What's the most unusual critter you've ever had the pleasure to eat?

[INTELBYTES]

Poll question: What's the most unusual critter you've ever had the pleasure to eat?

I've eaten rattlesnake a few times at our local "Taylor Rattlesnake Roundup". It's has an interesting flavor but too many bones.

What the most unusual animal you ever tasted?

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Wild boar in Germany and reindeer in Sweden. Both are delicious.

n/t

[TahitiNut]

26. Wild boar is very tasty, indeed!

:thumbsup:

[7th_Sephiroth]

40. "japaneese pizza"

with squid and mayo, i also saw a baseball game in tokyo hand had some fried squid on a stick

[scottcsmith]

45. Ah, yes, Japanese pizza

I remember the pizza having corn as a topping, squid, and seaweed.

[RebelOne]

2. Fried grasshoppers.

I was told they were nuts until, of course, after eating them, I looked at the jar label.

[INTELBYTES]

27. You could have a buffett of those grasshoppers here in Central Texas.

Do they pack much nutrition?

[RebelOne]

47. Don't know about nutrition benefit, but

if I had known what they were, I sure as hell wouldn't have eaten them.

[Another Bill C.]

3. I think it was dog.

I was working as a technical advisor in an Asian country. I tried to eat in a different restaurant every night. I stopped into one and they couldn't speak English so they sent for an interpreter. He asked if I would like some barbecue meat. I said okay and, after quite some time, they brought me a rack of ribs that would pretty well fit a small dog. There wasn't much meat and it was almost raw. It was too big to be a cat, though. It wasn't very good, either, but they were so nice to me that I ate it for the courtesy. After that I stuck to the more common stuff like eel and squid.

[Feanorcurufinwe]

4. Alligator

[gyopsy]

21. Alligator is good!

I've had some of this and I loved it.

[Philosophy]

33. Tastes like chicken

I've had some.

[Devils Advocate NZ]

5. Hu Hu grubs...

When fried, they have the consistency and flavour of hot peanut butter. When raw (in fact still living) they are similar in flavour, but there is something different about them that can't be described.

The Hu Hu grub is a larvae about as big as an adult thumb. They have a fat white body sort of like a maggot, but with a little black head. They can be found in dead fall trees in New Zealand.

I have been told that the Wichiti Grub in Australia is almost identical, but I have never eaten one.

[slackdude]

6. Bear

It was really yummy, kind of like pork only more tender.

[woofless]

7. Armadillo

and I don't know what in Turkey. Maybe camel.

[INTELBYTES]

12. Was the armadillo served on the "half shell"?

[HalfManHalfBiscuit]

8. Pan fried frogs, shark's fin soup

In a hard-core LA Chinese restaurant. Frogs mostly bone, hardly any meat. I would not eat the duck feet.

I've also eaten possum. Nasty, oily, skanky.

[frylock]

9. i had a friend who shot a rattler on a campout..

we skinned it, marinated it in a bag of salsa, and threw it on the Q.

[Webster Green]

10. Bear...wasn't all that pleasurable though......

Greasy and gamey....

Humboldt County wild boar was the best meat I've ever tasted.

[flamingyouth]

11. Reindeer

It was actually pretty good.

[Zorro]

13. Guinea Pig

It's not an uncommon dish in Ecuador.

Tastes about what you'd imagine a fricasseed rat would taste like.

[Cuban_Liberal]

14. Alligator

I ate 'gator butt' (tail meat) down in Acadia, and it was delicious. :)

[blindpig]

piranha

on a trip to the Peruvian amazon 5 yrs ago. Caught em myself. Gear consisted of a supple branch, some twine & a hook suitable for largemouth. Bait was a bloody chunk of water buffalo. Like bream, sweet & boney. BTW, kids &dogs were swimming in the same creek.
Please don't patronize rattlesnake roundups! They are an environmental nightmare that neither the habitat nor the snake populations can endure.

[INTELBYTES]

16. Haven't seen a shortage of rattlesnakes in Texas yet.

[blindpig]

19. be assured

do you go looking for them? It's taking the "hunters" longer and further afield to stock their slaughters. Rattlers are slow breeding animals and cannot sustain that kind of abuse in the long term. The biggest are the most productive females and the most likely to be killed. Yeah, you'll still see some but not nearly what there used to be & damned few big ones.

[blindpig]

15. dupe

[mobuto]

17. Zebra meat

You either get the reference or you don't. But I haven't actually eaten a zebra.

[chaska]

18. gator, cooter (turtle), squirrel, rabbit, frogs legs, ate a grub worm once

on a dare, dove, quail, duck, deer, wild turkey. I'm Southern. Can ya tell?

[AlecBGreen]

20. squirrel is tasty

but I was running for the toilet before I had even finished. I thought it might be a fluke so I tried some later (different squirrel) and I was on the john before you could say "wheres the TP?"

Ive also had rooster, squid, octopus, fish eyes and probably dog but I couldnt be sure.

edit: I spel lik a too yeer old

[Zookeeper]

22. Chocolate covered caterpillars and baby bees... n/t

On edit: The chocolate covered baby bees were tasty, but the caterpillars tasted like a monkey smells...

[Zorra]

23. Racoon, Porcupine, Rockchuck, Rattlesnake

They all taste like sh*t, but you can eat 'em.

Squirrel is ok if you prepare it right. Have eaten bear, moose, and elk also. Don't care for bear meat but moose and elk are tasty.

I ate the worm from a mescal bottle on a dare when I was in college.

(I'm a vegetarian now)

[sablescort]

24. Had a platter of...

Escargots (snails in French) ...Pretty tasty with toast if I say so.

[m-jean03]

28. Love escargot!

I love those little forks you use to pull them out of their shells...That butter and wine and garlic sauce that you mop up with bread...mmm. (I was an exchange student)

[maveric]

25. I had Turtle soup in Mexico some years ago.

Before I knew how endangered the sea turtles were.

[m-jean03]

29. Tofu.

I have never seen one of these alive, have you? I hear they're nocturnal.

:shrug:

[smirkymonkey]

38. The Japanese restaurant next to

my apartment building is absolutely infested with them!

[Donkeyboy75]

30. SWF

:evilgrin:

[Bride of Cthulhu]

31. Reindeer

it was good.

[asteroid2003QQ47]

32. Porpoise

Urchins are way better and road kill peacock is best.

Road kill grey squirrel's not bad either.

[mobuto]

34. Urchins? Which kind?

Street or sea?

[asteroid2003QQ47]

37. Answer

Known locally as whore's eggs, does that clear it up for you?

[Padraig18]

35. Snails (escargot)

The idea was a bit sickening, prior to actually consuming them. They were quite good, if a bit rubbery, however.:)

[bigwillq]

36. I had swordfish

It was o.k. I usually don't like fish

[smirkymonkey]

39. Goat and conch

in the carribean - both were pretty tasty.

Also escargot, eel, abalone, venison, quail, pheasant, ostrich (like beef) rabbit, and buffalo wings ;)

[HEyHEY]

41. Cougar

[bratcatinok]

42. Crunchy

dried turtle food back when it was made of dessicated dead bug bodies.

[Nay]

43. Buffalo. Was pretty good.

[scottcsmith]

44. Some unknown meat in the Philippines

Purchased from a street vendor in Subic Bay, Republic of the Philippines, when my ship made a port call in 1991. I have no idea what I ate. Chicken? Beef? Monkey? Dog? Soylent Green? Dunno. It tasted like chicken.

[The Lone Liberal]

46. Something in a can

that the army gave me.

[DemoTex]

48. I fear that I might have had Fido passed-off as pork.

In Nha Trang, Vietnam. Like Robin Williams said in Good Morning, Vietnam, "never eat in a restaurant located next to a pound. Arf!"

[NashVegas]

49. Alligator

tastes like chicken .. kinda.

[Triple H]

50. Turkey.

It tasted like chicken.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

51. My Uncle Used To Be The Chef For Safari Club International

at their annual banquets, years ago in Denver. Safari Club International is a group that promotes the hunting of rare and endangered species throughout the world. My uncle said it made him very, very ill because of the smell of cooking these exotic animals and he also found the eating habits of the club members absolutely sickening. He finally quit in disgust, although he did enjoy making the newspapers about these unusual eating events.

The SCI would feature lion, tiger, spider monkey, rhinoceros, babboon, zebra, panther, aardvark, anaconda and a number of very unusual animals that the members would either kill or capture. I still have a copy of my uncle's very strange banquet menu. My uncle mentioned having to kill, skin and prepare spider monkey for the menu. The screams of the monkies were awful and the smell of the flesh cooking reminded him of the intense odor of urine.

Another very sickening thing about Safari Club International is that they promote (or at least used to promote - my uncle was apalled and and sicked by it) the purchase and "canned" hunts of old circus and zoo animals, like elephants, lions, camels, etc. when the homes of these animals no longer want them or can keep them. Even weirder yet is the fact that George W. Bush, when he was Governor of Texas was awarded the "Governor of the Year" trophy by Safari Club International. Texas under Bush was considered the canned hunt capital of the world. His father George H.W. Bush attended the annual banquet and accepted the honor in the name of his son. I wonder if he ate monkey on the menu.

http://www.safariclubfoundation.org/

[Lydia Leftcoast]

52. Raw horsemeat in a mountain inn in Japan

Thin slices of horsemeat were dredged in soy sauce. Because of that, I tasted mostly soy sauce. The dish is called "basashi."

Jellyfish strips in a Kyoto restaurant. Not my favorite.

In China, I had shark fin soup, which actually tasted quite good.

I drew the line at eating deep-friend whole sparrows in Shanghai.

[SheWhoMustBeObeyed]

53. Goat brains, quite by accident I assure you

A friend and I went to a buffet-style Indian-Pakistani restaurant. We went through the line and took scoops of everything whether we knew what it was or not.

One item was particularly chewy and not all that tasty, but it was simmered in a savory sauce so we kept eating it. When the waitress came to refill our water glasses we asked her what it was.

They're goat brains, she said.

What?

Goat brains (a little impatiently, as in "damn Westerners, haven't you ever eaten goat brains before?").

Oh.

I enjoyed the rest of the meal after making sure the brains were not touching anything else on my plate, and resolving not to visualize what they really looked like underneath that thick, dark sauce.

[absyntheNsugar]

54. Iguana

In Costa Rica...unless you count Silkworm Larvae, Waterbeetle Paste or Fried Grasshoppers in Thailand.

[put out]

55. Rattlesnake, gator, rabbit, squirrel, gerbil too, maybe.

Also sweetbreads (Cow's thyroid gland?) Calf brains. Cow tongue. Calf testicles.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

56. An animal that (as far as I know) has no English name

Paca (Agouti paca).



Edit: DU didn't like the original URL for this image.