so much better than politics.
Pumpkin Pie
CHINESE BITTER MELON !!!
Pate
Not a fan of Oysters,…but had a Thanksgiving Stuffing and there was something seriously wrong with those Oysters.
Fried oysters with a good batter with very good tarter sauce and fresh lemon slices! Delicious!
Brussels Sprouts or Bleu Cheese
Love both, especially blue cheese, even as a little girl, I like blue cheese on Danish dark rye bread with a cup of tea.
Agree that the flavor of plain Brussels Sprouts leaves something to be desired, but try roasting those sprouts in the oven, and I think you’ll change your mind. A little olive oil, some salt and pepper, low heat and long roast. Really improves the flavor, and texture.
If you steam brussels sprouts with carrots, then coat them with butter and fresh parsley, it is a nice balance between the slight bitter sprouts and sweet carrots. They are also lots of recipes with brussels sprouts and bacon.
I did not arrive at this place accidentally. I’ve been told it’s genetic, but I don’t care. I have no desire to even try to find the right recipe for Brussels Sprouts. I fully expect to spend the rest of my life without them.
Blue cheese is one of those things that makes me wonder if our ancient ancestors had tastebuds. Or eyes and noses. Somebody looked at it once, smelled it, tasted it, then said, “It’s food!”
I can’t imagine how that could happen. The smell and appearance make my soul shrivel, and the taste makes it die.
You should try smoked Brussel sprouts at least once.
Brussels sprouts cut in half, roasted with olive oil. Precooked bacon bits, sprinkle with toasted pine nuts when ready to serve, then do a light drizzle with balsamic glaze or fresh shredded parm on top or both. Delish! Our Thanksgiving/Christmas side dish.
You all can post all the brussel sprouts recipes you want, I’m still not eating those nasty things! Bleu cheese is another story, I’ve never had one I didn’t like.
@Cowellian, don’t you just love it when people tell you that if you’ll just prepare something a certain way, you’ll like it? I’ve never understood that mindset in people. I think you’re right about the genetics element. I know an individual who has been told that genetics is the reason cilantro tastes like dish soap to her.
Mistakenly took a bite of an anchovy that was tucked away in my Caesar salad and it ruined my whole day.
It’s a toss up between Brussles sprouts and cauliflower. Yuck, and YUCK!!!!
I tried pickled pigs feet once, another yuck.
Add sweetbreads to the mix, a bigger yuck.
Then there’s tripe, nasty!
And headcheese, yuck and nasty!
My parent use to eat pig feet, basically the idea in the Europe in the forties and fifties nothing should go to waste. I never ate pigs feet, sometime the were used to cook cabbage, slow process that makes the cabbage very tender and tasty, would eat the cabbage not the feet.
Dried seaweed.
I love dried seaweed!
Durian. My face puckers at the memory.
My boss gave me some when she vacationed in Vietnam.
coworker and I had a bite and promptly gave it back. The fruit has an ok taste but the smell is terrible like a fart. Boss said they are banned on passenger busses and trains because of the smell.
I love cheese – all cheese.
With the exception of one – Mizithra.
I’ve no idea why I like lots of different cheeses (strong, mild, in-between) but not that one.
Limburger cheese tops them all
Isn’t that odd! And it sounds innocuous. I must try it. Mizithra and Limburger.
I lived in Iceland with a couple of girl friends in the mid sixties, we went there because we had met 2 Icelandic girls in Denmark. The night before we were to leave my one girl friend wanted to prepare a Icelandic national dish. It happened to be a sheep head, they cooked underground by the hot springs, and then put the whole head on the table, it is all black. Well, since my girl friends and I were brought up to be polite we ate what we could, and complimented the cook. Unfortunately, when I moved to the US, I would take Icelandic air lines from New York to Copenhagen and coming back to the states I made a 3 day stop in Reykjavik to visit my girl friend, and lo and behold she decided to “treat me again” to the sheep head. Ugh, and since I had already said I liked it I had to keep up the charade. Sometimes honesty is the best policy.
Oh how
Oh how FUNNY, Hanne!! It sounds like a good time cooking it by the hot springs and all, but all black, eh? I wonder if it tasted good though.. great story.
Wood fired anchovies.. they smelled great but made me vomit…Rather embarrassing while sitting at a beachside restaurant in Spain.
Disgusting to whom? I’ve eaten balut numerous times but I don’t find it disgusting while others surely do. I’ve had fried cricket which I did not like but was not disgusted by it. Eaten squirrel, racoons, snapping turtle, bear, etc. Tongue, liver, brains, etc. Durian tastes good but the smell is something else.
I really don’t know the answer to this question.
Natto. Fermented soy beans.
Oh, yeah. That is definitely disgusting in texture. Had it. Done that.
Stinky Tofu in Taiwan…ewwww
Raw sweet onion sandwiches. My parents loved them and I couldn’t stand them. I don’t mind cooked onions however.
Homemade wine in Chignik Alaska. One of the locals dug up a garbage bag that was hidden in the ground under a bush and scooped out the vile concoction for our enjoyment. It was made with some kind of fermented rotten fruit. One sip was all it took for an hour of projectile vomiting. I feel bad for the locals that live in dry villages and have to resort to drinking this stuff.
Three things come to mind and none were food.
First of all, I really despise olives. I can tolerate them on a pizza, but that’s about it. When I was around 10 or so, I was dying of thirst. I opened the fridge and saw a large tumbler of Coke. I took a huge swig and then realized that Dad had opened a can of olives and poured the left overs and the juice into the glass. Blech!
When I was 5, I decided to try a new tube of toothpaste that showed up in the bathroom drawer. Turns out it was Noxema shaving cream. Yuck!
When I was in the Army, I had an upcoming room inspection. I spent all day cleaning my barracks room. I was also drinking long-necked Budweiser and smoking Newports. I was using a half-empty as an ashtray and grabbed the wrong bottle for a drink. The taste was gross but what alerted me first that I drank out of the wrong bottle was the mouthful of stale beer and cigarette butts. I ended up spitting it out without thinking and had to wax and buff my floor all over again. Maybe that’s why the drill sgts are always preaching “Attention to detail”. Learned a lesson.
At Sun Valley Mall there was a cheese shop downstairs near the food court. A clerk was offering cheese samples and I selected Limburger, not knowing what was in store. I couldn’t get it past my nose, it smelled like a dead cat.
Swiss Colony? Hickory Farms?
Hickory Farms! Thanks for the memory (sort of).
I’d actually like to try Limburger if I knew it was fresh. There is only one manufacturer left in the U.S. and that is a small place in Wisconsin. I picked up some German stuff once but I am convinced it was WAY past expiry. It just looked rotten. I know it is supposed to stink but I don’t think it is supposed to look rotten, too.
Mr. Nombre,
if the cheese has an ammonia smell, its bad. otherwise try it
I worked at Hicky Farts for two Christmas school breaks. Got to feed Greg Kihn cheese samples.
The reason that Limburger smells so bad is because the bacteria used to make it is the same bacteria that causes B.O. Can’t really understand who decided that would be a good idea.
If anyone is of Norwegian descent you might be familiar with lutefisk. Never ate it, it is famous for it’s offensive smell. It is dried cod soaked for days in water and lye and then cooked. Ugh.
Oh, yeah. I’ve eaten lutefisk, too … more than once. I think it depends who cooks it. Not bad but unusual texture.
I’m Swedish, not Norwegian, but I was still subjected to lutefisk as a kid. Pretty bad, but I’m sure I’ve tasted worse.
One year, back when we lived in Claycord, our church had a Scandinavian Christmas dinner. So of course, I tried the lutefisk. I didn’t have a problem with it, but I’ve never felt the need to find more of it.
When my Aunt came to visit from Minnesota, she would cook lutefisk and I would have to go out to eat because I couldn’t stand the smell of it.
Cottage cheese…I just can’t get it passed my nose…
Okra …. it tastes like phlegm and has the same consistency.
Uncle say’s Windex…. he suggests you don’t drink beer and refill a spray bottle with Windex at the same time… especially if you’re being distracted by talking with a pretty girl. He could not get the Windex taste out of his mouth for 3 days, but thanks goodness he didn’t swallow any of it.
Okra is excellent fried.
Cilantro. The first time I ever had it was in a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown when I was ten or eleven. I spat out some soup, thinking it had gone rancid. A beautiful chicken broth spoiled by mildew.
My mom said, “You don’t like cilantro either?” She pointed out an innocuous looking stem and leaves.
To this day, I can’t imagine that something so innocent and green can taste worse than the oldest and moldiest of cheeses. When it’s chopped, it smells like two day old summer roadkill. Yuck.
Hey don’t knock two day old road kill.
Some of it is kind of tasty!
I’d take roadkill over cilantro any day 😉
escargot……..yuck!
Tried escargot once, it was like a bland and chewy marble, overpowered by the garlic butter. The french bread had more flavor.
Pickled herring from Norway, right after a beautiful blond girl was eating it in front of us like nothing. Definitely an acquired taste!
Another thing I love pickled herring, I think the Norwegian and Danish pickled herring taste the same. Ikea’s has the real thing, eat it on buttered dark rye bread, and wash it down with a shot or two of Aquavit, a national drink that I don’t like and rarely drink.
Hanne,
I agree, pickled herring is great stuff. I once worked in a cabinet factory in MN. The owner treated the workers to a pail of pickled herring as a Christmas treat one year.
Very delicious!
Even the most tiny bit of liver is not going to make it past my gag reflex!
Also, I do enjoy many kinds of sushi. But if it happens to be wrapped with one particular type of kelp….. see liver above!
It’s embarrassing to nibble s bit from the side of the sushi, and then just have to offer the rest to a friend. (Fortunately, I have a lot of them who are good sports that way!)
Booooooooo! Bad joke….doesn’t count!
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Even the most tiny bit of liver is not going to make it past my gag reflex!
Also, I do enjoy many kinds of sushi. But if it happens to be wrapped with one particular type of kelp….. see liver above!
It’s embarrassing to nibble s bit from the side of the sushi, and then just have to offer the rest to a friend. (Fortunately, I have a lot of them who are good sports that way!)
Is it any better this time? Good things come to those who await.
Vegan “beef” jerky. Yuck!
Lutefisk isn’t just Norwegian. The old Swedes in my family used to insist on serving it at Christmas. It took a lot of glog to remove the aftertaste!
I have tried some strange things, including:
air-dried pig fat (Ukraine)
Jellyfish (Japanese restaurant)
Horsemeat (Europe)
This is cheating because they’re supposed to be gross, but some of those Jelly Belly “Bamboozled” jelly beans are just…. No. “Dog food” flavor in particular.
Most definitely lamb!
It was the broken, lacquered Plaster-of-Paris macrame bead I accidentally ate after it fell into my box of Vanilla Wafers during one of the impending PGE power shutoffs last year. It looked just like a broken piece of Vanilla Wafer. By the time I figured out it wasn’t a Vanilla Wafer, it was too late.
When I was a very young child my Grandfather tried to get Limburger cheese in my mouth. My father was an aficionado of every smelly cheese in the world. He would travel to the four corners of what ever area we lived in to find it. Lunch on Saturday when he was home was a house clearer. He had one cheese in a mason jar that he kept on top of fence post for a week. At the end of the week the cheese had grown and on Saturday he would eat some of it and put the rest of it back on the fence post. He only had to buy that one once and it never ran out. He once made a mistake and put some really bad smelling cheese in the refrigerator. We had to throw everything out that was in the refrigerator. He lived to be 97.For eighty years I have never eaten cheese of any kind. Ever.
Ha Ha, I can relate, my Dad loved a special aged cheese, I think it was a Port Salut, which I learned to like. My mother would make him wrap in in a wet cloth and put in a heavy plastic bag, and we would hang it outside the window of the pantry. It was only put on the table at the end of the meal and after my Dad and I had a few slices, it was quickly removed and hung out the window.
Jelled gifilte fish and caviar.
Aquavit would work better than glogg, usually glogg is drunk with cookies and pastries.
Agree about the first one, but love caviar, put it on top of deviled eggs and you have a delicacy. Of course to each their own. I find this topic interesting. Quite a few items that people don’t like I grew up with and loved as far back as I can remember. Others not so much. In Denmark we had brown gravy almost every evening meal, I had a grandmother that served lumpy gravy, it probably tasted about the same as my mothers (it was her mother), but I could not get past the lumps.
I picked up a jar of Manischewitz gefilte fish on sale after Passover (not the jellied variety). I still haven’t opened it but thought I’d like to try some for the first time. In reality, the meat is supposed to be deboned and stuffed back in the skin of the fish and cooked, as I understand. I’m figuring it must be like some kind of fish cake in a jar. I like fish balls and cake in Vietnamese soup and have tried fish wieners so how bad can it be? Right?
Small box of raisins. After I finished all the raisins, I discovered live maggots crawling in the empty box!
Some of you folks are real lightweights. I’ll try anything that other people eat, and I’m practically guaranteed to see how they may have developed a taste for it. There’s only been one thing that as an adult I’ve tried and couldn’t bring myself to swallow it. Sea cucumber. It was an ingredient in a seafood soup a member of our dinner party seated to my left ordered at the Yangtze River restaurant in Berkeley one night. He offered me a good sized cube shaped morsel of it on his soup spoon to try. It looked very odd, a little ugly even, but I’d understood for a long time by then that doesn’t have a connection with a food’s overall enjoyability. So I took it into my mouth, and the texture was even worse than I was expecting. It felt like an oily square blob of warm slippery fat. But I also knew that texture didn’t make or break a food item either. It looked bad and the texture was gross, so it must taste pretty damn good now, right? Why else would anyone capture it on the seafloor and sell it to someone to prepare, and put it in a soup at a fine restaurant? It had to taste pretty wonderful now, didn’t it!! So then the flavor hits me. STRIKE THREE!!! i freeze, my mouth stops moving, and I contemplate what T’m going to do with the thing. My kind and generous friend says “It’s okay. Go ahead, spit it out.” and into my white cloth napkin at the fancy restaurant dinner table the ugly weird looking barely ruptured square blob went. Luckily the only person who knew anything about it was the one who’d shared it with me. It actually tasted like sometimes the way rotting garbage smells. That was over forty years ago, and sea cucumber is still the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted.
Hm. Again, everything covered here that I’ve tried is so tame, and I’ve tried almost all of it. But I did happen to remember another kind of bad eating experience, though again no swallowing was involved. One moonless night long long ago, some friends and I were soaking in a hot tub after a very long and tiresome day building something, and we called to have a pizza delivered. The pizza came and slices were distributed on paper plates. The glaring outdoor light was turned off as we listened to soft music while relaxing in the tub. I took my first bite of the delicious slice of combo pizza. I placed my plate next to and slightly behind my head on the tub decking, and continued the meditative soak in the hot bubbling water while I enjoyed my mouthful of delicious pizza. I was soon ready for another bite. I reached for my plate, and I found my pizza slice by muscle memory as it was a very dark night. I opened wide and sunk my teeth into the still hot slice of pizza and began to chew, but right away something was wrong. There was something crunchy, and it was not the right kind of crunchy.. something else was weirdly firm, though supple, and.. cold! As I took in the mother of deep breaths that I would need to blow whatever was in my mouth through the gap between the bottom of the fence and the deck, over the property line and on to Kingdom come, I realized what it had been. I could hear a woman screaming and I realized it was me.
Head Cheese – Tasted awful and almost puked!
Starbucks coffee
Horseradish 🥴
You don’t like a creamed horseradish with a good steak? Whenever I cook a steak I combine sour cream, a little mayonnaise with creamed horseradish, you can control how hot you want it. Also an open faced sandwich, dark bread, spread mayo and horseradish, then slices of cold chicken or turkey, then the mayo combo again and pickled beets on top of it all. My Dad who was a Gardner grew horseradish and we always added it to gravy whenever we had beef. It is used a lot in Scandinavia.
I don’t remember if it was Vegimite or Marmite (leaning towards Marmite), but it was VILE!!!!!!!!! Now Milo from New Zealand? That was amazing. lol
They taste almost exactly the same– like a bullion cube. Salty and pungent and awful 😉
Marmite if I remember correctly is a liquid seasoning, you are suppose to just add a few drops to whatever your are cooking like gravy etc
They’re both yeast spreads usually used on toast. They’re a thick paste. Vegemite looks like the hardened stuff you get on an opened soy sauce bottle. I had marmite in college. I think it was a little more spreadable, maybe a bit milder in flavor than vegemite. A milder shade of awful.
Had to Google for the stew thing– marmite might actually be edible that way.
Boiled peanuts, which they sell at roadside stands in peoples front yards in the south. They we’re so disgusting. I tried to be polite to my aunts and cousin, when I was visiting, My mistake because my cousin packed them for me to take with me to a my next business stop in Dallas. When I got to hotel and unpacked found them and surprise they were already moldy. I happily discarded them.
1) tequila
2) girl named Nancy
3) tequila
Well played….
Goat cheese is vile! Tastes like dirty gym socks smell.
Hanne Jeppesen: My Dad also ate pigs feet, pickled pigs feet. I always thought it was an Okie thing. Anything wierd I blamed on the Okie side. Salted peanuts in a bottle of coke wierd but actually good.
I think back in the forties and fifties it was eaten in many European countries, I know for sure in France and probably in Germany, I mostly grew up in the fifties, but after the war, nothing was to go to waste, and probably before the war as well, since the depression hit Europe also. I don’t know if anyone it still eating all those weird things anymore, pigs feet, head cheese, liver, blood pudding (which I also loved as a girl)others as well, that is all I remember now.
I love goat cheese, I put it on my salad, or if I make scrambled eggs I add it just at the end, or in an omelet, especially an asparagus omelet. Anyway, this subject has no right or wrong, it all depends on our personal taste and perhaps what we grew up with. I noticed a lot of things people don’t like I do and it is often something I grew up with.
Durian.
The buttered popcorn flavored Jelly Belly bean!!