Soy milk, canned herring, cheese with live maggots, dark cuisine in different countries always has different dark flavors

When you get a bowl of bean juice, the mung beans in the bean juice have been fermented at 25 degrees for 14-24 hours. During this process, the sugars in the bean juice are fermented by lactic acid bacteria to form various acid compounds, such as acetic acid, propionic acid, valeric acid, etc. These substances give the bean juice a sour aroma and make the aroma of the bean juice penetrating. In other words, these substances make the bean juice smell sour.

The sulfur-containing compounds in soy milk, such as methyl mercaptan, dimethyl disulfide, and dimethyl trisulfide, bring a sulfur smell to the soy milk. Methyl mercaptan has a foul odor, dimethyl disulfide has a sulfur odor, and dimethyl trisulfide has a smell like stinky radish, onion, and vegetables.

Experiments have shown that the longer the fermentation time, the more sulfur compounds there are. If the bean juice you drink has been fermented for more than 24 hours, the smell of the bean juice will be fuller and your experience will be more fulfilling and rich.

If you have just arrived in Beijing, you may not be used to this strange local specialty, but if you look around the world, smelly food does not seem to be uncommon, and one or two typical cases can be found in many regions.

Moreover, when it comes to making smelly food, people have come up with all kinds of tricks. Many foods not only taste bad, but the production techniques also repeatedly exceed people's imagination of dark cuisine.

Take the famous canned herring as an example. Swedes catch herrings every spring and then soak the herrings in salt water to ferment them to make canned herrings.

Doesn't it sound special? However, unlike the canning process we are familiar with, canned herring is not sterilized during canning, so the fermentation process will continue after canning, and the can will bulge due to the continuous generation of gas in the box.

In order to avoid the strong stench that would pollute the environment, local authorities even stipulated that canned herring must be opened indoors. Moreover, because the smell of this food is too "unworldly", several airlines have banned canned herring from being carried on board.

We need to remind everyone that if you like this delicacy, for food safety reasons, you must fully heat and cook it before eating.

There is a very special cheese in Italy called Pecorino cheese, also known as "rotten cheese". Some people even call it "maggot cheese" because maggots are really used in its production.

To make a piece of "maggot cheese", you first need a piece of local traditional goat cheese, and then let it over-ferment. The method is to put cheese fly larvae into the goat cheese. The acid produced by these larvae when digesting food can break down the fat in the goat cheese until the goat cheese becomes soft and liquid.

A piece of finished maggot cheese may contain thousands of larvae, and some maggots will even jump up and run onto the table when it is served!

The most amazing smelly food is the pickled puffins that appeared in the BBC documentary "Human Planet".

The Inuit living in Greenland use nets to capture local pygmy puffins (Alle alle). After killing the puffins, they put them directly into the bodies of dead seals without any processing, and then sew up the incisions with thread, allowing the puffins to ferment directly in the seal's stomach.

In order to avoid interference from miscellaneous bacteria, the sutured incisions are usually sealed with seal oil and then buried in the permafrost. After 2-3 years of fermentation, the puffins are taken out, the feathers are plucked and they can be eaten - usually as a dip, but the Inuit also have a traditional way of eating it, which is to put their mouths directly at the puffins' butts, take a deep breath, and suck all of the puffins' internal organs into their mouths.

Pygmy Puffin on the rocks, source see watermark

It is hard to imagine what kind of eating experience this is. The unique process of making this kind of food makes people feel that the locals make them not to serve human appetites, but more like to prepare them for animals that specialize in scavenging, such as vultures.

In fact, the reason why this food preparation method came into being is inseparable from the unique local environmental conditions.

In order to prevent food from spoiling, early Swedes would store food using salt and fermentation. If the fishermen at the time had the technology to preserve food by freezing, they probably would not have made smelly canned herring.

As for the Inuit, since they live in the extremely cold Arctic, they can hardly eat vegetables all year round and cannot supplement the necessary vitamins. However, the microbial fermentation of pickled puffins during the pickling process will produce a variety of vitamins, which can just make up for the deficiencies in their diet.

From the perspective of modern nutrition, fermentation is the process of breaking down carbohydrates by microorganisms such as yeast or bacteria in an anaerobic environment. What we eat is actually the metabolic products of microorganisms, or to put it more bluntly, what we eat is what they excrete and what they leave behind.

However, fermented foods are rich in nutrients, containing protein, multiple vitamins, and various trace elements, and are good for health.

Therefore, if we regard fermentation as "shallow corruption", we can summarize some common characteristics of these dark dishes: moderate corruption makes them more delicious.

References

[1]. Lu Xiaodan, Zhang Min, Miao Jing. Comparison of flavor substances and sensory evaluation of raw and cooked Beijing bean juice from different sources[J]. Food Science, 2015, 36(6): 103-108. DOI: 10.7506/spkx1002-6630-201506019.

[2]. Lu Xiaodan, Zhang Min. Analysis of flavor substances in soybean juice[J]. Journal of Chinese Institute of Food Science and Technology, 2014, 14(12): 164-172.

[3]. Rachel Herz (USA); translated by Liu Xiaonan and Liu Ruizhe. This is disgusting: Uncovering the mystery of disgust[J]. China Light Industry Press. 2013.01

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Review expert: Wang Guoyi, postdoctoral fellow in food safety.

Tadpole Musical Notation original article, please indicate the source when reprinting

Editor/Xiao Xitushuo