Food writer Stefan Gates is on a mission.
Armed with a strong stomach, and equal nerve, he has travelled to
China, Afghanistan and South Korea in search of the ultimate edible
challenge.
Will he relish his scorpion supper or cast aside his slippery sea
slugs?
When I saw this on the menu in a Beijing restaurant, I had to try
it.
Never in my life did I imagine that I would eat a braised camel
hump.
It had been sliced, slowly braised, then battered and deep-fried. I
have peeled the batter off this one.
Its taste and texture is disarmingly similar to Spam.
I stumbled across these extraordinary carp float bladders in a
market outside Beijing.
They are not a delicacy themselves, but are attached to the roe and
the bladders fill with gas as soon as they are pulled from the
fish.
The Chinese eat a lot of carp and they are often still alive when
sold in supermarkets.
Yup...scorpions. They were skewered alive in front of me in China,
then dropped in boiling oil, where they cook almost
instantly.
Very crunchy on the outside, yet smooth in the middle and they
smell of the rather elderly oil they were cooked in.
This oil also masks any scorpion flavour (if, indeed they have any
flavour).
Sea slugs always used to be my culinary nemesis, but when I found
them in a market in Seoul I thought I would tackle my phobia.
I took them to a bring-your-own restaurant upstairs. They chopped
up the slug, still alive, into pieces that you dip into red pepper
sauce... still wriggling a bit.
They taste of fresh oysters clean and salty. The texture is very
interesting: crunchy and chewy, like eating raw cartilage I should
imagine.
Heaven knows, I have eaten a lot of unusual things, but I found
these little fellas terrifying.
They are silkworm larvae, and along with the sea slug, they used to
be the food I was always most terrified of; so I felt duty-bound to
try them.
Scorpion, eyeballs and yak's penis are a mere bagatelle in
comparison. The texture is crunchy, oily and yet soft on the
inside. Somehow they tasted of shrimp.
If I never eat them again, it will not be any great hardship.
Dried frogs are extraordinary. Even Yoon Jung, our South Korean
fixer, hated the idea of them.
They are steeped in hot water to make a sort of stew or infusion
and fed to sick children.
There seemed to be some debate about whether they were used as a
cure, or a threat.
Eating testicles is always a transcendental, yet unsettling
experience.
They are fiddly to prepare, removing them from the membrane and
then chopping them into small chunks.
They taste a little musky, and... well... frankly...
testicular.