Unusual Foods that Only Exist in China
October 12, 2024
•17 min read
China enjoys some quite unusual foods. Let's take a look at some of the most unusual foods that only exist in China.
If you’re planning a trip to China anytime soon, you should probably know that the cuisine is far more exotic than just pizza and chicken nuggets. Have you ever seen crocodile meat, centipedes, fried lizard, or bear paw soup served up in your local restaurant? Don’t reach for the snacks just yet as we feast our eyes on some of the most unusual foods that only exist in China!
Century Eggs
How do you like your eggs in the morning? If the answer is "stinky", then China is the place for you! These are Century Eggs in the image below, a kind of preserved duck, quail, or chicken egg that are considered a delicacy across China.
They’re also called Thousand Year Eggs or Millennium Eggs, but don’t panic just yet, they haven’t actually been preserved for that long. The eggs are covered in a paste made of tea, lime salt and ash and are left to sit for as long as several months. During this time, the sodium hydroxide in the coating changes the inside of the egg. While the egg white turns to a gelatinous brown, the yolks becomes a creamy source of intense flavor. As you can guess, it’s pretty polarizing dish. Many fans claim it’s a fragrant delight, while others think it’s a dish that’s well past its "egg-spiration" date!
Shark Fin Soup
You can find plenty of unconventional soups across China, and Shark Fin soup is no exception. Made from the fin of a real shark, it’s one of the most luxurious dishes on the market with just one bowl costing around $100!
The cartilage, which is similar in structure to human fingernails, is shredded to add texture to the soup, though it doesn’t actually provide much flavor! But it’s a dish associated with good fortune, so it’s still served at important events like weddings and banquets. But gathering the main ingredient is a gruesome affair, with an estimated 73 million sharks killed every year for their fins alone. For an ingredient that doesn’t even add any flavor, that’s an outrageously high cost!
Seahorse Snack
If you ever find yourself wading through the sea of Chinese street vendors, there’s one little seafood snack that might stand out among the rest. Believe it or not, China is the world’s largest consumer of seahorses, with an annual demand of approximately 500 tons. When dried, they become a crunchy sidewalk snack that tastes like potato chips! Don't believe me? Hear this guy out in this video clip below:
Bird Nest Soup
Just how mouth-watering does "bird spit soup" sound? Made from edible birds’ nests, which are sometimes called the Caviar of the East, bird nest soup is actually extremely rare and insanely valuable.
The main ingredient is made by swiftlets, which use their saliva to create the sturdy nests at dizzying heights, usually high up in mountaintop caves. As you can imagine, they’re not the easiest things to harvest. Considering how difficult they are to clean and the perils of getting hold of them in the first place, some nests can be sold for almost $5,000 per pound! They’ve been used in Chinese cooking for around 1,200 years, and are favored for their gelatinous texture! Suddenly it seems like having a waiter spit in your food could actually be considered a compliment, if he has feathers, that is!
Chip Varieties
When it comes to chips, we all love a variety of flavors. But China has managed to take it to the next level with their bizarre abundance of crazy flavors. How does a bag of Hot and Sour Fish Soup chips sound? Not for you? Then what about Lemon Tea Flavor chips? How about Blueberry flavor? As strange as they may seem, these bizarre food fusions combined with the saltiness of the chips are a popular hit in many regions of China.
اغرب نكهات البطاطس بالعالم . نكهة الكيوي .الكابتشينو.توت .بيبسي .... اخر واحد !!
Gutter Oil
What do you think this woman in the video clip below is doing? Cleaning the sewers?
Eating Bats
Just the idea of eating a bat soup is stomach churning to a lot of people and many people in China actually feel the same way! Eating bats in China has almost always been culturally unacceptable, but not illegal.
I hear bat pepper soup is a delicacy in a certain Nigerian university. This is definitely not on the healthy eating pyramid. I come in peace.🕊
Healthy food pyramid Source: Harvard
Deep Fried Silkworm Pupae
Some people will eat anything if it’s deep-fried. Americans love deep fried pizza, deep fried birthday cake, even deep-fried watermelon! But would you be brave enough to try deep fried Silkworm Pupae?
These would-be silkworms are a traditional delicacy in northeast China and are sold on skewers to be deep fried, shells and all! But they’re not just found on the sidewalks, they’re a common ingredient at many of the regions restaurants as well! They’re drenched in delicious spices to make them a little easier to swallow, or at the very least to make you forget you’re literally eating worms!
Snake Soup
What better way could there be to warm yourself up than with a nice, hearty bowl of snake soup? Known in Cantonese as Se Gang, this southern Chinese delicacy can contain up to five different types of snake meat.
The meat itself apparently tastes similar to chicken, but with a few more scales than the average chicken nugget. Snake restaurants in Hong Kong are called Se Wong, which translates to "Snake Kings". But today these restaurants are becoming increasingly rare as cooking with snakes takes certain expertise, and sadly isn’t paid very well. So, if you’ve ever wanted to take a bite out of a snake, you better go get it while it’s hot, literally!
Balut
If you couldn’t handle the century eggs, you may want to stay away from Balut, a fertilized duck egg that’s been boiled in the shell and is eaten with the embryo still inside. As unappetizing as it looks from the outside, these pre-packed snacks originated in China and have become a common street food across the Philippines.
To get stuck into this haunting grub, you crack open the egg and suck out the broth which has gathered at the top during its boiling. Then, if you’re feeling hardcore, you peel the shell off and proceed to chow down on the entire thing, bones, beak, and all! Who knew a little added crunch could be so horrifying?
Blood Tofu
Many cultures consume blood products, like black pudding in England or Morcilla in Spain. But China’s blood tofu looks a little different. That’s because blood tofu’s main, and sometimes only, ingredient is blood!
Stinking Black Tofu
If you’re walking down the market streets in China and suddenly gag on the wafting smell of garbage, there’s a good chance it’s actually coming from a cultural delicacy, which is stinky black tofu.
Regular tofu is made from coagulated soy milk, and any vegan will tell you the resulting bean curds are relatively bland. But stinking black tofu takes much longer, and the black brine it’s made from can sit for almost a whole year to give it a stronger flavor! Fermented with a mix of Chinese herbs and vegetables, the solid black blocks of bean curd are then ready for market! Some of the more strong-stomached among you might be thinking “it doesn’t sound all that bad” but some vendors can take a liberty here, shortcutting the process by adding feces to the tofu to make it smell more pungent.
Jellyfish Salad
At a special occasion like a birthday party or anniversary, what kind of food would you serve? Tasty meats? Perfect looking cakes? What about a jellyfish salad? Even though they’re made from about 95% water, some Chinese foodies have found a way to make jellyfish into a gourmet dish. The jellyfish itself is tasteless, but the crunchy texture it has makes it perfect as a salad ingredient! Just check out this bizarre ASMR:
Yak Sausage
The Guolizhuang restaurant in Beijing prides itself on serving just about every kind of animal wiener under the sun, but not of the sausage kind!
Bizar recept: Yak penis bit.ly/362YgwF In het Guolizhuang Restaurant in Beijing dat bekend staat om het serveren van penis en testikel ... #Yakpenis #Guolizhuang #dishes #recipe #Geschirr #Rezept #plats #recette #platos #receta #penis #pene #Dragonintheflameofdesire
Yin Yang Fish
While yin yang may make you think of harmony and serenity, "yin yang fish" couldn’t be anything further from that pleasant mental image. Yin Yang fish is a fried, whole fish that’s prepared below the gills to keep the fish head alive while its being cooked, served and eaten.
Drunken Shrimp
If the yin yang fish had you covering your eyes, it might not be time to peep through your fingers just yet because fish aren’t the only creatures that can find themselves being cooked alive in China. Drunken Shrimp is a dish where the shrimp are served alive and flipping.
Cats
Sadly, just like their canine counterparts, China’s feline friends can also be served up as a side dish. About 4 million cats are eaten every year across the country, and even though it’s seen as taboo it doesn’t stop street vendors and rural sellers partaking in this animal scandal.
Areas such as the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces in south China have an older population that consider cat meat a good source of nutrition during winter months. And Guangdong province alone is thought to consume around 10,000 cats a day! In fact, one investigation from 2017 revealed that stray and pet cats were being rounded up and sold to restaurants under the guise of rabbit meat!
Hairy Tofu
Just when you thought vegan food couldn’t get any worse, enter the nightmare inducing Hairy Tofu!
As you now know, Tofu is made from fermented soy milk. Much like in the process of making cheese, the time it takes tofu to ferment can change its texture and flavor. In the case of this wig-wearing tofu, also known as Mao Tofu, humid conditions during the fermentation process are needed to help cultivate a mold with hair like texture.
Soft Shell Crabs
There aren’t many foods you can eat with the shell on, but thanks to Chinese ingenuity you can now eat an entire deep fried, battered crab right off the skewer.
These soft-shell crabs have been battered for street-side convenience in markets all over China. While they seem like a no-fuss solution to picking out and serving hard-to-get crab meat, that inconvenience is passed onto the customer. You have to bite through the shell to get to your meal, and by that I mean through eyes, guts, and all! And it’s not easy either. According to some, a lot of it can get stuck in your teeth too.
Deep-Fried Bee Larvae
According to scientists, the bees are disappearing fast and turning these flower-loving creatures into a tasty snack certainly isn’t helping! In the northern city of Qingdao, one restaurant offers up plates of deep-fried bee larvae! But the practice isn’t actually all that uncommon. Since the late 1800’s, bee larva and pupae have been eaten across many areas of China and are still sold in the markets today.
To some, they taste like little balls of raw dough, but to others they’re naturally sweet and go well with a simple salt and pepper seasoning. They don’t look too appetizing to me, but who knows, if they’re really that good, it’s no wonder they’re on their way to becoming an endangered species!
Bear Paw Soup
At first glance, this soup in the image below seems more like a prank than a meal. It looks like a dolls hand has been left in the bowl! Sadly, this is the crowning glory of horrendous Chinese soups, the Bear Paw Soup. According to folklore, this soup is supposed to give the consumer the power and virility of a bear. And for that kind of trade-off, a single portion can cost upwards of $1000.
But the way they harvest the main ingredient is undeniably horrendous, with approximately 10,000 bears kept in tiny cages on 70 farms across China. Some have even been kept there for more than 30 years! Seems like this dish is grizzly in more than one way.
Crocodile Meat
China’s first Walmart opened in 1996, and while it may look familiar on the outside, their range of fresh fish has a whole lot more bite! Crocodile meat is a commodity that’s available across China, but the giant reptile has been used in elements of Chinese medicine dating back to the 16th century.
Guilinggao
Guilinggao is an ancient medicinal dessert that originally came from Guangxi province in China. It’s a type of bitter jelly, with enough herbal roots to almost cure 19th century Emperor Tongzhi of smallpox, if folklore is to be believed.
Venomous Centipedes
There are 100 reasons why you shouldn’t chow down on venomous centipedes. But in China, this insidious looking insect can be dried or fried to become a crunchy kebab style snack. Check out this clip below:
Deep-Fried Lizards
If you consider yourself a reptile lover, exotic Chinese cuisine probably isn’t your thing. We’ve already seen snakes turned into soup, but what about flying lizards on sticks?
Sea Star
Lizards on sticks are pretty bizarre, but they’re not the only unconventional creature to be skewered and sold on market stalls. With China becoming one of the largest and fastest growing seafood markets in the world, ocean dwelling starfish are quickly making their way across the country.
But how do you go about eating this five-legged food? First, you prise away the spiney outer armor, then eat the olive-green mush lining the insides. You then peel or suck out the mush, leaving you with a mouthful of fish flavored goop.Pacific Geoduck
Weighing up to 16 lbs, and costing up to $300 each, allow me to introduce you to the largest type of burrowing clam in the entire world: the Pacific Geoduck. The clam prized for its gigantic siphon, meaty texture, and salty flavor.
