Vsauce!
Kevin here.
A Century Egg is a Chinese preserved egg dish that looks grey and smells like sulfur and
ammonia.
It’s cured anywhere from several weeks to months in a mixture of ash, salt, clay, quicklime
and rice hulls and the ammonia smell is so strong a myth developed that the eggs were
actually soaked in horse urine.
Which they're not.
Over in Japan, Natto is soybeans fermented with Bacilis Subtilis bacteria and it smells
like a combination of pungent cheese and old socks.
The slippery, sticky dish actually has health benefits as a result of containing Pyrazine,
the same compound giving it it’s distinct smell, which is proven to reduce the likelihood
of blood clotting.
Taking a deep breath while eating South Korea’s Hongeo has been likened to licking a urinal.
The uncooked, fermented skate has such a strong odor because the fish has no bladder or kidneys
so uric acid oozes out of its skin.
When fermented for up to 15 days the uric acid turns to ammonia and walking into a room
filled with fermenting skate can burn your eyes and nose down to your lungs.
To top it off it's chewy and hard to swallow.
Stinky Tofu is prepared differently all over China and Taiwan and it’s been purported
to smell like an open sewer.
The malodorous fermented tofu is often sold by open air street vendors rather than inside
restaurants and it's traditionally made with a brine of fermented milk, vegetables and
meat that can take several months.
Its fans say the smellier it is - the better it tastes.
When it comes to cheese Limburger, mostly made in Germany, is notoriously foul-smelling
due to the bacterium used to ferment it, Brevibacterium linens.
Which is also found on human skin and partially responsible for foot odor.
Durians, a fruit native to Southeast Asia have a smell that’s been described as like
road kill wrapped in sweaty socks.
Shaped like a rugby ball covered in spikes, it’s banned on mass transit, airplanes and
hotels due to its odor which can be detected by animals from half a mile away.
And while some absolutely love the taste, calling it the "King Of Fruits" - Chef Andrew
Zimmern compared it to completely rotten, mushy onions.
Lutefisk is a gelatinous fish dish made in some Nordic countries from aged stockfish
or dried whitefish and lye.
It’s often eaten during Christmas in Norway despite being described as tasting like soap
and giving off an odor that would gag a goat.
But Northern Sweden boasts a soured herring considered one of the most putrid smells in
the world.
Surströmming is fermented baltic herring that comes in a can and features pungent smelling
acids like propionic acid, butyric acid and acetic acid.
As well as hydrogen sulphide.
A German food critic once wrote that “the biggest challenge when eating surströmming
is to vomit only after the first bite, as opposed to before.”
It’s even stronger smelling than other fermented seafood like Hákarl from Iceland - which
is rotten shark hung for five months because the meat is actually poisonous when fresh.
Or Kusaya which is Japanese for “stinking fish” - another fermented fish that is dried
in the sun after being soaked in a smelly brine that can be over a hundred years old
and passed down from generation to generation as a family heirloom.
Finally, Kiviak an Inuit food from Greenland involves stuffing hundreds of birds inside
seal skin, sewing it up, sealing it with grease and burying it under a huge flat stone to
keep air content to a minimum.
After seven months it’s dug up and the fermented birds are eaten often at weddings or for birthdays.
So happy birthday!
And as always - thanks for watching.