The strangest soups in the world
Many of us love to eat a plate of delicious steaming soup for lunch, which will satisfy our hunger. Soups are hearty and healthy dishes that are prepared from what you have in the refrigerator. Maybe you have a bat or a tiger penis in your refrigerator?
There are soups in the world that are completely different from those that you are used to cooking. Most of them came to us from such an unusual Asian cuisine for Europeans.
Learn about the most unusual first courses from around the world, some of which may shock you.
Although for some of you, probably, the ingredients of this soup are not surprising, not all people would be willing to try beef stomach. Menudo is a traditional Mexican soup that is very popular in Mexico and is often prepared on special occasions. The dish is also widely known as a hangover cure.
Menudo is made from cow stomachs with the addition of onion, cilantro, oregano, chili pepper and corn. It takes from 7 to 10 hours to cook it, since the stomach is cooked for a very long time so that it becomes soft and tender. Some may wonder, can the stomach really be delicious? But if you add all the other ingredients to it and let it simmer on low heat for a couple of hours, the result will be simply incredible.
The stomach becomes so tender that it melts in the mouth, add corn tortillas to this, which can be dipped in soup, and you will get a wonderful lunch. Little is known about the origin of this soup, but one can guess that in Mexico, when the bull was stabbed, they wanted to use all parts of the carcass for cooking, including the stomachs. You can find this dish in many Mexican restaurants.
This is probably the simplest soup from the whole list, which is prepared by the Chagga tribe living at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa. This tribe survives through agriculture and pays most attention to the cultivation of bananas and coffee.
The tribe leads a simple lifestyle, that's why it cooks simple dishes: kiburu soup is made from sweet bananas, legumes and... mud. All ingredients are mixed with water to make soup, and tree branches can also be added here. Dirt makes the soup salty and gives it an earthy taste.
This soup is somewhat similar to the Mexican menudo soup, since different parts of animals are used for its preparation. Soup, as the name implies, translates as "soup".
The Tanzanian version of this dish is prepared for breakfast, it is the most unusual and is made from the lungs, heart, liver, goat's head and cow's stomach, sometimes from the entrails and tongue. Sometimes the soup is made on the basis of hooves, then it is called "supu ya makongoro". This dish is traditionally loved for breakfast in Tanzania, and it also saves from a hangover.
This soup is very similar to our chicken noodle soup, except that it is not made from chicken meat, but from cock testicles. Eggs and vegetables are cooked until tender. The testicles have a creamy consistency inside, they are very soft, somewhat reminiscent of tofu, but with a hard skin, like sausages.
Some compare them to boiled eggs that taste like custard. Testicles, as it turned out, have good side effects, for example, they favorably affect the skin of women and increase potency in men.
One of the most expensive soups on this list is bird's nest soup, which is made from salangana nests. This Chinese soup is a real delicacy, it can be enjoyed in some restaurants for $ 30-100 per serving. A kilogram of bird nests costs about 2 thousand dollars.
In fact, this soup is made from sticky bird saliva, from which birds mainly make up their nests. The nest dissolves in water, the soup somewhat resembles jelly. These nests have been cooked in China since ancient times, mainly in the form of soups.
Salangans build their nests in caves, and male birds do it. It takes about 35 days to build one nest. Birds weave threads from their saliva in the shape of a bowl. They say that the dish has a positive effect on human health, in particular, it helps to treat asthma, increases libido, strengthens the immune system.
In Shanghai, China, you can try deer placenta soup, which can benefit health: strengthen sexual strength, cure kidneys, improve skin condition and increase vitality. Mushrooms, flowers, and chicken are added to this soup, but the main ingredient is deer placenta, which is quite elastic and chews for a long time.
The placenta is a sac—like organ of the female body that attaches the embryo to the mother's uterus during pregnancy in most mammals. Blood passes through the placenta from the mother's body to the embryo, which delivers oxygen and nutrients to it, and also helps to remove by-products. After the baby is born, the placenta leaves the mother's body.
This soup is made from the milk of cod fish, and it is very popular in Japan, where it was named shirako soup. Milks are bags of fish sperm that are boiled in water until you get a soup with a creamy consistency, almost like custard.
"Shirako" means "white children" in translation. The dish is prepared mainly in winter, it is believed that it can increase potency if there is a certain amount of it. Some oriental restaurants prepare this dish as something special to surprise customers.
This soup might not be so terrible if its main ingredient (bats) at least cleaned of fur. On the Palau Islands in Apparently, there is a shortage of edible animals in the Pacific Ocean, so the locals do not disdain bats. The islands are home to several species of bats, those that eat insects, and those that feed on fruits.
The latter are boiled in coconut milk with ginger and other seasonings for several hours. In some restaurants, you can even choose a male or female before the poor mouse is thrown alive into boiling water. Many gourmets who decided to try this masterpiece of culinary art claim that it is great, however, if you ignore the hairy head sticking out of the plate.
There are many soups made from the genitals of animals, but this soup is the rarest and most expensive of all. Of course, because for its preparation you need to kill at least one tiger, which is punishable by death in China.
Tiger penis soup has been a special dish of Asian cuisine for centuries (which is probably why there are so few tigers there today), since the tiger penis, Asians believe, has mystical properties Viagra!
The dried penis of a poor feline is soaked in water for a week, and then simmered for a whole day with spices and medicines, sometimes together with tiger bones. One serving of this soup can cost $ 400. Despite the fact that they try to protect tigers in every possible way, their body parts still leak into the markets, but most of the products that are sold under the guise of tiger penises are actually the tendons of deer or bulls.
And finally, the strangest soup on our list, which the tongue does not dare to call soup. This is a traditional dish of Vietnamese cuisine, which is made from raw blood (usually goose blood), bird giblets, peanuts and herbs.
This soup freezes and the blood becomes thick, it is eaten chilled before the blood loses its jelly-like consistency. Presumably, soup gives strength not only to the one who eats it, but also to the one who cooks it. The soup lost popularity after avian flu became rampant in Asia. And yet many Asians continue to eat it without fear of getting infected.
Soup No. 5 also gets into the list of the strangest soups on the planet. It is prepared in some areas of Southeast Asia, and it consists of onions, carrots, meat broth, penis and testicles of a bull. This soup has also gained popularity due to its aphrodisiac properties.