I've eaten many of the dishes on this list, including their #1 (hákarl), but none of the things on this list compare to the worst thing I've ever eaten: mopane worm.
When I bit down into my first mopane worm, the flavor made me realize two things immediately: A) It tastes exactly how it looks, which is like a fried caterpillar, and B) That terrible apple I once ate as a child actually contained a caterpillar, and that is how I knew the flavor. Ugh.
But forget the taste. The real focus of your attention will be on the textures: The chitinous shell reminiscent of finger nail clippings, the spongy "meat", and the gritty intestinal tract filled with fine sand, It's a real roller coaster.
An order of mopane worms is an entire bowl. I ate three of worms before I had to give up, which honestly took everything I had. I still feel a little ill thinking of them today.
Tasteatlas apparently has never heard of ChauDaufu (Stinky Tofu), a common street hawker dish in southern China, notably Hong Kong. This dish involves marinating tofu in, as one cartoon put it long ago, an extract from the unwashed socks of six soccer teams, then deep frying it. The smell is very close to pig manure. It is so potent that a great many apartments have contracts forbidding it from from being brought into the building. It is hard to overstate how bad it smells.
And it tastes incredible with flavors varying from being similar to a pungent blue cheese to a mild and slightly meaty flavor. I’ve found Hunanese tofu to be the mildest despite looking the scariest (it’s completely black tofu), and Taiwanese smells like a literal garbage bag left to ferment in the hot summer sun and the juices burst in your mouth with every bite. Absolutely exquisite.
It’s the cheese of the Sinosphere in taste, variety, and smell. Every town has its own style and there’s always one that tastes delicious even if the others are disgusting.
It's hard to find the real chou doufu in major cities these days. Even the stuff in most night markets is toned down so as not to scare off tourists and piss off the other vendors.
I remember the first time I encountered it was in 2000 outside Shenzhen, China (which was mostly a construction site at the time). I literally thought a sewer main had broken.
I tried this a few years ago at a place in Oakland CA called Spices 3! It was horrid smelling. I didn't know what to expect but I HAD to try "stinky tofu". I gave it the old college try but only ate a few bites. The taste was not bad but I could NOT get over the smell. It was extremely overpowering. I had them take it away at one point.
I've been to spices 3 many a time, tried some interesting dishes, but never went for the stinky tofu. I did try a spicy intestines appetizer. They should warn you it is served cold. The one dish I really want to try is something called "gangster casserole murder style", but it's some giant thing that I think needs to be shared by at least 4 people, and I haven't been able to find people willing to go in with me on it. It's got blood in it.
I would say it smells more like hot garbage than manure. But point taken, how is it missing from the list?! It’s surely more “worse” or unappetizing than most of first 50?
It's not as common in Hong Kong nowadays. Perhaps due to complaints by neighbors (remember this is a super dense city), in recent years it's hard to find stinky toufu, and even if I find any at all, they don't stink as much as they used to.
Some decades ago the stink spread far and wide, multiple blocks at least. It was a great way to advertise when you didn't have internet advertisement. There are probably regional differences as well, the ones I recall having in Taiwan don't stink as much either, probably due to the same reasons.
It's worth a try if you come across them. They actually just taste like normal fried toufu.
I've had this in various places in China and I've never had it smell/taste as bad as how you describe it. The hostess was even advising me against getting it but it was meh.
That stink has been etched into my mind ever since a night ten years ago when I spent an hour waiting for someone at a Shanghai subway station that was within wafting distance of a stinky tofu stand. I still have no idea how that stall owner avoided getting lynched by half the commuters that had to pass through his cloud of putrid miasma.
Erm, what? Stinky tofu is just a fermented tofu. Yes, it has a strong smell, but surely you've had fermented or pickled food before? Like, maybe sauerkraut or kimchi? Does a kimchi pickling jar smell any better? It's not some kind of mythological horror food, it's a common and reasonable dish that many normal people enjoy. I've had it as a cold appetizer and as a deep-fried hot appetizer. It's fine both ways.
Stinky Tofu's smell is so distinct, so awful, and so powerful, it is the subject of numerous scientific studies on that topic alone. Wikipedia notes that "The main volatile compound was indole, which has an intense fecal odor".
I think you're making an argument along the lines that only you are a good judge of correct stinky tofu, and therefore only you can be right. I don't know what to tell you except that I've had it from multiple vendors, and I've seen other people get it there, and no one was gagging, vomiting, or running away from it. It's just a food, no reason to exaggerate.
I didn't say anyone would be gagging, vomiting or running away from it. Your original comment implies that your version is correct instead. I don't see how that's more holier than what I said.
Part of "the worst rated" (emphasis on rated) means the absence of unrated dishes. Ergo, it is the least popular of dishes popular enough to have been rated in the first place.
Except stinky tofu is popular enough in China and Taiwan - at least among some people. It's not really some weird speciality from one smal town that most would never have heard off. Any decent food tourism guide will at least mention it.
And yet, it wasnt rated by this population of people. It's pretty obvious there is some form of significant sampling bias happening here, and that each culture in the world wasn't polled proportionately, or even has the means to travel and try other dishes. This is the worst rated dishes, as rated by this population of voters.
It's hard to take this list seriously. The 99th worst rated dish consists of the following:
Peppers, onions and garlic mixed with a bit of herbs tomato sauce and olive oil.
Then added to a chicken stock to make a soup. Add rice and some meat.
Under what world is that terrible?? It feels like a stable of 20 different cultures around the world. Almost so straightforward it's hard to imagine anyway it can go wrong (other than flat out burning your ingredients).
I'm pretty sure Campbells and Progresso probably both serve a soup of these exact ingredients in a similar ratio.
It's kinda hard to take the rest of this list seriously.
It’s the worst rated dishes, not the absolute worst. (Though the top ten look pretty terrible.) The fish you mention is rated 2.8 out of 5. It looks like users of the site rate foods.
The Gule Ærter (#6, pea soup) looked positively tasty, so I can't imagine what is hidden in it to make it so bad. I'd have no problem with the Vegetable Roll (#7) and would be happy to try the Sour Spicy Fish Curry (#10, Kaeng som). I like anise-flavored candy, so Anis de Flavigny (#5) is fine.
The pizzas (#8, #3) look like gut-bombs, but I'm sure a slice would be ok. I'm not a fan of kidneys, but I once ordered a whole platefull of them in Paris by mistake, (6 lamb's kidneys, I think) and ate almost the whole lot (Devilled Kidneys, #9).
I think I could taste the spider's legs at least once (#4) and I find it hard to believe that the whitefish salad (Indigirka Salad, #2) could be that bad from it's description...
That leaves only Hákarl (#1) as the one I'm genuinely afraid of.
Indeed. 87 is small fried fish, a type of food that is eaten all over the world. We call it whitebait and I believe it's the same in former Commonwealth countries.
The kicker for me was vegetable roll (just a sausage patty) is only a couple spots away from fried tarantulas.
Rated high up there is a dish called "scouse" which sounds like a perfectly unobjectionable stew of meat, potatoes, and vegetables. Nothing fancy, but sounds like it'd be great on a cold wet night.
This is a fun list, but obviously far from objective. Like a lot of online reviews, it seems these are victims to negativity bias - the only people bothering to write reviews are the people who hate this dish.
I am disappointed how few comments were left with the reviews. For some of these dishes I would really like to understand where the hate comes from (grandma always made us eat it vs I'm a tourist and this is weird). Or, conversely, what the appeal is.
Yeah, about 3/4 of them seem like things I'd be willing to try, not on a dare or anything but just because they sound tasty.
Then again, to each his own. I was eating with my brothers once, and the middle brother was saying "You have to try this stuff, it's great. It's Limburger cheese, 6 months past the expiration date". The youngest brother was unimpressed, he said "this tastes just like the Limburger that is only one month past the expiration date that I normally eat." As the boring old brother, I enjoyed it but didn't try to rank it.
Also some of the dishes are factually incorrect (Number 40 is factually incorrect). This almost seems like something a bot put together.
Actually looking at it now, does this website just have articles about dishes, and these are the entries that are lowest rated? Maybe people are just trolling the website or disagreeing with something about the description?
Taste is not neccessarily a reason for popularity. Often a dish is popular because it's cheap, or simple. And this site probably only contains dishes which are popular enough to be put on this site. So there already is a selection bias. This list is just about the worst dishes from the best dishes (of this site).
Can't believe blood and tongue sausage is on this list!! I eat mass quantities of this when I visit my German homeland. There's a lot of good craft meat here in the pacific northwest but blood sausage and actual Weisswurst is still hard to find.
Offal-based dishes seem to be frequent on this list. Could it be some US or Anglo-Saxon prejudice against offal? Tongue, liver, tripe, etc are common in many regional European cuisines (not to mention Asian ones).
I've never seen any good writing on the subject but I've always found it curious that the US has sort of an arms length relationship with so many meats and almost complete rejection of offal (some liver and tongue and very rarely kidney or gizzard being the exceptions) as compared to, what seems like, the entire rest of the world.
If you look at old cook books from the US, say before 1950. There were more recipes for more parts of the animal. Offal was more common. Things like Sheeps Head, Intestine, Tongue, etc. were not rare. In the US' case it was really just a case of the United States becoming really wealthy (plus meat industry subsidies making meat cheap) that enough people started opting out of eating those things. 2-3 generations later and its disappeared.
My brother-in-law says that one may not sell hog maws in Oregon. He contrives to get some now and then from Pennsylvania, where he and my wife grew up. Even at farmers markets in central Pennsylvania, though, one must order ahead for them.
Probably go in on a hog with some 4H group. A lot of my coworkers in smalltown/semirural areas will raise pigs. Not sure if it would be a violation to see hog maw (had to google, now I want some) but probably nobody would care.
Wealth and a cultural aversion to the trappings of poverty. Rich people don't need to eat offal. My dad hates the taste of liver because he associates it with the cheap liver and onions he choked down as a kid. Same with tongue.
That's definitely a lot/most of it, particularly with offal, but plenty of countries have gone from poor to rich and kept eating blood sausages and sweet breads and it doesn't explain like why lamb or goat is a specialty meat. Rabbit exists in a weird liminal not quite game not quite specialty.
I quite liked the skyrhákarl in very small doses. When we entered the fish shop we thought they were closed and cleaning the floors, the ammonia scent was so strong.
Eating it, it had a spritz and fizz like PopRocks. Impossible to describe, but it made me want to go back for a few more pieces before I felt ill.
Bizarrely, #5 in rated the absolute worst in the world is a brand of mild and boring French grandpa candy. For US readers, imagine Werther's caramels being voted as one of the most disgusting foods. Wut?
I was surprised too. Those candies taste like some mild Mentos, or large Tic-Tacs. I hardly see how this could be so upsetting as to be #5 in the list, right next to fried spiders.
In fact, most of the list makes so little sense I believe this article might have been automatically generated.
My grandpa actually live 10km from where it's produced, and is a good customer. I attribute the bad rating to the fact that it is a really hard candy, that cannot be munched but has to be sucked.
Down there with fried spider should be something this doesn’t go into at all: the large amount of utterly vile ultra processed “food” available at American supermarkets and fast food restaurants.
Anything that lists nonspecific “meat” as an ingredient sounds at least as horrifying as brains and eyeballs and could in fact be brains and eyeballs. Does “meat” imply mammal or will anything that is motile and that aerobically respirates qualify?
The things they attempt to call “cheese…” The fraction of petroleum called “American cheese” is bad enough but then there are things that come in a tube or a spray can.
Then there’s McDonalds. What do they put in their burgers? Feel sick every time I’ve eaten it. I’ll take the spider legs. At least I know what it is.
Some of the worst sounding dishes taste the best. Take something I tried in Poland. It was called "flaczki", which you can translate into "guts". First they told me to try it. It was the most delicious thing I ever ate! It was soft and tasted somewhat like chicken but had much more flavor. Then they told me what it is - its a cow's stomach cooked for at least 12 hours. Glad I am one of those people that the name or knowing what something is made of is not turning me away from eating it.
Seriously if you ever visit Poland try flaczki, but also try kalabki.
In english we call that tripe. Not very common in US cuisine. Menudo (hominy, tripe, red chile, broth) is probably the most common dish in the US (though it's generally considered mexican food). I think it --and offal dishes in general-- is more common in UK cuisine though.
Because it's presented without any explanation to the rating system, my instinct is that some of them are rated for the traditional "cultural shock" reasons or "more offal than I'm used to" reasons, but some of them seem to be rated low due to "difficult to recreate to an appropriate standard", or just "literally impossible"?
I mean, it could just be "rated by visitors to tasteatlas.com" and it's not weighted by number of votes...
i'm surprised that Balut wasn't number one and that a Canadian layered pizza was in the top 5. obviously "authenticity" played into a lot of the ratings.
I'm Canadian, and I've never heard of pizza cake before. It was a one time thing by a chain restaurant? Doesn't really fit in the same category as lutefisk.
It was apparently a Boston Pizza thing. Not hanging out that much in Canada, I'd never heard of Boston Pizza until recently. But it was obvious immediately that 1) While Boston Pizza seems to be based on Greek style pizza from my native New England, it has drifted enough that it's not really that similar, and 2) People generally find Boston Pizza to be poor based on the reviews.
Boston Pizza is to pizza what Cheesecake Factory is to cheesecake. It's not great pizza or even good pizza that they serve there (in addition to a million other things), but it's fine for what it is.
It's definitely not lutefisk. Silly list, a real demonstration of the limitations of crowdsourced, data generated content.
haven't heard of it either. by the picture i thought it was chicago style deep dish at first and thought that fitting as there is a lot of gatekeeping around it. also that looks a lot more appetizing than Altoona-hotel pizza.
The "Pizza Cake" looks like what someone who heard of deep dish pizza without actually knowing how its made might cook up. Somewhat unorthodox, perhaps even "stupid food" but I don't see why the end result wouldn't be tasty to most people who like pizza. How it made it to #3 is baffling.
The author/raters also seem to have something against anis, wtf.
How the hell does number 73, a pastry with nothing suspect, make it on this list? And rated worse than 87, a fried and dried fish. Not that I don’t like dried and fried fish but fried dough being worse? You’re out of your mind.
Also where is surstromming? It’s a food and it doesn’t even appear on the list…?
I suspect the ratings are partly based on expectations. Eating a duck fetus doesn't mess with someone's expectations nearly as much as getting "vegetable roll" and it's really a hunk of beef.
But I'm not sure how they actually rated these. Does seem silly, but a fun list to see some foods I've never heard of before.
There is a lot of innocent or even bland things on this list.
Chikwanga is #44 on the list. This is just a cassava flour cake, it's a staple food meant to be eaten along with something else, it being bland is kind of the point. Of course if you go to some Congolese restaurant and only order chikwanga you're going to be disappointed, but it's the same as going to a Chinese restaurant and only ordering white rice.
I was expecting a list full of acquired taste dishes or other odd stuff. There's some of that (fried spiders, wtf?!) but most of it just seems like ... normal food? e.g. #7 just seems like a confusingly named beef patty? Why is that #7?
The only thing I can think of is people searching for literal vegetable rolls being annoyed by the irrelevant result and leaving it a 1 star review as an act of petty revenge. I was wondering if the photo wasn't doing it justice so I looked it up and it really does just seem to be a pretty normal sausage. I would also caution against taking this list too seriously: the top review for the fried spiders is a 5 star review that reads "woops forgot to fry them"
enough internet for today everyone! This reminds me of top rapper lists, always wrong, always horrible, always obvious choices...
this is probably chatGPT already being put to work :(
A lot of people hate anise flavor. But I kind of doubt that this specific candy would rate the worst. Part of the problem here is that the items on the list have to be things that are considered specialties worth ranking. Nobody's going to be rating a stale box of Good and Plenty on a list like this, even if it is objectively worse than your French candy.
As gaeng som is the favourite dish of both my wife and most of my southern thai inlaws, I've tried getting used to it about once a year for the past 16 years. Tastes better than it smells, but I still don't like it, only manage a tiny portion to be polite - and bring some fun to the table ;)
Durian, however, tasted ok from day one, and great after a couple of years.
Jackfruit carving is a family affair. You need your entire clan to pitch in to conquer the little demon-fruit. Even after anointing each member you will always end up with sticky hands that will only become clean after the a few weeks. The taste is pretty great though
I hate the smell, always have. Smells like rotten vegetables. But I have grown to like the taste, especially with khai jiaow cha-om (ไข่เจียวชะอม) (acacia shoots fried with egg, a sort of omelette).
i've eaten the turkish version kokorec as street food in istiklal. it was served in bread with a bunch of spices. only tried it one but i thought it was good.
Even Hákarl? I'm a pretty adventurous eater and the worst you'll usually get out of me is, "Meh, not that great". But Hákarl made me want to throw up, literally. The hardest part of trying to eat it was that it was tripping my gag reflex before I even got it in my mouth. The smell of rotting fish is bad enough. But overlaid with a strong ammonia smell, it just pushes it over the top.
https://lodges.safari.co.za/African_Travel_Articles-travel/m...
When I bit down into my first mopane worm, the flavor made me realize two things immediately: A) It tastes exactly how it looks, which is like a fried caterpillar, and B) That terrible apple I once ate as a child actually contained a caterpillar, and that is how I knew the flavor. Ugh.
But forget the taste. The real focus of your attention will be on the textures: The chitinous shell reminiscent of finger nail clippings, the spongy "meat", and the gritty intestinal tract filled with fine sand, It's a real roller coaster.
An order of mopane worms is an entire bowl. I ate three of worms before I had to give up, which honestly took everything I had. I still feel a little ill thinking of them today.