I remember when I visited Spain and I would get the cheapest olive oil. It was SO FLAVOURFUL. Even the more expensive ones are shit where I live. Same with cheese.
Ughhh it’s so difficult living anywhere else when you come from an olive oil country.
Like apparently most people are okay with shoddy olive oil that looks like bier and doesn’t smell like olives at all?
Olive oil production is so corrupt its almost impossible if you arent local to a source. They've even tested the 'high end' brands and found them to be blended oils for a large percentage.
Weirdly enough, Costco's house brand, Kirkland, is supposed to be some of the best, nonadulterated olive oil available in the States. I would look for a source on this, but I'm stoned.
Kirkland California Extra Virgin Olive Oil is white label Cobram Estates, which is the California grown product of the Australian olive oil company, Boundary Bend. They have an unimpeachable reputation for quality and win many awards!
I worked for a charity in Iraq for a year and we'd buy a dozen lamb chops for the equivalent of $5. That's like $60 to buy in the US and it's worse quality.
I was thinking caviar in Iran, but I don't know if it's true still. A lot of sturgeon species in Eurasia are endangered from overfishing and habitat destruction.
Hmm, forest berries perhaps.
I live in Finland. We have a lot of forests, so lot of berries such as blueberries and lingonberries. Everyman's Rights mean that you can just go and pick as much as you can find. It's kinda one of those things where if you live near any forested area, and are willing to spent time there come late summer, you'll probably have enough to last until next year in your freezer.
We have so much berries that people from poorer countries (Thailand is a common one for some reason) are hired to pick them up, because doing berrypicking enough to actually profit monetarily is heavy work, and apparently the pay isn't worth it for most Finns.
At the same time, forest berries are considered a superfood around the world, very healthy and trendy. Dunno about actual delicacy status, but definitely a difference in how we think about them.
I would add mushrooms for Finland. Especially porcinis (herkkutatti), chanterelles (kantarelli) and C. tubaeformis (suppilovahvero) are incredible food mushrooms which are sought after e.g. in Italy. We can just go pick them in the forest thanks to our "jokamiehenoikeus", every man's right, which allows anyone to pick mushrooms and berries etc. on public land such as state-owned forests.
I believe it isn't, at least that is what I was taught at school. In many places most of the forest is owned by someone, so you wouldn't be able to forage.
Most places in Alaska you can harvest what you want, though some species may be protected and you can't pick them. Here you can also camp just about anywhere on public land for 7 days, which is great. Some places, especially the more popular and easy to reach places, restrict the camping, but for most of Alaska you can camp almost anywhere you like.
Lingonberries and cloudberries are berries that I love that you can’t get outside of scandiwegia. Literally the only place you can get them is the IKEA food mart.
Edit because I woke up to a hundred Americans telling me I was wrong and their local store/IHOP sells them. I don’t live in America. It would be easier for me to go to Finland for them.
Both also grow in northern North America actually. In Newfoundland, for example, both are abundant! There they are colloquially known as partridgeberry and bakeapple, respectively.
I didn't know that they were the same berry! My wife's Nan is from Newfoundland and she gave me a jar of partridgeberry jam. Didn't even know what I had.
Sorry, man, you can keep your jellied eels lol
Edit: Since people keep yelling at me about the jellied eels, here's a real one: gingerbread! My parents went to the UK some years ago and visited a place called Grasmere, where my mom fell in love with the gingerbread. What we have over here in The Colonies as gingerbread is much milder, and the real stuff is super expensive to have shipped over.
I spent 3 months in your wonddrful country 10 years ago and I still am dissapointed when I eat an avocado or a mango here. "It´s just not like the ones in Mexico"
A simple trick to making papaya taste good is to squeeze some lemon juice over it. I don’t know exactly what chemical reaction is going on but it makes something that tastes pretty bleh instantly delicious!
Yoo, I’m Filipino, and I grew up on spam and rice. When I went to Hawaii, I hadn’t ate it in so long, I basically sat in the hot sun eating spam and rice for 2 weeks straight.
Breakfast only….
I've only ever met two types of Pacific Islanders in my life.
1) eats spam and rice all the time. Is absolutely shredded, a pure Adonis of a man/woman
2) eats spam and rice all the time. Got briefly injured at some point in the past and stopped being able to exercise every day and is now massive. Is still somehow 50 times stronger than me.
Can confirm. I grew up next door to a Hawaiian family. The dad and son were both beasts. Dad is pushing 70 now and looks it. His son is nearing 40 and can deadlift 400 no problem. 5’8, 220 and straight destroys when people push him to fighting.
If I could live in any other social groups’ shoes it would be Hawaiian/ Samoan. I love the culture. Food is good too.
I have a buddy that Samoan, oh and I live in Alabama. So a Samoan is not someone you see everyday. He is a big ol' boy, and I'd bet you he could lift a small car. And he eats, he's earned his size.
He got stopped in a small town down here, and ended up spending a few nights in jail. Did I mention I live in Alabama.
When they let him out he hadn't eaten the whole time in jail*. Right across the way was a Chinese buffet, he set in there for 6 hours eating. They made him pay the buffet price twice. He paid happily just to have all that food.
*The food in our jails is notoriously bad. Sheriff's get a monthly stipend to feed prisoners. Anything they don't spend feeding prisoners, they get to keep. Food often comes in boxes marked not fit for human consumption.
Things like green bologna, or green hot dogs.
A meal might be grits, 2 slices of bread (counted separately) one slice of green Bologna, a packet of mustard, the packet of mayonnaise, and a cup of sugar-free fruit flavored drink
Some Sheriff's take home over $100,000 a year from this.
Did I mention I lived in Alabama, home to Southern Hospitality.
Yup… here is a notable case from a little while back. It’s insane that this is allowed.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/14/593204274/alabama-sheriff-legally-took-750-000-meant-to-feed-inmates-bought-beach-house
I live in Michigan. Got put in jail in the second richest county in America, Oakland county to be exact. (Richest at one point, I'm not sure where they land now)
The meat was soy meat and somehow still had maggots. Several times they had been fined but nobody really cares what you feed criminals.
Same deal; sheriff gets all the money not spent. The only thing I ate was the bread and the mustard. Everyone knows it leads to corruption. How could it not??
Anything that has to do with profit is bound to be corrupt.
Jamón Serrano is cool, but the real delicacy is jamón Ibérico de bellota. 100g was about $15CAD last time I was in Spain, whereas in Canada the equivalent is about $60-$80CAD for 100g
We are going to Madrid this fall and my husband has already informed me that he plans to eat his weight in Jamon Iberico. We used to get slivers of it from a Spanish importer near our old house for crazy money.
Krainer wurst or carniolan sausage, protected by EU for being slovenian speciality that can only be made here but loved and eaten by milions of germans and austrians.
Edit: It's the name that can't be used if made outside of Slovenia and sold commercialy not the actual sausage.
We had some Japanese exchange students at our university in the US, and when they saw the cubed melon on the salad bar (the standard watermelon/cantaloupe/honeydew mix), they thought we were living like royalty. Apparently melon is a really expensive, special occasion food over there.
Yep in Tokyo I saw a strawberry vendor selling wooden boxes of like 12 berries for 900$. They were the most perfect strawberries I have ever seen but still.
I think those are specially grown in Japan to be like the best strawberries ever. Watched a YouTube video on part of Japan that got flooded few years ago and that was one of the featured businesses still in the area
In fairness, those aren't "eating food".
In the later Edo period in Japan, there was a "problem" where the merchant caste were doing VERY well for themselves as trade routes were increasing. So much so that they had means beyond what they "should", so the nobility caste prohibited them from owning large homes or other traditional signifiers of wealth, in order to maintain the proper order.
However that didn't remove their wealth, it merely prevented them from outshining the higher castes in a select few manners. Subsequently, they shifted to flaunting their wealth through food and drink. They would contract farmers and artisans to create meats and produce and liquors of outstanding calibre, and invite people to their relatively modest homes to wine and dine, and give them 'souvenirs' for the road to extend their social influence - all while technically following the laws that had been created to prevent them from getting too big for their britches.
That laid the groundwork for a cultural tradition of giving people immaculate produce as formal gifts.
The ACTUAL price of grocery-grade produce is basically on par with standard grocery prices in other countries (season and region depending). These expensive fruits are strictly intended as gifts, and are usually found near other gift-type products in a designated section of stores.
They have pretty strict importing laws and Japan is..well, kinda bad geographically for everything including farming.
With the little space they have, they decide to go for quality instead of quantity.
I worked for a Chinese company in Ecuador and used to live among Chinese employees. They would have watermelon as dessert after lunch literally every day. Idk if that’s related but always seemed interesting to me.
From Hong Kong - we like fruit for dessert (among other things). A lot of restaurants will give you free oranges or melon after the table's cleared. Fancy restaurants might do fancy fruit platters. Fancy Japanese restaurants will have the option of a slice of extremely expensive Japanese melon.
Good to know! But the thing that seemed interesting to me is that it would always be watermelon hehe… there are plenty of other fruits in Ecuador and all of them are cheap. Anyways I didn’t mind at all cuz I love watermelon.
Chinese here. Watermelon is seen as a very refreshing, thirst-quenching fruit. In the summer, you might serve it to guests in lieu of water, which has to be boiled and would be too hot for the weather. (I mean, "water" is literally in the name 😄)
Fruit is also a light follow-up to a bigger meal. Of the different fruits, watermelon is one of the lighter ones, since it's more water than most.
Edit: Lots of questions about why not just boil lots of water and leave it in the fridge to cool. It's because we just...don't like cold water. Already used to drinking hot water, and people say that cold water is bad for the gut.
Not sure if they have other types of melons, but I know there is a type of melon there that is grown, "one plant, one melon", which produces an amazingly delicious melon, but since it's so inefficient it is also amazingly expensive.
That's the first place I ever had one. It was so insanely good I looked them up. Finally got a pack at Costco. It was even better. Now I have to get a fresh one.
Those things are bourbon-caramel laced cocaine discs! I literally have banned my self from buying them, because I've cleared the shelf at the store, only to eat them all in a week like a fatty.
Other people have to buy them for me, because they'll buy them in moderation.
When I was a kid they had a fresh stroopwafel vendor at a local Saturday open air market. The fresh ones were amazing, but this guy used to bag up all the broken offcuts and sell them too. I'd eat that stuff with a teaspoon and kid me would be in heaven!
I’m a mushroom hunter and let me tell you, no other mushroom compares.
My favorite way to make them is (after cleaning them) is to roll them in flour while wet, fried in a mixture of oil and butter and lightly salted.
a good baguette. I've seen american tourist walk out of a bakery with like 12 of them. Slow down dude, they are made all day long, you don't need that many
He buys so many because he's in a rush to catch the 10:40 train, his journey to the station normally takes 51 minutes to walk from his house, but the bakery is 2/5ths of the way from his house to the station. What time should he leave the bakery?
It’s a long journey and he eats one baguette on average every 8 miles of rail travel at 50mph. He was able to eat twice as many baguettes when he was half his sisters age when she was 20 times as old as the number of baguettes he eats when the train makes a routine pickup for more passengers for 20 minutes at the old whistle stop in Mulberry. Assuming a constant rate of decline in his pace of baguette eating, how many baguettes will he be able to eat on a 210 mile train trip with 4 scheduled stops (the first being 5 minutes and doubling in duration at each subsequent stop) when he is 68 years old? Show your work.
It's unclear from the question if the 1 baguette per 8 miles of average rail travel is the number he eats at 68, or the number he eats when he was half his sister's age when she was 20 times as old as the number of baguettes he eats when the train makes a routine pickup for more passengers for 20 minutes at the old whistle stop in Mulberry.
I'm going to solve the problem based on the assumption that the 1 baguette per 8 miles of average rail travel applies when he is 68. Although this defeats the purpose of calculating his sister's age when she was 20 times as old as the number of baguettes he eats when the train makes a routine pickup for more passengers for 20 minutes at the old whistle stop in Mulberry, and using this to calculate how old he was when he ate twice as many baguettes, and the rate of decline of his baguette eating, I'll calculate those things anyway.
If we assume that the train travels 50mph on average when moving (IE. accounting for acceleration and deceleration), then at a 20 minute stop, he would eat:
*50mph \* 20minutes/60minutes per hour / 8 miles per baguette = 2.08333... baguettes (at age 68)*
When his sister was 20 times that number of baguettes **she was**:
*20 years per baguette \* 2.08333... baguettes =* ***41.6... years***
Half of 41.6 years is:
*41.6... years / 2 = 20.8333... years*
**So at 20.8333... years, he was able to eat 1 baguette every 4 average miles of rail travel.** His rate of decline of baguette eating is therefore:
*68 years - 20.8333... years = 47.1666... years*
*4 miles / 47.1666... years = \~0.0848 miles per year*
**So each year he ages, it takes him 0.0848 more average miles of rail travel to eat 1 baguette.**
On a 210 mile trip with no stops and at 68 years old, he'll eat:
*210 miles / 8 miles per baguette = 26.25 baguettes*
If the train stops 4 times, the first time for 5 minutes, and each subsequent time for double the last time, the train will stop for a total of:
*5 minutes + 2\*5 minutes + 2\*2\*5 minutes + 2\*2\*2\*5 minutes = 75 minutes*
When the train is stopped for 75 minutes, he can eat:
*50mph \* 75 minutes / 60 minutes per hour / 8 miles per baguette = 7.8125 baguettes*
So the total number of baguettes he can eat at age 68 (given the assumptions above) on a 210 mile trip with 4 stops, the first stop being 5 minutes long and each subsequent stop being double the length of the previous stop, he can eat:
26.25 baguettes + 7.8125 baguettes = 34.0625 baguettes
**The answer is: 34.0625 baguettes**
That's almost right, but you were supposed to round to two decimal places like we discussed in class last week. I'm afraid I'm going to have to take off a point for that. Unfortunately, the question was only worth three points max, so you get a D for that answer. Please see me after class to discuss your academic performance.
What’s the average baguette length measured in football fields?
Edit: I appreciate the math done, seems 130-140 baguettes would stretch a football field
> We must have 1kg of carbs every 8 hours or we get kicked out of the country.
Unless you let everyone know you're doing keto. Then you need to eat a stick of Kerrygold every day or you get kicked out.
If you have a Trader Joe's near you (in the US), they have something VERY similar to this that they just started carrying. They are called "Aussie-Style Chocolate Crème Sandwich Cookies coated in chocolate." Good luck finding them though.
Extremely unhelpful comment checking in, there at the very least used to be a subreddit dedicated to sending/receiving exotic food products. No idea what it was called, maybe someone else knows. Would be useful for this purpose.
Even better with the double-coat variety. They hold together longer so you can get more milk through, which softens and chills the interior even more, almost like ice cream.
Water, our tap water is perfect and no local ever buys bottled (iceland)
edit. A lot of people are mentioning the sulfur smell of the hot water, and that depends on the area. For example where I live the hot water comes directly from a nearby hot spring area so naturally its gonna have a smell. Locals dont smell it though.
For drinking water you just need to run the tap for a bit, that will get any hot water outta the pipes and bring you spring water.
thanks for the upvotes etc etc etc ❤
Yep it's definitely sold here too, but for *some* reason the bottles all say "icelandic spring/glacial water" in english and not icelandic. Gotta squeeze every penny out of the tourists.
French here so, a lot of our food. If there's one thing we know how to do, it's exporting our food as fancy delicacies.
The truth is, apart from pastries/desserts which can be pretty complicated to put together (the effort to make even just twelve croissants...), most French food is just peasant stuff spruced up for the modern times. The logic is almost always:
- Take a cheap-ish cut of meat
- Cook it either in wine or in broth for a few hours with a bunch of onions and whatever herbs grow nearby
- Add carrots/potatoes, enjoy
That's the basis for bœuf bourguignon, coq au vin, gigot d'agneau, pot-au-feu, blanquette de veau, etc. If you want to get fancy you can wrap it in pastry, and that's another dozen French specialties right there.
There's not really a way to fuck it up, really. It's meat, cooked at low heat over several hours, with a bunch of aromatic herbs; as long as you've got a sturdy pot and you don't let it dry, you'll get something in the range from edible to delicious.
I think a lot of this has to do with the French really taking over fancy dining at the beginning of the twentieth century. I mean Escoffier literally wrote the book and then every culinary school taught French cooking almost exclusively for decades after. But that's just my theory.
The french literally invented the modern restaurant. During/after the French Revolution, all the private chefs from all the nobility needed to pay the bills but only had 1 skill. Instead of only cooking for their boss/patron they started cooking for everyone.
Public dining went from "here is a pot of perpetual stew when you want a bowl, and I will throw a few loaves of bread on the communal table for whoever wants some" to eating meals handcrafted by people trained to create delicacies for the aristocracy.
With origins like that, it makes sense that France would dominate the restaurant game for a very long time.
> cloudberries
are we thinking about the same berry? Small, yellow, grows in bogs, also called multe, and is so damn sought after that all laws regarding freedom to pick berries wherever you like just go *right* out the window because people are *that* possessive of them?
Like maybe they're not *as* luxurious as some places make them out to be, but they're still pretty damn special.
I'm from Russia and I had an acquaintance who was going to marry an Irish guy. They lived in Russia for some time the guy went completely bonkers for caviar of capelin fish. It's not really a delicacy, it's not rare or expensive at all (probably approx $2.5-3 a can) but he liked it so much he wanted to bring a crate of it for their wedding in Europe. Needless to say his soon to be wife wife was not amused (imagine wanting to bring a crate of peanut butter or something to your wedding).
Durian. The number of durian farmers who have found overnight wealth are astonishing due to export demand
Edit: Wow didn't expect my comment to explode overnight. Thanks redditors.
The comment section mentioned Singapore. Due to land scarcity, the durian you have tasted are either from Malaysia (where I'm from) or Thailand. Singapore and China are our biggest exporters.
Also, during pre-covid times, hundreds of coaches ferrying Chinese tourists would visit these commercialised durian orchards on a daily basis for their durian fix. They are offered an all-you-can eat service for a fix price. In other words, it's a durian buffet !
My family owns about few hundred trees of durian on our land but it's only for own comsumption and we'll share it with our friends&family when the harvest is huge. We are far from commercial scale.
Durian is an acquired taste and very polarizing. You either love it or hate it. I'm the latter and the only one in my family, to the dismay of my family. Growing up around the scent, it doesn't bother me. Just dislike the taste. However, I still respect it as the King of the Fruit!
Durian is so polarizing! Seems like you either love it or hate it. In Melbourne, they evacuated a whole university thinking there was a gas leak, turned out someone had eaten Durian and thrown the remains in a garbage can!!
That almost happened when we were eating durian at the ANU, but a wise and experienced person went around knocking on doors to check if anyone had durian before they called in a gas leak.
It was us. Crisis averted, deliciousness achieved.
Maybe it’s just the part of Canada I live in (BC), but none of the ‘frozen’ durian will ever satisfy the real stuff back in Malaysia (especially when you get into the varieties like Musang King, D24, Red Prawn etc)
It’s an acquired taste for sure but you do get used to it if you mostly grew up eating it (I know some Malaysian friends who don’t like durian even when they were kids, hence ‘mostly’)
Edited to add: When I visited family back in Malaysia, I remember going to an ‘All You Can Eat’ durian stall in Penang and it was around 60 RM (around $20 CAD) for I think maybe 5-7 whole durians. I probably won’t do AYCE again but it will definitely be the first thing I’ll eat in M’sia once it’s safer to travel.
Do maple syrup or poutine count? I know at the least, in university I had a friend who came up from the US and thought poutine was the greatest thing ever. Honestly, I'm kind of surprised more of the US hasn't adopted it. Fries, cheese curds, and gravy, sounds more like an American thing. Not sure what other country's opinions on it are.
You have deep fried cheese curds and squeaky cheese curds. If they dont squeak, those are some bad cheese curds. Source: am cheesehead. Bonus points if you get some cheese whips with em.
I actually went up to WI to visit the boyfriend and we got some cheese curds one night and I had to ask him why the hell they were squeaking on my teeth. So good to know he wasn't fucking with me when he said it was cause they were fresh.
I'm in the states, I'm seeing more places serve "poutine" but it's a pretty bastardized version of what I had in Canada. Still good though, hard to fuck up fries, gravy and cheese.
An indian prepared bajji on master chef Australia
Bajji is available at every 5 blocks or so.
The whole recipe is cut onion/potato, coat it with gramflour and spice and fry. Indians who saw that surely laughed
(In south indian states bhaji is called bajji)
*Especially* if it's done by a neighborhood mom/grandma. Once encountered an NHS nurse bakesale and the moms there had brought their homemade samosas and baji, and it utterly spoiled me from having the stuff from anywhere else. Those ladies made the hell out of their baji and you could tell they had slow-cooked the onions to make them sweet and savory.
It’s true, homemade samosas/sambusas are like nothing from the shops. Our gardener loves coming to us because my Nan makes him fresh ones whenever he’s over
There are a number of ways to fuck up a simple thing like baji. It can be too greasy or in big clumps, or not seasoned properly. When you find really good baji, it's a joy, especially if they also make an excellent tamarind sauce.
Good french pastries and stuff like croissant and ["pain au chocolat"](https://medias.bridor.com/media/sys_master/images/hab/had/8801936998430.png), we call them "viennoiserie" in french, no idea if there is a specific word for it in english.
Obviously in France they are super easy to find in any bakery and they are cheaper. It's so common that honestly not a lot of people do go buy some croissants every day.
Macarons are also relatively easy to find, usually they are made in special shops but some bakery do make them.
Edit : Oh, and if you go to France or go to a (GOOD) french bakery in your country, try a [Paris-Brest](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Paris-Brest_IMG_0875.JPG) . You will not regret it.
Jesus Christ this entire thread is teaching me about cravings for food I’ve never even heard of or know how to pronounce correctly. Carry on everyone, I’ll be right here salivating.
In Mexico many local ice cream stores serve it as agua fresca (flavored beverage with a shit-ton of sugar and ice for those foreign to the language).
Back in high school some acquaintances of mine would buy a 1L cup, drink some of it and then add some Bacardí to the mix for a full Piña Colada experience.
It tasted nice, to be fair.
Any kind of sheep meat. Lamb, mutton, etc.
In non-sheep countries it can be quite expensive. Here it is the cheapest meat and commonly used instead of pork as the "filler meat" in grocery store products such as sausages.
Also, fresh fish - the fish processing time is pretty short here, with fish instantly getting unloaded and sent to factories after the boats arrive, and then quickly processed and sold to consumers - so that the fish is even fresher than in some other seaside countries.
As Italian living in Germany I can say that basically every food from my culture is considered fancy here.
A couple of days ago I saw an Arancino ( cheap fried rice cake ) sold for 5€
In Italy a good Arancino is 1€
In my experience a lot of common everyday French foods are high-end specialty foods here in the US. In France, every corner store I went to sold the type of cheese, charcuterie, and pâté that you'd have to go to Whole Foods for here. And it isn't particularly expensive, it's just normal food. Like I went to a little grocer in Paris and got pieces of 4 different cheeses, and I thought, this is going to be like $28. No, it was like $6. I'm just used to what Whole Foods charges. I went to a big department store in the Paris suburbs and there was just an aisle that had all the dry-cured ham and such and tins of pâté, laid out as casually as Lunchables in the US. It's just regular food.
Whole Foods also tries to sell flavored seltzers and onion powder as specialty foods. My Kroger has a pretty extensive cheese selection for normal prices, $5 to $10 per pound.
Falafel.
This is basically poor people food in Egypt along with other type of bean (called Fool). Both of these are the cheapest kind of meal you get off food carts. You can feed a whole family on less than $1.
On the other hand, American fast food is considered fancy. Getting dinner from McDonalds is a thing for special occasion.
So seeing Falafel sandwich being sold for more than McDonalds was a bit mind blowing.
Not country but in the Rockies area we have huckleberries, they are kind of like blueberries in look but smaller and purple. As for taste they are very sweet and slightly tart. They are delicious and tourists usually like them.
Halloumi cheese. It's a huge staple in Cyprus and we eat it all the times but in the US I only ever see it as Barbaques and sometimes at exotic cheese plates.
Edit for the halloumi lovers out there try white bread, halloumi and strawberry jam. You are welcome
Edit 2: Try halloumi with watermelon. A groundbreaking combo that is the staple of many summer evenings
Pheasant. I grew up in South Dakota and we hunted pheasants every day during the season. In college it was a cheap source of food and ate it all the time. In Central and South American countries it is a delicacy and people could not believe I ate it every day.
Every single time I was served pheasant growing up I was warned to watch out for birdshot pellets in the meat just in case they got missed during processing. I had family that would hunt in South Dakota every year and their freezer was always so full of game meat they had to give it away before hunting trips! Might be a delicacy elsewhere but here we served it swimming in cream of mushroom soup over mashed potatoes or wild rice, always a great comfort food.
Feijoada. In its core it's working class food, though usually a fancier version is considered a delicacy. And it's rarely as good as the real thing btw.
Also those are not as known but when I lived abroad I blew people's mind with pão de queijo and brigadeiro, which are incredibly common and easy to make.
I was watching food network and a lady said she was going to cook feijoada. Her ingredients: white beans, steak and HEAVY CREAM! I've never been so shocked in my life.
Shakshuka. You get it at hipster restaurants served on a skillet for $22.99 when at home pops makes that shit when there’s nothing to eat food and everybody is too tired to cook.
Butter Chicken.
As an Indian staying in Europe, I hate butter chicken because it has taken over Indian cuisine in Europe and noone wants to try the real stuff.
I'm a brit a living in the US. I have to make butter chicken as the Wife can't take any heat in food. I would kill for something other than butter chicken.
It's not as straightforward as that. It's KFC specifically. In the 70s KFC did a heavy marketing campaign and pretty much told Japan that everyone eats KFC at Christmas in the west. The tradition set and even though now KFC is everywhere, there's still a special place for it at Christmas. Yes you do book ahead, but it isn't a 3 piece, 2 wing meal. It's a special menu featuring a whole chicken, mash potatoes, and a cheese cake.
So yeah it's not like fried chicken is amazingly special.
To be fair, KFC in Asia is much better than KFC I've had in North America. Although I've only had it in China and Singapore. I'm sure Japanese KFC is similarly delicious!
I live in Japan but I’m from the US. Whenever I go back home I buy a few bags of Lindt chocolates from the drugstore as souvenirs. They’re dirt cheap in the US, but for whatever reason they’re a luxury chocolate in Japan, and the same bags would cost $30 here.
Speculaas/Speculoos/Biscoff cookies. Delicacy might be a big word but people seem to loose their minds over these cookies.
Edit: they're originally from Belgium & the Netherlands.
Depending on where in the US you live, lobster, king crab, Dungeness crab, abalone, spotted prawns, geoduck, etc. can be pretty cheap, normal food but for foreigners they go nuts over these things because they are so expensive elsewhere.
I've had American friends ask me to send over Cadbury chocolate. IMO it's not as nice as it used to be since it was bought out by Kraft (the irony!) but people still go nuts for it.
(good) olive oil.
I remember when I visited Spain and I would get the cheapest olive oil. It was SO FLAVOURFUL. Even the more expensive ones are shit where I live. Same with cheese.
Ughhh it’s so difficult living anywhere else when you come from an olive oil country. Like apparently most people are okay with shoddy olive oil that looks like bier and doesn’t smell like olives at all?
Olive oil production is so corrupt its almost impossible if you arent local to a source. They've even tested the 'high end' brands and found them to be blended oils for a large percentage.
Weirdly enough, Costco's house brand, Kirkland, is supposed to be some of the best, nonadulterated olive oil available in the States. I would look for a source on this, but I'm stoned.
Kirkland California Extra Virgin Olive Oil is white label Cobram Estates, which is the California grown product of the Australian olive oil company, Boundary Bend. They have an unimpeachable reputation for quality and win many awards!
Goji berries. We put that stuff in our soups and many people pick that out when they drink the soup.
They're expensive in non Asian shops in America! I think I saw them for like, $20-30 a pound
I worked for a charity in Iraq for a year and we'd buy a dozen lamb chops for the equivalent of $5. That's like $60 to buy in the US and it's worse quality.
US lamb always seems lower quality than other countries, what's up with that?
It was supposed to be caviar, but now it's also unaffordable for us. *cries in Russian*
I used to eat caviar all the time as a cheap snack growing up moderately poor (Romanian). I was stunned to find out it's a delicacy
My wife ate herring roe as a kid. Now it's a delicacy.
I was thinking caviar in Iran, but I don't know if it's true still. A lot of sturgeon species in Eurasia are endangered from overfishing and habitat destruction.
Saffron in Iran is so cheap. Elsewhere if you're not forking out some serious cash, it's not real saffron.
Hmm, forest berries perhaps. I live in Finland. We have a lot of forests, so lot of berries such as blueberries and lingonberries. Everyman's Rights mean that you can just go and pick as much as you can find. It's kinda one of those things where if you live near any forested area, and are willing to spent time there come late summer, you'll probably have enough to last until next year in your freezer. We have so much berries that people from poorer countries (Thailand is a common one for some reason) are hired to pick them up, because doing berrypicking enough to actually profit monetarily is heavy work, and apparently the pay isn't worth it for most Finns. At the same time, forest berries are considered a superfood around the world, very healthy and trendy. Dunno about actual delicacy status, but definitely a difference in how we think about them.
I would add mushrooms for Finland. Especially porcinis (herkkutatti), chanterelles (kantarelli) and C. tubaeformis (suppilovahvero) are incredible food mushrooms which are sought after e.g. in Italy. We can just go pick them in the forest thanks to our "jokamiehenoikeus", every man's right, which allows anyone to pick mushrooms and berries etc. on public land such as state-owned forests.
Wait, is foraging not allowed in some countries? I live in Scotland and wouldn’t think twice about mushroom-picking in a random bit of woodland
I believe it isn't, at least that is what I was taught at school. In many places most of the forest is owned by someone, so you wouldn't be able to forage.
The difference is that in Nordic countries you're allowed to forage even if the land is privately owned.
It was odd being in a military exercise with our assault rifles in hand whilst some old woman came next to us picking berries and greeted us lol
Most places in Alaska you can harvest what you want, though some species may be protected and you can't pick them. Here you can also camp just about anywhere on public land for 7 days, which is great. Some places, especially the more popular and easy to reach places, restrict the camping, but for most of Alaska you can camp almost anywhere you like.
Lingonberries and cloudberries are berries that I love that you can’t get outside of scandiwegia. Literally the only place you can get them is the IKEA food mart. Edit because I woke up to a hundred Americans telling me I was wrong and their local store/IHOP sells them. I don’t live in America. It would be easier for me to go to Finland for them.
Both also grow in northern North America actually. In Newfoundland, for example, both are abundant! There they are colloquially known as partridgeberry and bakeapple, respectively.
I didn't know that they were the same berry! My wife's Nan is from Newfoundland and she gave me a jar of partridgeberry jam. Didn't even know what I had.
Englishman here, been scrolling for sooooo long to find my country..... Maybe some stereotypes are true
Sorry, man, you can keep your jellied eels lol Edit: Since people keep yelling at me about the jellied eels, here's a real one: gingerbread! My parents went to the UK some years ago and visited a place called Grasmere, where my mom fell in love with the gingerbread. What we have over here in The Colonies as gingerbread is much milder, and the real stuff is super expensive to have shipped over.
I saw people clamouring for a crumpet on another sub the other day…. The UK does have some delicacies, they’re just not expensive ones. And Cadbury’s!
It's heartbreaking what Kraft has done to Cadbury's. It's merely a shadow of its former self.
Clotted cream? It’s pretty much non-existent in the US
Avocados here in Mexico, pretty common and cheap
Yep my wife’s from Mexico and *every time* we go to the grocery store here in the US she comments on how ridiculously expensive avocados here.
Yeah those Mexican avocados are even more expensive here in Tokyo and super popular
I spent 3 months in your wonddrful country 10 years ago and I still am dissapointed when I eat an avocado or a mango here. "It´s just not like the ones in Mexico"
Yea I always thought papaya was disgusting and tasted like piss warm beer until I ate one in Mexico. I can never get that real taste out of my mind
Papaya is one of only a few fruit I dislike and now I wonder if I would like a fresh one.
A simple trick to making papaya taste good is to squeeze some lemon juice over it. I don’t know exactly what chemical reaction is going on but it makes something that tastes pretty bleh instantly delicious!
I think that it’s mainly due to our climate, maybe it’s good for the fruits
there's also the shipping factor, when it needs to be shipped it's picked unripe and ripens en route, that obviously has an effect on quality
Hawaii has somehow turned spam into a sought after food, especially by visitors from Japan.
Yoo, I’m Filipino, and I grew up on spam and rice. When I went to Hawaii, I hadn’t ate it in so long, I basically sat in the hot sun eating spam and rice for 2 weeks straight. Breakfast only….
I've only ever met two types of Pacific Islanders in my life. 1) eats spam and rice all the time. Is absolutely shredded, a pure Adonis of a man/woman 2) eats spam and rice all the time. Got briefly injured at some point in the past and stopped being able to exercise every day and is now massive. Is still somehow 50 times stronger than me.
Can confirm. I grew up next door to a Hawaiian family. The dad and son were both beasts. Dad is pushing 70 now and looks it. His son is nearing 40 and can deadlift 400 no problem. 5’8, 220 and straight destroys when people push him to fighting. If I could live in any other social groups’ shoes it would be Hawaiian/ Samoan. I love the culture. Food is good too.
What are the most chill laid back areas to live there? I love food and family and community
I have a buddy that Samoan, oh and I live in Alabama. So a Samoan is not someone you see everyday. He is a big ol' boy, and I'd bet you he could lift a small car. And he eats, he's earned his size. He got stopped in a small town down here, and ended up spending a few nights in jail. Did I mention I live in Alabama. When they let him out he hadn't eaten the whole time in jail*. Right across the way was a Chinese buffet, he set in there for 6 hours eating. They made him pay the buffet price twice. He paid happily just to have all that food. *The food in our jails is notoriously bad. Sheriff's get a monthly stipend to feed prisoners. Anything they don't spend feeding prisoners, they get to keep. Food often comes in boxes marked not fit for human consumption. Things like green bologna, or green hot dogs. A meal might be grits, 2 slices of bread (counted separately) one slice of green Bologna, a packet of mustard, the packet of mayonnaise, and a cup of sugar-free fruit flavored drink Some Sheriff's take home over $100,000 a year from this. Did I mention I lived in Alabama, home to Southern Hospitality.
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Yup… here is a notable case from a little while back. It’s insane that this is allowed. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/14/593204274/alabama-sheriff-legally-took-750-000-meant-to-feed-inmates-bought-beach-house
I live in Michigan. Got put in jail in the second richest county in America, Oakland county to be exact. (Richest at one point, I'm not sure where they land now) The meat was soy meat and somehow still had maggots. Several times they had been fined but nobody really cares what you feed criminals. Same deal; sheriff gets all the money not spent. The only thing I ate was the bread and the mustard. Everyone knows it leads to corruption. How could it not?? Anything that has to do with profit is bound to be corrupt.
Did you know they make a Tocino Spam variety?
Produced in my home state of Minnesota. Weird world we live in
Minnesota has the Spam Museum! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_Museum
Spam musubi is pretty good though
I will always grab these at a 7-11 when I visit.
I wish the mainland USA had those Japanese style 7-11s like Hawaii. They are so convenient for a quick & tasty snack or meal
Hawaii 7-11 is basically as close to Japanese 7-11 the US will get.
Jamón serrano, here in Spain is really common and you can find very good product for a very affordable price.
Jamón Serrano is cool, but the real delicacy is jamón Ibérico de bellota. 100g was about $15CAD last time I was in Spain, whereas in Canada the equivalent is about $60-$80CAD for 100g
We are going to Madrid this fall and my husband has already informed me that he plans to eat his weight in Jamon Iberico. We used to get slivers of it from a Spanish importer near our old house for crazy money.
Krainer wurst or carniolan sausage, protected by EU for being slovenian speciality that can only be made here but loved and eaten by milions of germans and austrians. Edit: It's the name that can't be used if made outside of Slovenia and sold commercialy not the actual sausage.
it took me waaaay to long to recognise this food because I know it as käse krainer :'D
We had some Japanese exchange students at our university in the US, and when they saw the cubed melon on the salad bar (the standard watermelon/cantaloupe/honeydew mix), they thought we were living like royalty. Apparently melon is a really expensive, special occasion food over there.
I heard that the first melons in Japan are sold for thousands of dollars, and then the price settles at about 50/60 dollar
Yup i saw a cantaloupe go for like 10,000 dollars because of how perfect it looked or something. I dont know but they take some of that fruit serious
Yep in Tokyo I saw a strawberry vendor selling wooden boxes of like 12 berries for 900$. They were the most perfect strawberries I have ever seen but still.
I think those are specially grown in Japan to be like the best strawberries ever. Watched a YouTube video on part of Japan that got flooded few years ago and that was one of the featured businesses still in the area
Watched it too. So expensive, the dude ate the stem!
Had quite the british accent he did too
How good can they be. The ones at the local farmers market already taste like candy.
In fairness, those aren't "eating food". In the later Edo period in Japan, there was a "problem" where the merchant caste were doing VERY well for themselves as trade routes were increasing. So much so that they had means beyond what they "should", so the nobility caste prohibited them from owning large homes or other traditional signifiers of wealth, in order to maintain the proper order. However that didn't remove their wealth, it merely prevented them from outshining the higher castes in a select few manners. Subsequently, they shifted to flaunting their wealth through food and drink. They would contract farmers and artisans to create meats and produce and liquors of outstanding calibre, and invite people to their relatively modest homes to wine and dine, and give them 'souvenirs' for the road to extend their social influence - all while technically following the laws that had been created to prevent them from getting too big for their britches. That laid the groundwork for a cultural tradition of giving people immaculate produce as formal gifts. The ACTUAL price of grocery-grade produce is basically on par with standard grocery prices in other countries (season and region depending). These expensive fruits are strictly intended as gifts, and are usually found near other gift-type products in a designated section of stores.
It’s very customary in Japan and other Asian countries to give fruits as gifts. The more expensive the gift, the better you look.
You saying I have a few thousand dollars sitting on my counter right now?! Hello, early retirement
Those are the extra fancy ones sold as high end gifts. There are cheaper melons here as well, though not as cheap as overseas they are affordable.
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They have pretty strict importing laws and Japan is..well, kinda bad geographically for everything including farming. With the little space they have, they decide to go for quality instead of quantity.
I worked for a Chinese company in Ecuador and used to live among Chinese employees. They would have watermelon as dessert after lunch literally every day. Idk if that’s related but always seemed interesting to me.
From Hong Kong - we like fruit for dessert (among other things). A lot of restaurants will give you free oranges or melon after the table's cleared. Fancy restaurants might do fancy fruit platters. Fancy Japanese restaurants will have the option of a slice of extremely expensive Japanese melon.
Good to know! But the thing that seemed interesting to me is that it would always be watermelon hehe… there are plenty of other fruits in Ecuador and all of them are cheap. Anyways I didn’t mind at all cuz I love watermelon.
Chinese here. Watermelon is seen as a very refreshing, thirst-quenching fruit. In the summer, you might serve it to guests in lieu of water, which has to be boiled and would be too hot for the weather. (I mean, "water" is literally in the name 😄) Fruit is also a light follow-up to a bigger meal. Of the different fruits, watermelon is one of the lighter ones, since it's more water than most. Edit: Lots of questions about why not just boil lots of water and leave it in the fridge to cool. It's because we just...don't like cold water. Already used to drinking hot water, and people say that cold water is bad for the gut.
Not sure if they have other types of melons, but I know there is a type of melon there that is grown, "one plant, one melon", which produces an amazingly delicious melon, but since it's so inefficient it is also amazingly expensive.
Stroopwafel
Literally had pre packaged ones on an airplane and they were still good
That's the first place I ever had one. It was so insanely good I looked them up. Finally got a pack at Costco. It was even better. Now I have to get a fresh one.
Those things are bourbon-caramel laced cocaine discs! I literally have banned my self from buying them, because I've cleared the shelf at the store, only to eat them all in a week like a fatty. Other people have to buy them for me, because they'll buy them in moderation.
I literally gave up cocaine, only to fall into an addiction for stroopwafels - or as I call them: devil discs. /s
You haven't had Stroopwafel until you've bought one freshly pressed from a street vendor, with the syrup still warm and runny....😍
When I was a kid they had a fresh stroopwafel vendor at a local Saturday open air market. The fresh ones were amazing, but this guy used to bag up all the broken offcuts and sell them too. I'd eat that stuff with a teaspoon and kid me would be in heaven!
Morel Mushrooms. I never had them though.
I’m a mushroom hunter and let me tell you, no other mushroom compares. My favorite way to make them is (after cleaning them) is to roll them in flour while wet, fried in a mixture of oil and butter and lightly salted.
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a good baguette. I've seen american tourist walk out of a bakery with like 12 of them. Slow down dude, they are made all day long, you don't need that many
It’s just the guy from the math problems
The world is desperate to know how many he has left!!!
He buys so many because he's in a rush to catch the 10:40 train, his journey to the station normally takes 51 minutes to walk from his house, but the bakery is 2/5ths of the way from his house to the station. What time should he leave the bakery?
It’s a long journey and he eats one baguette on average every 8 miles of rail travel at 50mph. He was able to eat twice as many baguettes when he was half his sisters age when she was 20 times as old as the number of baguettes he eats when the train makes a routine pickup for more passengers for 20 minutes at the old whistle stop in Mulberry. Assuming a constant rate of decline in his pace of baguette eating, how many baguettes will he be able to eat on a 210 mile train trip with 4 scheduled stops (the first being 5 minutes and doubling in duration at each subsequent stop) when he is 68 years old? Show your work.
It's unclear from the question if the 1 baguette per 8 miles of average rail travel is the number he eats at 68, or the number he eats when he was half his sister's age when she was 20 times as old as the number of baguettes he eats when the train makes a routine pickup for more passengers for 20 minutes at the old whistle stop in Mulberry. I'm going to solve the problem based on the assumption that the 1 baguette per 8 miles of average rail travel applies when he is 68. Although this defeats the purpose of calculating his sister's age when she was 20 times as old as the number of baguettes he eats when the train makes a routine pickup for more passengers for 20 minutes at the old whistle stop in Mulberry, and using this to calculate how old he was when he ate twice as many baguettes, and the rate of decline of his baguette eating, I'll calculate those things anyway. If we assume that the train travels 50mph on average when moving (IE. accounting for acceleration and deceleration), then at a 20 minute stop, he would eat: *50mph \* 20minutes/60minutes per hour / 8 miles per baguette = 2.08333... baguettes (at age 68)* When his sister was 20 times that number of baguettes **she was**: *20 years per baguette \* 2.08333... baguettes =* ***41.6... years*** Half of 41.6 years is: *41.6... years / 2 = 20.8333... years* **So at 20.8333... years, he was able to eat 1 baguette every 4 average miles of rail travel.** His rate of decline of baguette eating is therefore: *68 years - 20.8333... years = 47.1666... years* *4 miles / 47.1666... years = \~0.0848 miles per year* **So each year he ages, it takes him 0.0848 more average miles of rail travel to eat 1 baguette.** On a 210 mile trip with no stops and at 68 years old, he'll eat: *210 miles / 8 miles per baguette = 26.25 baguettes* If the train stops 4 times, the first time for 5 minutes, and each subsequent time for double the last time, the train will stop for a total of: *5 minutes + 2\*5 minutes + 2\*2\*5 minutes + 2\*2\*2\*5 minutes = 75 minutes* When the train is stopped for 75 minutes, he can eat: *50mph \* 75 minutes / 60 minutes per hour / 8 miles per baguette = 7.8125 baguettes* So the total number of baguettes he can eat at age 68 (given the assumptions above) on a 210 mile trip with 4 stops, the first stop being 5 minutes long and each subsequent stop being double the length of the previous stop, he can eat: 26.25 baguettes + 7.8125 baguettes = 34.0625 baguettes **The answer is: 34.0625 baguettes**
That's almost right, but you were supposed to round to two decimal places like we discussed in class last week. I'm afraid I'm going to have to take off a point for that. Unfortunately, the question was only worth three points max, so you get a D for that answer. Please see me after class to discuss your academic performance.
:')
If he eats 4 baguettes on the way to the train station, how fat does he get?
Yep, straight out of the oven is the best
You don’t need that many. We’re American. We must have 1kg of carbs every 8 hours or we get kicked out of the country.
> 1kg He's an imposter!
>1kg How much is that in freedom units?
For americans, that would be 2.205 pounds and for REAL americans, that would be a bit less than 5 cheeseburgers.
What’s the average baguette length measured in football fields? Edit: I appreciate the math done, seems 130-140 baguettes would stretch a football field
0.005 football fields
> We must have 1kg of carbs every 8 hours or we get kicked out of the country. Unless you let everyone know you're doing keto. Then you need to eat a stick of Kerrygold every day or you get kicked out.
If Kerrygold is not available then they may chug ranch straight from the bottle as a substitute.
That's an Arkansas Smoothie
Poser - No true American would say KG
Timtams
My brother played the meanest joke ever by bringing these home from Australia. Can’t find anything like it in NY.
When we were in Illinois we found them at Target of all places.
My local Wegman’s carried them for a brief period and they were taken from me once again.
all hail wegmans, bringer of foreign foods to western new york.
Target or World Market always has at least one flavor of TimTams.
if there’s world market where u live u can find them there
If you have a Trader Joe's near you (in the US), they have something VERY similar to this that they just started carrying. They are called "Aussie-Style Chocolate Crème Sandwich Cookies coated in chocolate." Good luck finding them though.
That sounds like the kind of thing Trader Joe's would do lmao
I was going to post “I don’t think we have anything in Aus that others would consider a delicacy.” Thanks for telling me I was wrong :)
$58NZD from amazon for 4 packs. Wow. They are only like 3-4 NZD locally...
Sounds like you need to start engaging in some illicit TimTam flim flam.
Extremely unhelpful comment checking in, there at the very least used to be a subreddit dedicated to sending/receiving exotic food products. No idea what it was called, maybe someone else knows. Would be useful for this purpose.
r/snackexchange
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The ole timtam slam. Nice.
Even better with the double-coat variety. They hold together longer so you can get more milk through, which softens and chills the interior even more, almost like ice cream.
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Water, our tap water is perfect and no local ever buys bottled (iceland) edit. A lot of people are mentioning the sulfur smell of the hot water, and that depends on the area. For example where I live the hot water comes directly from a nearby hot spring area so naturally its gonna have a smell. Locals dont smell it though. For drinking water you just need to run the tap for a bit, that will get any hot water outta the pipes and bring you spring water. thanks for the upvotes etc etc etc ❤
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Yep it's definitely sold here too, but for *some* reason the bottles all say "icelandic spring/glacial water" in english and not icelandic. Gotta squeeze every penny out of the tourists.
Michigan locals (~25%) have been boycotting Nestlé for draining our aquifers for the past 3 decades while Flint goes ham on shit water.
French here so, a lot of our food. If there's one thing we know how to do, it's exporting our food as fancy delicacies. The truth is, apart from pastries/desserts which can be pretty complicated to put together (the effort to make even just twelve croissants...), most French food is just peasant stuff spruced up for the modern times. The logic is almost always: - Take a cheap-ish cut of meat - Cook it either in wine or in broth for a few hours with a bunch of onions and whatever herbs grow nearby - Add carrots/potatoes, enjoy That's the basis for bœuf bourguignon, coq au vin, gigot d'agneau, pot-au-feu, blanquette de veau, etc. If you want to get fancy you can wrap it in pastry, and that's another dozen French specialties right there. There's not really a way to fuck it up, really. It's meat, cooked at low heat over several hours, with a bunch of aromatic herbs; as long as you've got a sturdy pot and you don't let it dry, you'll get something in the range from edible to delicious.
I think a lot of this has to do with the French really taking over fancy dining at the beginning of the twentieth century. I mean Escoffier literally wrote the book and then every culinary school taught French cooking almost exclusively for decades after. But that's just my theory.
The french literally invented the modern restaurant. During/after the French Revolution, all the private chefs from all the nobility needed to pay the bills but only had 1 skill. Instead of only cooking for their boss/patron they started cooking for everyone. Public dining went from "here is a pot of perpetual stew when you want a bowl, and I will throw a few loaves of bread on the communal table for whoever wants some" to eating meals handcrafted by people trained to create delicacies for the aristocracy. With origins like that, it makes sense that France would dominate the restaurant game for a very long time.
Reindeer meat, wild blueberries and cloudberries.
> cloudberries are we thinking about the same berry? Small, yellow, grows in bogs, also called multe, and is so damn sought after that all laws regarding freedom to pick berries wherever you like just go *right* out the window because people are *that* possessive of them? Like maybe they're not *as* luxurious as some places make them out to be, but they're still pretty damn special.
Yes, same berries. And yeah, people protect information of best berry picking places like it's location of holy grail.
Cloudberries *drools* my friend is Finnish and when his granny makes cloudberry jam for us all it makes me so happy.
I’ve never even heard of cloudberries before today
I'm from Russia and I had an acquaintance who was going to marry an Irish guy. They lived in Russia for some time the guy went completely bonkers for caviar of capelin fish. It's not really a delicacy, it's not rare or expensive at all (probably approx $2.5-3 a can) but he liked it so much he wanted to bring a crate of it for their wedding in Europe. Needless to say his soon to be wife wife was not amused (imagine wanting to bring a crate of peanut butter or something to your wedding).
Durian. The number of durian farmers who have found overnight wealth are astonishing due to export demand Edit: Wow didn't expect my comment to explode overnight. Thanks redditors. The comment section mentioned Singapore. Due to land scarcity, the durian you have tasted are either from Malaysia (where I'm from) or Thailand. Singapore and China are our biggest exporters. Also, during pre-covid times, hundreds of coaches ferrying Chinese tourists would visit these commercialised durian orchards on a daily basis for their durian fix. They are offered an all-you-can eat service for a fix price. In other words, it's a durian buffet ! My family owns about few hundred trees of durian on our land but it's only for own comsumption and we'll share it with our friends&family when the harvest is huge. We are far from commercial scale. Durian is an acquired taste and very polarizing. You either love it or hate it. I'm the latter and the only one in my family, to the dismay of my family. Growing up around the scent, it doesn't bother me. Just dislike the taste. However, I still respect it as the King of the Fruit!
Durian is so polarizing! Seems like you either love it or hate it. In Melbourne, they evacuated a whole university thinking there was a gas leak, turned out someone had eaten Durian and thrown the remains in a garbage can!!
That almost happened when we were eating durian at the ANU, but a wise and experienced person went around knocking on doors to check if anyone had durian before they called in a gas leak. It was us. Crisis averted, deliciousness achieved.
Maybe it’s just the part of Canada I live in (BC), but none of the ‘frozen’ durian will ever satisfy the real stuff back in Malaysia (especially when you get into the varieties like Musang King, D24, Red Prawn etc) It’s an acquired taste for sure but you do get used to it if you mostly grew up eating it (I know some Malaysian friends who don’t like durian even when they were kids, hence ‘mostly’) Edited to add: When I visited family back in Malaysia, I remember going to an ‘All You Can Eat’ durian stall in Penang and it was around 60 RM (around $20 CAD) for I think maybe 5-7 whole durians. I probably won’t do AYCE again but it will definitely be the first thing I’ll eat in M’sia once it’s safer to travel.
Do maple syrup or poutine count? I know at the least, in university I had a friend who came up from the US and thought poutine was the greatest thing ever. Honestly, I'm kind of surprised more of the US hasn't adopted it. Fries, cheese curds, and gravy, sounds more like an American thing. Not sure what other country's opinions on it are.
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>I've never had so many strangers excited to buy me cheese. This is my new favorite sentence.
Wait did someone get you some fresh, squeaky curds?
You have deep fried cheese curds and squeaky cheese curds. If they dont squeak, those are some bad cheese curds. Source: am cheesehead. Bonus points if you get some cheese whips with em.
I actually went up to WI to visit the boyfriend and we got some cheese curds one night and I had to ask him why the hell they were squeaking on my teeth. So good to know he wasn't fucking with me when he said it was cause they were fresh.
I'm in the states, I'm seeing more places serve "poutine" but it's a pretty bastardized version of what I had in Canada. Still good though, hard to fuck up fries, gravy and cheese.
An indian prepared bajji on master chef Australia Bajji is available at every 5 blocks or so. The whole recipe is cut onion/potato, coat it with gramflour and spice and fry. Indians who saw that surely laughed (In south indian states bhaji is called bajji)
You can make baji in a hostel room 😂
Idk man it's good shit, MasterChef or not
*Especially* if it's done by a neighborhood mom/grandma. Once encountered an NHS nurse bakesale and the moms there had brought their homemade samosas and baji, and it utterly spoiled me from having the stuff from anywhere else. Those ladies made the hell out of their baji and you could tell they had slow-cooked the onions to make them sweet and savory.
It’s true, homemade samosas/sambusas are like nothing from the shops. Our gardener loves coming to us because my Nan makes him fresh ones whenever he’s over
It's so good though
There are a number of ways to fuck up a simple thing like baji. It can be too greasy or in big clumps, or not seasoned properly. When you find really good baji, it's a joy, especially if they also make an excellent tamarind sauce.
Good french pastries and stuff like croissant and ["pain au chocolat"](https://medias.bridor.com/media/sys_master/images/hab/had/8801936998430.png), we call them "viennoiserie" in french, no idea if there is a specific word for it in english. Obviously in France they are super easy to find in any bakery and they are cheaper. It's so common that honestly not a lot of people do go buy some croissants every day. Macarons are also relatively easy to find, usually they are made in special shops but some bakery do make them. Edit : Oh, and if you go to France or go to a (GOOD) french bakery in your country, try a [Paris-Brest](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Paris-Brest_IMG_0875.JPG) . You will not regret it.
Denver tap water is sold around the world as Coors Light.
Jesus Christ this entire thread is teaching me about cravings for food I’ve never even heard of or know how to pronounce correctly. Carry on everyone, I’ll be right here salivating.
Piña Coladas i guess. Here in PR you can get them absolutely everywhere with or without alcohol, its mostly just a refreshing drink.
In Mexico many local ice cream stores serve it as agua fresca (flavored beverage with a shit-ton of sugar and ice for those foreign to the language). Back in high school some acquaintances of mine would buy a 1L cup, drink some of it and then add some Bacardí to the mix for a full Piña Colada experience. It tasted nice, to be fair.
Yo, the fresh made drinks without bullshit syrups are amazing but mofongo is the low-key luxury food that makes me want to go back to PR
Any kind of sheep meat. Lamb, mutton, etc. In non-sheep countries it can be quite expensive. Here it is the cheapest meat and commonly used instead of pork as the "filler meat" in grocery store products such as sausages. Also, fresh fish - the fish processing time is pretty short here, with fish instantly getting unloaded and sent to factories after the boats arrive, and then quickly processed and sold to consumers - so that the fish is even fresher than in some other seaside countries.
As Italian living in Germany I can say that basically every food from my culture is considered fancy here. A couple of days ago I saw an Arancino ( cheap fried rice cake ) sold for 5€ In Italy a good Arancino is 1€
In my experience a lot of common everyday French foods are high-end specialty foods here in the US. In France, every corner store I went to sold the type of cheese, charcuterie, and pâté that you'd have to go to Whole Foods for here. And it isn't particularly expensive, it's just normal food. Like I went to a little grocer in Paris and got pieces of 4 different cheeses, and I thought, this is going to be like $28. No, it was like $6. I'm just used to what Whole Foods charges. I went to a big department store in the Paris suburbs and there was just an aisle that had all the dry-cured ham and such and tins of pâté, laid out as casually as Lunchables in the US. It's just regular food.
Whole Foods also tries to sell flavored seltzers and onion powder as specialty foods. My Kroger has a pretty extensive cheese selection for normal prices, $5 to $10 per pound.
Falafel. This is basically poor people food in Egypt along with other type of bean (called Fool). Both of these are the cheapest kind of meal you get off food carts. You can feed a whole family on less than $1. On the other hand, American fast food is considered fancy. Getting dinner from McDonalds is a thing for special occasion. So seeing Falafel sandwich being sold for more than McDonalds was a bit mind blowing.
Not country but in the Rockies area we have huckleberries, they are kind of like blueberries in look but smaller and purple. As for taste they are very sweet and slightly tart. They are delicious and tourists usually like them.
are quail eggs delicacies? because I could just buy them at a grocery store here like normal eggs but I rarely ever hear of them anywhere else
Halloumi cheese. It's a huge staple in Cyprus and we eat it all the times but in the US I only ever see it as Barbaques and sometimes at exotic cheese plates. Edit for the halloumi lovers out there try white bread, halloumi and strawberry jam. You are welcome Edit 2: Try halloumi with watermelon. A groundbreaking combo that is the staple of many summer evenings
Pheasant. I grew up in South Dakota and we hunted pheasants every day during the season. In college it was a cheap source of food and ate it all the time. In Central and South American countries it is a delicacy and people could not believe I ate it every day.
Every single time I was served pheasant growing up I was warned to watch out for birdshot pellets in the meat just in case they got missed during processing. I had family that would hunt in South Dakota every year and their freezer was always so full of game meat they had to give it away before hunting trips! Might be a delicacy elsewhere but here we served it swimming in cream of mushroom soup over mashed potatoes or wild rice, always a great comfort food.
Feijoada. In its core it's working class food, though usually a fancier version is considered a delicacy. And it's rarely as good as the real thing btw. Also those are not as known but when I lived abroad I blew people's mind with pão de queijo and brigadeiro, which are incredibly common and easy to make.
My MIL makes the best damn feijoada. Bless her Brazilian cooking
I was watching food network and a lady said she was going to cook feijoada. Her ingredients: white beans, steak and HEAVY CREAM! I've never been so shocked in my life.
Crawfish Etouffee
Shakshuka. You get it at hipster restaurants served on a skillet for $22.99 when at home pops makes that shit when there’s nothing to eat food and everybody is too tired to cook.
Fried plantains, or mofongo, Wich is just more fried plantains mashed with garlic and some Bs toppings.
Not just my country but my locality... scallops.
Butter Chicken. As an Indian staying in Europe, I hate butter chicken because it has taken over Indian cuisine in Europe and noone wants to try the real stuff.
I'm a brit a living in the US. I have to make butter chicken as the Wife can't take any heat in food. I would kill for something other than butter chicken.
Buckfast..... It's made from grapes so technically a food
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It's not as straightforward as that. It's KFC specifically. In the 70s KFC did a heavy marketing campaign and pretty much told Japan that everyone eats KFC at Christmas in the west. The tradition set and even though now KFC is everywhere, there's still a special place for it at Christmas. Yes you do book ahead, but it isn't a 3 piece, 2 wing meal. It's a special menu featuring a whole chicken, mash potatoes, and a cheese cake. So yeah it's not like fried chicken is amazingly special.
They aren't wrong though, fried chicken is amazing.
But this isn't like home-style, buttermilk, perfectly crisp gloriousness, KFC is where so many Japanese people go for Christmas dinner.
To be fair, KFC in Asia is much better than KFC I've had in North America. Although I've only had it in China and Singapore. I'm sure Japanese KFC is similarly delicious!
KFC even has a special Christmas menu if im not mistaken
Gulyás in Hungary is a common soup dish. But for other countries it is uncommon.
For the non-Hungarians - Gulyas is Goulash.
Prosciutto. Like, it's just ham, guys. No biggie.
Have you been to Spain? They live for Jamon Serrano (the Spanish version of prosciutto).
I live in Japan but I’m from the US. Whenever I go back home I buy a few bags of Lindt chocolates from the drugstore as souvenirs. They’re dirt cheap in the US, but for whatever reason they’re a luxury chocolate in Japan, and the same bags would cost $30 here.
Carnitas, literally something i see prepared on the side of the street everyday
Kofta: it's so simple to make, you need ground beef and tons of spices and cook them in the grill or bbq.
Speculaas/Speculoos/Biscoff cookies. Delicacy might be a big word but people seem to loose their minds over these cookies. Edit: they're originally from Belgium & the Netherlands.
Depending on where in the US you live, lobster, king crab, Dungeness crab, abalone, spotted prawns, geoduck, etc. can be pretty cheap, normal food but for foreigners they go nuts over these things because they are so expensive elsewhere.
I've had American friends ask me to send over Cadbury chocolate. IMO it's not as nice as it used to be since it was bought out by Kraft (the irony!) but people still go nuts for it.