Strange food, the stinkier the better! Do you agree?

When it comes to food, having the same favorite food is considered fate. But if someone eats food that is unacceptable to most people, that person must be the odd one out.

There are seven flavors - sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, salty, fresh, and tangy.

If "fragrant" is the general praise for food, then "stinky" is perhaps the highest praise for food.

The Chinese are very good at stink. In China, a lot of food to stink famous, has long been "notorious" - Hunan stinky tofu, Liuzhou snail noodles, Beijing bean juice, Guizhou folded ear root, Wuhan stinky gluten, Jiangsu and Zhejiang

 stinky amaranth stems, moldy thousand Zhang, stinky pickled eggs, stinky leaves, stinky winter melon ...... Throughout China, from vegetables, soybean products to meat, as long as they can eat, there is no can not stink.

Some food, stink to the extreme, is the real smell

The world's food culture, more or less, there will be some with the stink of food. And in the matter of eating stinky, the Chinese have gone even farther.

Stink and fragrance is a line of separation, there is a subtle critical point between the strange smell and fragrance. The extreme stench is more set off by the fragrance, extra refreshing.

China's "national snack", stinky tofu, is known for its stench.

The stinky smell of stinky tofu is actually acceptable to many people, and after frying and putting in various ingredients, most of it is actually covered up. The stink of stinky tofu varies from place to place. In Huizhou, stinky tofu is fried in canola oil to produce the peculiar effect of "smelling slightly foul, but smelling strange in the mouth".

There is an ancestral method of fermenting stinky tofu with fungus strains that is well known in the area. The stinky tofu originates from the stinky brine vat a hundred years ago, and the old brine is so fresh and mellow that it produces "stinky tofu sashimi" - the stinky tofu that is fished out of the stinky brine vat and dipped in soy sauce can be stuffed into your mouth.

The proteins in tofu in the brine, decomposed into amino acids, presenting a fresh flavor. Stinky is the excessive accumulation of various amino acids. Chinese stinky tofu is fresh. The wonderful thing about stinky tofu is that the freshness is overly rich and layered with an endless aftertaste.

The reasoning behind the addiction to snail noodles and the love of stinky tofu is the same.

As we all know, there is a threshold for consuming snail noodles. Its smell is very recognizable, some people say it is a strange odor, after eating snail noodles from the hair to the soles of the feet will be filled with a smell of shit, dogs are disgusted; but some people think it 

is fresh and fragrant, a meal does not want to panic. It's easy to find a snail noodle store on the streets of any city, as long as you smell a strong sour smell, then there must be a snail noodle store a few hundred meters around.

The stench of snail noodles is mainly in the sour bamboo shoots. The high content of valeraldehyde and other substances in the sour bamboo shoots can give off a faint putrid smell.

There is also the very famous Beijing bean juice, which is also stinky with a special flavor.

Doujuer is a unique Beijing specialty. It is made by taking out the starch from mung beans and making vermicelli or dumplings, and then boiling the light greenish broth after fermentation, which is, frankly speaking, the 

offcuts of making mung bean vermicelli. The boiled bean juice is thick and silky, similar to sesame paste, and smells sour and fresh. It is said that as early as the Qianlong period, the bean juice has been introduced to the royal family.

If you have never had bean juice, you have not been to Beijing. When the famous singer Leslie Cheung was alive, he came to Beijing to look for bean juice and drank sweat all over his head. It seems that there are still a lot of celebrities who are good at eating stinky things.

Where do people like to eat smelly food?

Growing up in the coastal areas of China, Ningbo people not only like to eat seafood, but also love "stink", and there is even the saying "a stink is worth three fresh".

"Ningbo Three Odors" are stinky amaranth stalks, stinky winter melon, and stinky taro cores. Jiangsu and Zhejiang delicacies emphasize the combination of salty and fresh. The biggest feature of "Three Odors" is that it smells sour and tastes delicious. 

 "Ningbo Sanqi" is similar to "Sour" and "Huizhou Ermei" (stinky mandarin fish, hairy tofu) in Southwest China, as well as Shaoxing's moldy tofu, moldy sheets, and moldy bamboo shoots, but the flavor is still different.

Just like stinky winter melon. Stinky wax gourd is a famous traditional dish of the Han nationality in Ningbo, Zhejiang. East Zhejiang is close to the East China Sea, and there are abundant seafood. In the early 

years, there was no refrigeration equipment, and the seafood was easily spoiled after landing. Therefore, fishermen had to salt a lot of fresh goods to make salty goods. Because local residents have been dealing with these salty and fishy seafood for a long 

time, they are not only accustomed to smelly food, but also have a preference for it. There is a folk proverb in Ningbo, "Winter melon pickled in sesame oil and old wine", which is a good product for folks to cook rice in the morning.

The locals said: "The stinky winter melon is best eaten in summer. It must be a little bit cool just out of the refrigerator, and then add a few drops of rapeseed oil. The winter melon must be fermented to be moderately soft and hard. It melts. It tastes soft, fragrant and smelly."

Smelly amaranth stalks are also called moldy vegetable stalks, and the locals call them "rice-pressing hammers", and Chen Xiaoqing called them "the most stinky vegetable in China".

In fact, amaranth itself is not smelly. The locals cut the stalks of amaranth, add salt evenly, put them in jars and seal them for fermentation. After fermentation, a white, sticky liquid will be produced. This amaranth It became quite stinky. the

It's a pity, it is said that many Ningbo people don't eat "three stinky" anymore.

The moldy thousand sheets on the table were dark yellow in color, and a musty, thick bean fragrance came to the face, rising with the curling heat. If you take a chopstick into your mouth, before you chew it carefully, the thousand slices will turn into a ball of slightly sour, musty, glutinous, warm fresh air, filling the tongue.

In addition, the weather and seasons have different requirements for water consumption, heat preservation, and mold time. Sometimes even if the first few steps are in place, the bad ones that come out just don’t work, or the smell is so bad, which eventually leads to a failure. This has also become the technical bottleneck of "can only be felt, not expressed" in the production of Mei Qianzhang.

Choose the best thousand sheets, soak them in water for two hours, and then ferment naturally in a water tank or a bowl. These seemingly simple steps must adapt to the season and environment without any mistakes.

I heard from others that the food in Shaoxing is the smelliest. When Shaoxing's "Three Molds and Three Odors" were served on the table, my friend jokingly asked, "Do you really want to eat it? Do you dare to eat it?"

Amaranth stalks as thick as sugar cane, Jiang Xun bit into his mouth, a mouthful of fibers, covered with green mold, terribly smelly. There are also rotten eggs-chicks hatch half-dead eggs in them, and when they are taken out, people are almost fainted by the stink.

If a nation is not old enough, it will not know how to eat bad food. The smell is actually because the food is so scarce that it rots in the end, and he still has to eat it. Inside that stink is actually another expectation of a culture, that is, in the most rotten part, it still hopes that the part of life that can be beautiful...

The psychology of food odor: Why do some people just love the smell?

For ordinary people, when they smell food smelly, the alarm bells will go off in their hearts, and their brains will convey the instructions that the food is spoiled and forbidden to eat. But why do some people still like to eat smelly food?

Studies have found that each person's olfactory receptors behave differently, which leads to very different reactions and acceptance of smells from person to person.

The researchers conducted a study with stinky cheese and observed through fMRI technology that when people who disliked stinky cheese smelled stinky cheese, a part of the key nodes in the brain related to 

enjoyment and motivation were not activated, that is to say, they were not interested in stinky cheese. Cheese wasn't interested; those who didn't have an aversion to stinky cheese didn't. This also explains why people respond to odors in different ways.

Food odor is also part of human nature, not anti-human nature. People like to eat stinky because "stinky" is equal to "umami".

In the process of decomposing proteins, microorganisms will produce substances such as glutamic acid, which are the source of MSG, and the taste is umami, which can make us feel happy. In addition, there are no odor receptors on the human tongue, so when people eat stinky food, their mouths will not taste stinky, but delicious.

This is why we can get fresh food at any time now, but still like to eat smelly food.

Tasting stinky food is a sublimation from taste to smell. Humans are very insensitive to odors in taste, but very sensitive to odors in smell. When the smell enters the nasal cavity from the mouth, the odor receptors 

detect thousands of volatile substances, intertwined with the signals from the taste buds in the mouth, and the smell completes a real sublimation, which is called unique flavor. There is no smelly food that is not the interconnection and complex connection of human beings' multiple senses.

There is only a thin line between fragrance and smell, just like an overturned perfume bottle, if it is too fragrant, it will become stinky. And the smell is just an overly strong fragrance. After many odors are diluted many times, what is 

produced is fragrance. Therefore, just like some people have strong taste and some have light taste, there should be great individual differences between people for the tolerance threshold of the concentration of a certain smell.

Food odor is a legacy of human evolution, which is to make human diets broad and downward, and to obtain all food resources that humans can obtain from the cruel nature.

A variety of smelly foods were developed during the process of expanding and expanding the human diet. Bitter, spicy, salty, smelly, people who can eat anything can break through the limitations of existing 

food resources and continuously develop various new food sources, thus becoming the top predators in the food chain. From this perspective, knowing how to eat stinky food is actually one of the highest realms of human diet.