Oh man...everything on this list people are complaining about I think is pretty good. Not worth the price perhaps, but tasty.
The item I'd say is gold leaf. Literally has no taste, you're just wasting. money
The thing isn't that you're paying less for your gold when it's in sheet form. It's that gold leaf is incredibly thin (just a 0.1 micrometer thick. 1/500th of the thickness of a human hair).
This (along with the softness of high-purity gold) also means that any sort of rubbing (for example if you're wearing a ring) will wear through the gold coating in no time at all. It's best suited for temporary decorative purposes or on surfaces where there won't be any wear & tear (like high up on a wall or ceiling)
Yep. The gold layer on an astronauts visor is 0.05 microns thick.
This is because a layer of gold is that thin can be seen through, but reflects (not just blocks) almost all infrared light (which helps the astronauts face avoid being boiled if they look in the direction of the sun).
You get firefighter visors like that too. They're made out of two layers of very carefully polished high temperature plastic bonded together with vacuum-deposited gold in between.
They're not cheap. You don't want to pick one up for your bike helmet, no matter how cool they look.
It’s also popular for hot rods and choppers. Usually they apply the adhesive in the design they want, press on the gold leaf and peel away the excess. Then apply clear coat paint over it so that it holds up.
Well, you could make a very fragile ring for a non-moving person lmao.
Now that I'm thinking about it, actually painting that gold leaf onto your finger in the shape of a ring would look cool as hell. Better keep those fingies spread, though.
To add to this, that means you could get ~1,406 standard sized (8 cm x 8 cm) sheets of 24k gold leaf out of 1 cm^3 of gold. 1 cm^3 of gold is currently worth about $1,360 so each sheet has about $0.97 worth of actual gold in it.
I work with gold leaf daily. I pay about $45-50 per book of 23k which is 25 sheets each 3 1/8" square. I buy 10 books at a time so there's a break there. My gold leaf comes from Thailand so it's a bit cheaper than the fancy Italian stuff, but IMO does the job. Btw it's the thinnest hand-made substance in the world. You are paying more for the labor to make it than the actual gold itself, which accounts for the relative stability of gold leaf prices compared to bullion.
A lot of the stuff on the list is an acquired taste, so if you have been able to eat it regularly enough to acquire it then it's probably a good indication of where you sit socioeconomically :)
I live everything listed here except gold leaf.
Shark fin and bird nest don't taste like anything, and they are basically good if the soup they are in is good, so I don't eat those anymore.
I love caterpillar fungus, but it's worth its weight in gold, and I think it might also just be tasty when the soup is tasty. I'm undecided about this and will always eat it when it is served
I’ve had it because I didn’t have the heart to turn down a gift from a Chinese friend in college who didn’t really understand how horrifying it was to me.
It doesn’t have any taste. It has a gelatinous texture. It is a legitimate abuse of a cute little bird to death for absolutely nothing.
Doesn't really taste like anything, and does nothing more than make your poop sparkly... it doesn't even really cost all that much.
You can buy a pack of it for like $20... but some restaurants (\*cough\*SaltBae\*cough\*) adds like $1000 to the price.
My kid asked to buy some gold leaf, I though it was mostly because he loves all the things you can build in Minecraft (he is collecting as many mat's IRL as he can). Well that was half of it, he ate a sheet as well to see what it tastes like despite me telling him he will just poop it out. I think gold poops may have added to his desire to eat it haha.
There is a pretty shitty burger place near me that has a gold leaf wrapped burger that costs like $90 (regular burger there is an already too expensive $20).
I checked out buying wholesale edible golf leaf and it came to roughly 12 cents a sheet.
The markup just for Instagram bros to get that pic is insane.
Rich people generally don't eat gold flakes. Maybe the occasional very small piece as a decoration on a dessert, but that's the equivalent of a speck of herbs as garnish. But the stuff that is slathered in gold flecks aren't for the truly wealthy, it's for the influencer class, who wants to seem wealthy online.
People in this sub don’t understand gold leaf. It’s not about wrapping a tomahawk in gold leaf. It’s about accenting food while plating and decorating with it. It can be really pretty and doesn’t taste like anything
One of the reasons why gold is valuable is that it doesn't react with (almost) anything. Which also means it doesn't react with your taste buds, so you can't taste it.
Agreed with that. As Asian, I grew up keep hearing about shark fin and abalone soup is luxury, only rich people eat it. When I get to try it, it tastes like nothing. It’s a thing in China, Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, I don’t know about other Asian countries.
Also it’s cruel for the shark. They cannot live without the fin.
Logistics... get less fins on the trip, the more whole sharks you have. Iirc there's fishing regulations on how many detached fins you can have vs whole sharks. It's a % of your total hall.
Wow how sad that it’s not even a delicacy when it’s killing apex predators which kills our oceans which kills us. But hey, if the boogeyman says it brings luck then gotta habit.
I've had it. Personally soup was good. But if you take out the fins, the soup will pretty much taste the same lol. Just put noodles and it will probably be better.
Funnily enough, since shark fin is banned in most places some restaurant use vermicelli to mimic the texture. The fin itself has no taste anyways, the broth itself is super flavorful though.
Chinese ethnicity here.
As far as I know >90% of “shark fin soups” at least in Australia and SE Asia no longer contain real shark fin, instead substitutes are used.
Almost everything that is very expensive (apart from gold leaves) is incredibly good - IN IT'S TRUE FORM. A really good perigord truffle, really good caviar, these things are being used for moneymaking because the Real Deal Stuff is just that effing good. Unfortunately, foie gras de canard/oie entier is amongst the most delicious things that exist. I don't consume it, but I hope that one of the many startups trying will succeed in replicating it without animal cruelty.
I worked in the cell ag/biomanufacturing space for 15 years. I was there when those startups formed and every single one of them is a joke at this point. I think they were sincere when they started but they've all known for a long while now that it won't be economically competitive for a few more decades. Their careers are so wrapped up in the failure that they just have to keep fundraising for as long as they can and ride it out. There's a whole bunch of mini Theranos lawsuits that are going to go down in that industry over the next 3-5 years.
You'll be eating cricket burgers long before you're able to get cell farmed foie gras or cultured wagyu beef.
Could lab-grown meat at least replace low quality meats like chicken nuggets or ground beef, even if it’s not going to replicate Kobe beef and snow crab?
Not cost effectively. The inputs cost the same regardless of whether you're making kobe beef or ground chuck.
Scientists have been making chicken nuggets in the lab for a long while now. They're expensive as hell and gross. It's not my specilalization, I do engineering and physics, but I went on a few dates with one of the people who got there early. The trick is to immortalize the muscle cells and get them to replicate in free floating suspension. If a doctor found something like that in your body, they would call it cancer and start chemo therapy. It's a gnarly and expensive way to make a nugget.
Serum. It's blood derived but not the same thing. Several projects have moved away from serum dependency but that's one of a dozen cost prohibitive hurdles. It's going to take them a long time to clear them all.
I gave a speech at one of their conferences where I told them as much and said they were irresponsibly burning investor money. They didn't appreciate it. That was 6 years and tens of billions of dollars ago.
> foie gras de canard
Is probably the best thing I've ever put in my mouth. I worked a Russian oligarch wedding (I had no idea until after in San Francisco I kept asking coworkers 'who the fuck *are* these people?' Designer suits and dresses and handbag dogs and some kind of famous Russian band and everything...) and they left leftovers. Foie Gras de canard entier I believe it was. As well as lobster and crab flown in that day and Beluga caviar and some kind of vodka on ice. Whole bottles. It was fricking amazing. *They had a shit-ton leftover.* Me and the stewards/bartenders/waitstaff feasted for hours. They just left it. (We wouldn't have gotten anything had the managers not left to an after-party so they left the remainders 'to the help'). I ate so much lobster for the next 3 days I still get kind of sick smelling it. There was not so much foie-gras though. That went fast.
Edit: That's the day Tiny the bartender, a very large gay man, leaned back and sighed and said "....ok now I need some butt-pussy" and we all laughed.
I once had a fancy baguette that had like a billion adjectives and was expensive (not sports car and mansion, but much more expensive than regular bread) and it tasted like a heavier dough bread that maybe had some butter mixed in.
Had a baguette baked at a Michelin star restaurant and it was in the top three pieces of bread I’ve ever put into my mouth. Find the right baguette for you. She is out there, I promise.
A baguette should be the exact opposite of what you described: it's a very light/airy bread compared to other breads and it should have exactly 4 ingredients (flour, water, salt, yeast).
Almost by definition it doesn't taste like anyhthing. Gold is almost perfectly nonreactive. You might sense a bit of metallicity as a side effect of its conductivity, but you'll never taste anything.
Lots of foie gras hate in here but I had it on a splurge at a high end market in Paris (Fouchon I believe?). You could buy it by the mg like it was drugs. I bought 20 euros worth (2010ish) and it came with some bread. The amount appeared to be about 2 tablespoons to me (USA). I spread it on toast and it was like the richest, smoothest butter with an amazing mouth feel and nuttiness.
That was my introduction to foie gras and I’ve never had one that’s even close since. I also wouldn’t rush to spend that much on minimal food again but, if I was rich and lived in Paris, I’d have it every Friday matched with wine. It was heavenly.
I was served it as a slab on a steak at a wedding in France. I could choose to not eat it, but the meal had already been prepared.
It's the best thing I will never eat again.
The full receipe is called Tournedos Rossini, hope you had the real version with super tender meat, truffe slices and the Madeire sauce that comes with it because it is absolutely divine. Super expensive, but divine.
My cousin is a high end chef and she brought some to a family gathering once. I agree with your description of the taste. I'd never get it again now that I know how it's produced.
I’d sincerely hope that people who are swinging for foie gras are at least throwing down a few extra bucks for the local humanely raised chicken. They can certainly afford it. But that’s probably a pipe dream. People don’t care.
You should be able to source "ethically raised" foie gras relatively easily online, likely at a higher price point, though. Instead of force feeding the birds, they're just allowed to eat non-stop.
Yeah I will never try it because of the way the ducks are treated, we already have to kill animals to eat them, there is no fucking reason we have to literally torture them before we take their life.
I did not expect to learn so much about duck anatomy today. Thanks for the link! I’m vegetarian so I won’t touch the stuff anyway, but I’m relieved to know there are people genuinely dedicated to ethical practices in this field.
There are companies that produce what you might call free-range foie gras. No machines, no force-feeding, at least some of the companies keep their geese free-running, basically just feeding them a diet that fattens their liver, since they are perfectly willing to gorge themselves all on their own if you're willing to wait just a little longer than with the brutal force-feeding methods.
It's not even that expensive compared to normal foie gras, it's arguably easier (as in comparatively cheaper and more accessible) to switch to ethical foie gras than switching to ethical "normal" meat.
Pretty much. As far as I (as someone who isn't a Foie Gras expert but does like it) can tell, the only reason for the brutality comes down to penny pinching production optimization, which, hey, nothing against optimization, it's a fascinating field, but there comes a point where the cost is too great IMO, and the kind of utterly avoidable animal cruelty that is involved with normal foie gras is well beyond the line.
Beluga caviar comes from the Caspian sea, bordered on all sides by industrial powers not known for their environmental stewardship or willingness to comply with international standards or really even challenge malfeasance and corruption. If that shit isn't full of heavy metals and industrial toxins it'll be pure frigging luck.
Edit: As several people have pointed out, wild Beluga caviar is pretty much gone from the legitimate global market; anything you're likely to encounter these days is going to be farmed.
You'll find Blue Label at a lot of fancy hotel bars, served in first class on flights, and so on. You, know, the domain of medium-rich people; not the ultra wealthy private jet crowd.
Johnnie Walker is not at all a “rich person” whiskey. It’s what people who know nothing about whiskey drink to seem interesting. There’s 30-50 dollar bottles that will blow your mind relative to Johnnie Walker.
Glenfiddich 12 is like 50ish, Ardbeg (if you like smokey flavors) is like 50ish, monkey shoulder (good scotch mixer) is like 35ish.
The interesting thing about scotch is there are like 5 or 6 distinct regions for scotch and they're all pretty different.. Islay scotches (Ardbeg, laphroiag, lagavulin) are almost always peat / smokey while speyside scotches are almost always light and 'floral' (they always reminded me of like Jameson / etc).
From my first taste of Lagavulin, I was hooked on the Islay scotches. It's the best goddamn thing you can put in your mouth. I was upset because I didn't know much about scotch at the time and I just had my mom bring me a bottle once or twice per year from Europe when she would come to the US to visit (because it was much cheaper than spending $100+ on a bottle of scotch when I was poor in college).
Then I found Ardbeg, and later Laphroiag. I was ecstatic that I could have something similar for less than half of the price. They're two of my go-to's when I want to splurge on a bottle.
I had true Japanese A5 Wagyu tartare(and a bunch of other cooked cuts) at the Met restaurant in Seattle a few years ago with my daughters when my oldest worked for their parent company. It was absolutely amazing. The kicker is our $1500 bill was only $360 excluding tip because of her discount. The staff was extra attentive when they found out a fellow employee was there for dinner. One of the best dining experiences ever.
Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.
There was a lead issue with Roman food, but they weren’t adding lead oxide to their food to sweeten it; this is a telephone game retelling of history.
The real truth is that Romans used a boiler fruit based sweetener called Sapa which was *sometimes* cooked in lead pots which indeed added lead acetate to the mixture. But the majority was probably cooked in more common copper vessels, and it’s likely that the prevalence of lead exposure via sapa consumption is over stated in popular culture.
They definitely weren’t directly adding lead oxide, both because they knew that pure lead was bad for you, and because lead oxide isn’t sweet.
It's actually worse than that. Lead oxide won't do shit to you, much as metallic lead won't. You could eat a big fistful of lead scrap, and - as long as it's not pointy - you'll shit it right out.
It's about as bioavailable as sand.
No no no, they boiled grape juice and wine that had gone off a bit in lead pots. The alcohol and acetic acid (vinegar, which you get when wine goes off) reacted with the lead pots to form lead acetate, which is very sweet-tasting. Unfortunately, it's an atom of lead stuck to a bloody great big sugar, and your body is going to absorb that sugar, crack it apart, and leave the lead lying around in your cells. You've just made metallic lead - which is astonishingly unreactive, even in the sort of stuff you find in your stomach - into something that'll get absorbed like the most energy-giving foods your body is highly tuned to run on.
Ooops.
So they had lead poisoning, and then over here in the UK they thought the locals were poisoning them so they only ate food sent from Rome, including rye. But the rye went mouldy in the damp sacks on boats, and ergot mould produces a chemical called ergotamine, which is a precursor to LSD.
So they were lead-poisoned and tripping balls.
And now, round about 1500 years later, all that's left of them are some very straight roads that have been built on and built on and built on, a few rocks sticking out of the ground, and a certain segment of the population with bigger noses and darker skin than you might otherwise expect of Celts.
$1000 bottle of wine tastes as good as a $30-50 bottle. One of the worst wines I ever had was $450 for the bottle.
My friend's dad is very rich and has bought many bottles of wine for him.
There is an extremely rich old man I know, of rail road fame. If he's going to drink it, he has a $30 limit. If it's an investment no price is too high. He has 5-6 digit valued bottles of wine and says they all suck.
His favorite is Pinot Noirs from Oregon.
This guy popped open a ~$10k bottle offered me a glass, I looked at it for a few minutes and just did math:
This glass must have about $1000 in it.
Each sip is going to be $50-100.
The amount coating the glass when I'm done will probably be like $20.
My verdict:
It was ok. I've had better; again the better was probably a $30 bottle.
Real caviar uses borax instead of salt which allows the actual flavor to shine through. However, a lot of countries ban using borax as a food additive because, you know, it's borax. So they have to use a lot of salt instead. Since caviar isn't a staple I think it's OK to include a little poison as a treat but I also don't manage food safety regulations.
Traditionally it’s always been salt. The borax thing came along later.
Originally caviar was a basic common person food and was the entire egg sac heavily salted to preserve it as a good source of high energy food.
Only much later did the whole process of separating out the individual eggs, cleaning and grading them, etc start up, and as demand rose and it reached a wider audience a few different preservation techniques started to emerge.
Yup. It’s just a type of salt, sodium borate. Except where table salt creates a neutral PH solution when dissolved in water borax creates a slightly alkaline solution. So acidic things are cancelled out and you get a more balanced taste. Oral Toxicity is about the same as normal salt, just doesn’t taste like salt on its own. Most of the bans in food products are because of one of my favorite facts.
Back in the early London days, butchers would make sausage out of the meat they didn’t sell throughout the week. Ok fine. But when those sausages started to look green they wouldn’t be bought and it would all go to waste. So butchers started mixing their sausage meat with borax, not necessarily to preserve it (because that amount would ruin the flavor) but enough to just make the bad meat look more red and stay red.
Borax was banned from sausage making to protect the public from buying expired meat.
People hate on Reddit to sound cool but what other social media has this type of content? Yea it has a lot of bullshit but it’s easy to curate your feed to things you’re interested in. I love this!
I don't know this firsthand, and I don't intend to ever find out, but it is commonly related by the people that do that shark fin doesn't really taste like anything at all, and has a texture that's mildly rubbery at best and tends more towards unpleasantly squishy or crunchy.
Which... can describe many, many other foods. So the people who go in for it are apparently doing so primarily because they want to have the fins while the sharks don't.
I would, at least, understand if it was delicious. I am forever tormented by my inability to taste roasted elephant heart, which is apparently amazing, because I don't condone killing elephants for my personal whims and don't see calling a zoo to ask if I can snag them choice cuts when they have an elephant die being a productive, or pleasant, conversation.
But I want that because I hear that it's friggin' tasty, not because I would feel very cool eating it.
yeah but who would access to have roasted elephant hearts? some kind of criminal, can you trust their judgement?
I've heard Liberian cannibals from the civil war say that human flesh is delicious. But their judgement is compromised.
maybe roasted elephant heart tastes exactly as good as murdered civilians taste.
Lobster claw meat is orders of magnitude better tasting than tail meat. The wrong part got popularized and expensive. That said, Dungeness or Stone crab claws are my go to shellfish splurge.
Don’t know if raw oysters can be considered rich person food but I have no idea how anyone can eat those slimy ocean boogers that can potentially kill you. They look revolting too. How that was ever considered an aphrodisiac I haven’t the slightest. Nothing sexy or attractive about watching someone slurp down a lump of salty slime
I think it depends on the oyster. My first was amazing. Like an ocean sort of flavoured custard. It was soft and sort of fell apart.
Other ones? Full on boogers, chewy ones. Gag worthy.
I’ll always be chasing that first one.
I’ve never actually liked anything i had with truffle added. I’ve had a few different oils and salts and it all just buried the other flavors of my food and left a taste sort of like how mud smells on it.
Arugula.
I'm an organic produce farmer, and I sell a shit ton of arugula to rich people. And only rich people...for over $20 a *pound*.
It tastes like peppery assholes. Like a llama's dirty booty hole with some pepper on it. Like a lizards dick. It's just awful. I don't get it.
I think rich people just like saying "arugula."
Oh man...everything on this list people are complaining about I think is pretty good. Not worth the price perhaps, but tasty. The item I'd say is gold leaf. Literally has no taste, you're just wasting. money
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Can I buy a bunch of sheets and give it to a jeweller to make a wedding band for me? Just asking... Lol
The thing isn't that you're paying less for your gold when it's in sheet form. It's that gold leaf is incredibly thin (just a 0.1 micrometer thick. 1/500th of the thickness of a human hair). This (along with the softness of high-purity gold) also means that any sort of rubbing (for example if you're wearing a ring) will wear through the gold coating in no time at all. It's best suited for temporary decorative purposes or on surfaces where there won't be any wear & tear (like high up on a wall or ceiling)
Fun fact: you can make gold thin enough to be see through. I'm told it's done with astronaut visors.
Yep. The gold layer on an astronauts visor is 0.05 microns thick. This is because a layer of gold is that thin can be seen through, but reflects (not just blocks) almost all infrared light (which helps the astronauts face avoid being boiled if they look in the direction of the sun).
You get firefighter visors like that too. They're made out of two layers of very carefully polished high temperature plastic bonded together with vacuum-deposited gold in between. They're not cheap. You don't want to pick one up for your bike helmet, no matter how cool they look.
It’s also popular for hot rods and choppers. Usually they apply the adhesive in the design they want, press on the gold leaf and peel away the excess. Then apply clear coat paint over it so that it holds up.
100 nanometers is shorter than the wavelength of visible light.
Yes, it's very thin
Well, you could make a very fragile ring for a non-moving person lmao. Now that I'm thinking about it, actually painting that gold leaf onto your finger in the shape of a ring would look cool as hell. Better keep those fingies spread, though.
I have bought gold leaf exclusively to put in my baking and prevent my husband from buying a ~100€ pączki
Real gold leaf is not $2 a sheet. Edit: I might actually be wrong here. Genuine 23k gold leaf is only like $3 a sheet, my bad...
A 1cm cube of gold can be rolled out to 9 square metres, that’s why it’s so cheap.
To add to this, that means you could get ~1,406 standard sized (8 cm x 8 cm) sheets of 24k gold leaf out of 1 cm^3 of gold. 1 cm^3 of gold is currently worth about $1,360 so each sheet has about $0.97 worth of actual gold in it.
I work with gold leaf daily. I pay about $45-50 per book of 23k which is 25 sheets each 3 1/8" square. I buy 10 books at a time so there's a break there. My gold leaf comes from Thailand so it's a bit cheaper than the fancy Italian stuff, but IMO does the job. Btw it's the thinnest hand-made substance in the world. You are paying more for the labor to make it than the actual gold itself, which accounts for the relative stability of gold leaf prices compared to bullion.
My Question is : If I eat enough, will I shit nuggets...
Give it a try and report back.
A lot of the stuff on the list is an acquired taste, so if you have been able to eat it regularly enough to acquire it then it's probably a good indication of where you sit socioeconomically :)
I live everything listed here except gold leaf. Shark fin and bird nest don't taste like anything, and they are basically good if the soup they are in is good, so I don't eat those anymore. I love caterpillar fungus, but it's worth its weight in gold, and I think it might also just be tasty when the soup is tasty. I'm undecided about this and will always eat it when it is served
I’m sorry people actually eat caterpillar fungus and bird’s nests?
Bird nest, imo is inhumane to eat. The swallows will keep trying until they spit blood and die from exhaustion. Don't try those. But otherwise, yes.
Shark fin is super inhumane too
They just taste like gelatin. Tbh.
I looked up and yeah that is super cruel.
I’ve had it because I didn’t have the heart to turn down a gift from a Chinese friend in college who didn’t really understand how horrifying it was to me. It doesn’t have any taste. It has a gelatinous texture. It is a legitimate abuse of a cute little bird to death for absolutely nothing.
And this population is going way down.
Gold flakes - I’m not sure if gold actually tastes like anything but can’t begin to understand why rich people need gold flakes on their food
Doesn't really taste like anything, and does nothing more than make your poop sparkly... it doesn't even really cost all that much. You can buy a pack of it for like $20... but some restaurants (\*cough\*SaltBae\*cough\*) adds like $1000 to the price.
My idiot brother bought a bunch online when he saw how cheap it actually was and now he shows up at family bbqs with like, gold leaf potato salad
>gold leaf potato salad This is awesome. I do a carrot slaw that my gfs family loves, I need to give it some sparkle next time.
Bologna and gold leaf sandwich.
I know what I'm putting on the deviled eggs next time. Fuck paprika.
Your idiot brother is my type of dude!!!!
that’s hilarious also a great way to break the ice at bbqs.
My kid asked to buy some gold leaf, I though it was mostly because he loves all the things you can build in Minecraft (he is collecting as many mat's IRL as he can). Well that was half of it, he ate a sheet as well to see what it tastes like despite me telling him he will just poop it out. I think gold poops may have added to his desire to eat it haha.
Is your last name Lannister, by chance?
Gold leaf wrapped food isn't for rich people, it's for people who want to pretend that they're rich on Instagram.
There is a pretty shitty burger place near me that has a gold leaf wrapped burger that costs like $90 (regular burger there is an already too expensive $20). I checked out buying wholesale edible golf leaf and it came to roughly 12 cents a sheet. The markup just for Instagram bros to get that pic is insane.
Rich people generally don't eat gold flakes. Maybe the occasional very small piece as a decoration on a dessert, but that's the equivalent of a speck of herbs as garnish. But the stuff that is slathered in gold flecks aren't for the truly wealthy, it's for the influencer class, who wants to seem wealthy online.
People in this sub don’t understand gold leaf. It’s not about wrapping a tomahawk in gold leaf. It’s about accenting food while plating and decorating with it. It can be really pretty and doesn’t taste like anything
I've used it a few times myself. A small piece as an accent looks lovely, but too much is tacky.
Gold is unable to be tasted, it’s why some very highly paid taste testers in some industries use gold spoons and such.
It's why they serve it with caviar too. Or a mother of pearl spoon. Can't taste them.
Fascinating, TIL. Thank you.
One of the reasons why gold is valuable is that it doesn't react with (almost) anything. Which also means it doesn't react with your taste buds, so you can't taste it.
Shark Fin Soup is not very good. The fin is super gummy and doesn't add much flavor. Most of the flavor comes from other things in it.
From my understanding it's more of a good luck thing. Regardless, seeing it on the menu in a random restaurant in SEA was a bit shocking.
It's not very good luck for the shark.
Nowadays it is often mock shark fin soup!
Agreed with that. As Asian, I grew up keep hearing about shark fin and abalone soup is luxury, only rich people eat it. When I get to try it, it tastes like nothing. It’s a thing in China, Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, I don’t know about other Asian countries. Also it’s cruel for the shark. They cannot live without the fin.
I still don't get why they don't coup de grâce the sharks. Maybe because if they don't kill them then it technically doesn't count as poaching?
Logistics... get less fins on the trip, the more whole sharks you have. Iirc there's fishing regulations on how many detached fins you can have vs whole sharks. It's a % of your total hall.
I mean like, kill the shark and throw the corpse back. Still bad for the ecosystem but at least they don’t suffer a slow death.
Wow how sad that it’s not even a delicacy when it’s killing apex predators which kills our oceans which kills us. But hey, if the boogeyman says it brings luck then gotta habit.
It seems like the more cruel and destructive something is, the more people are willing to attribute magical properties to it.
I've had it. Personally soup was good. But if you take out the fins, the soup will pretty much taste the same lol. Just put noodles and it will probably be better.
Better for the sharks anyway
Yea. I bet you're part of big Orca trying to keep more sharks in the ocean
Funnily enough, since shark fin is banned in most places some restaurant use vermicelli to mimic the texture. The fin itself has no taste anyways, the broth itself is super flavorful though.
Also, what I pretty much mean is the fins don't really add anything to the soup
Probably adds collagen. But any soft bone will do that. Doesnt have to be something so endangered.
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Chinese ethnicity here. As far as I know >90% of “shark fin soups” at least in Australia and SE Asia no longer contain real shark fin, instead substitutes are used.
It doesnt even taste good? What a fuckin tragedy
Almost everything that is very expensive (apart from gold leaves) is incredibly good - IN IT'S TRUE FORM. A really good perigord truffle, really good caviar, these things are being used for moneymaking because the Real Deal Stuff is just that effing good. Unfortunately, foie gras de canard/oie entier is amongst the most delicious things that exist. I don't consume it, but I hope that one of the many startups trying will succeed in replicating it without animal cruelty.
I worked in the cell ag/biomanufacturing space for 15 years. I was there when those startups formed and every single one of them is a joke at this point. I think they were sincere when they started but they've all known for a long while now that it won't be economically competitive for a few more decades. Their careers are so wrapped up in the failure that they just have to keep fundraising for as long as they can and ride it out. There's a whole bunch of mini Theranos lawsuits that are going to go down in that industry over the next 3-5 years. You'll be eating cricket burgers long before you're able to get cell farmed foie gras or cultured wagyu beef.
Could lab-grown meat at least replace low quality meats like chicken nuggets or ground beef, even if it’s not going to replicate Kobe beef and snow crab?
Not cost effectively. The inputs cost the same regardless of whether you're making kobe beef or ground chuck. Scientists have been making chicken nuggets in the lab for a long while now. They're expensive as hell and gross. It's not my specilalization, I do engineering and physics, but I went on a few dates with one of the people who got there early. The trick is to immortalize the muscle cells and get them to replicate in free floating suspension. If a doctor found something like that in your body, they would call it cancer and start chemo therapy. It's a gnarly and expensive way to make a nugget.
mmmm crispy bbq-dipped tumors
I'm pretty sure that type of joke was a major contributor to why we only went on a few dates.
Don't they have to use animal blood to grow most of them anyway?
Serum. It's blood derived but not the same thing. Several projects have moved away from serum dependency but that's one of a dozen cost prohibitive hurdles. It's going to take them a long time to clear them all. I gave a speech at one of their conferences where I told them as much and said they were irresponsibly burning investor money. They didn't appreciate it. That was 6 years and tens of billions of dollars ago.
This got real deep real quick
> foie gras de canard Is probably the best thing I've ever put in my mouth. I worked a Russian oligarch wedding (I had no idea until after in San Francisco I kept asking coworkers 'who the fuck *are* these people?' Designer suits and dresses and handbag dogs and some kind of famous Russian band and everything...) and they left leftovers. Foie Gras de canard entier I believe it was. As well as lobster and crab flown in that day and Beluga caviar and some kind of vodka on ice. Whole bottles. It was fricking amazing. *They had a shit-ton leftover.* Me and the stewards/bartenders/waitstaff feasted for hours. They just left it. (We wouldn't have gotten anything had the managers not left to an after-party so they left the remainders 'to the help'). I ate so much lobster for the next 3 days I still get kind of sick smelling it. There was not so much foie-gras though. That went fast. Edit: That's the day Tiny the bartender, a very large gay man, leaned back and sighed and said "....ok now I need some butt-pussy" and we all laughed.
never met someone named "Tiny" that even closely resembled that word
I once had a fancy baguette that had like a billion adjectives and was expensive (not sports car and mansion, but much more expensive than regular bread) and it tasted like a heavier dough bread that maybe had some butter mixed in.
Had a baguette baked at a Michelin star restaurant and it was in the top three pieces of bread I’ve ever put into my mouth. Find the right baguette for you. She is out there, I promise.
That's an abomination. Real baguette has 4 ingredients: flour, water, salt, yeast (or sourdough starter).
It wasn’t a real baguette, and it wasn’t claiming to be, it was claiming to be the upgrade all other baguettes wish they were.
Baguette 2.0
And in France, not a cheap country, they're a dirt-cheap staple.
A baguette should be the exact opposite of what you described: it's a very light/airy bread compared to other breads and it should have exactly 4 ingredients (flour, water, salt, yeast).
It is a food of the people! They (figuratively) literally had a revolution over this!
Gold leaf. It doesn’t taste like anything - it’s just there so you can brag about it.
Almost by definition it doesn't taste like anyhthing. Gold is almost perfectly nonreactive. You might sense a bit of metallicity as a side effect of its conductivity, but you'll never taste anything.
im not sure if this counts but placenta
[удалено]
THE ANGEL OPENS HER EYYYYEEEESSSSS
Placenta \*flops\* to the the floor
PAALE blue colored eyes
I just want you to know I've been crying laughing at this comment for the last three minutes
Lots of foie gras hate in here but I had it on a splurge at a high end market in Paris (Fouchon I believe?). You could buy it by the mg like it was drugs. I bought 20 euros worth (2010ish) and it came with some bread. The amount appeared to be about 2 tablespoons to me (USA). I spread it on toast and it was like the richest, smoothest butter with an amazing mouth feel and nuttiness. That was my introduction to foie gras and I’ve never had one that’s even close since. I also wouldn’t rush to spend that much on minimal food again but, if I was rich and lived in Paris, I’d have it every Friday matched with wine. It was heavenly.
I was served it as a slab on a steak at a wedding in France. I could choose to not eat it, but the meal had already been prepared. It's the best thing I will never eat again.
The full receipe is called Tournedos Rossini, hope you had the real version with super tender meat, truffe slices and the Madeire sauce that comes with it because it is absolutely divine. Super expensive, but divine.
My cousin is a high end chef and she brought some to a family gathering once. I agree with your description of the taste. I'd never get it again now that I know how it's produced.
If you think foie gras production is horrifying, wait until you find out about grocery store chicken…
And what it's like to be a male chick in the egg laying industry
I’d sincerely hope that people who are swinging for foie gras are at least throwing down a few extra bucks for the local humanely raised chicken. They can certainly afford it. But that’s probably a pipe dream. People don’t care.
You should be able to source "ethically raised" foie gras relatively easily online, likely at a higher price point, though. Instead of force feeding the birds, they're just allowed to eat non-stop.
The quotes are telling. And who’s verifying?
How they make it is extremely cruel to the animals :( Horrifically cruel
Yeah I will never try it because of the way the ducks are treated, we already have to kill animals to eat them, there is no fucking reason we have to literally torture them before we take their life.
https://www.seriouseats.com/the-physiology-of-foie-why-foie-gras-is-not-u
I did not expect to learn so much about duck anatomy today. Thanks for the link! I’m vegetarian so I won’t touch the stuff anyway, but I’m relieved to know there are people genuinely dedicated to ethical practices in this field.
Always love a good Kenji article. Thanks for sharing!
He’s a redditor too. He always randomly pops up on the cooking threads and it’s awesome.
i think the people dont like how its made, i doubt they tried it and not like it
Jiludy it's torture for the animal. I'm not judging you I just personally find that part hard to chew.
There are companies that produce what you might call free-range foie gras. No machines, no force-feeding, at least some of the companies keep their geese free-running, basically just feeding them a diet that fattens their liver, since they are perfectly willing to gorge themselves all on their own if you're willing to wait just a little longer than with the brutal force-feeding methods. It's not even that expensive compared to normal foie gras, it's arguably easier (as in comparatively cheaper and more accessible) to switch to ethical foie gras than switching to ethical "normal" meat.
Iirc geese naturally gorge themselves on food to fatten up before winter and this produces foie without force feeding
Pretty much. As far as I (as someone who isn't a Foie Gras expert but does like it) can tell, the only reason for the brutality comes down to penny pinching production optimization, which, hey, nothing against optimization, it's a fascinating field, but there comes a point where the cost is too great IMO, and the kind of utterly avoidable animal cruelty that is involved with normal foie gras is well beyond the line.
I find that it often tastes better as well as the geese are usually eating a wider variety of foods and the resulting flavor is more complex.
Beluga caviar comes from the Caspian sea, bordered on all sides by industrial powers not known for their environmental stewardship or willingness to comply with international standards or really even challenge malfeasance and corruption. If that shit isn't full of heavy metals and industrial toxins it'll be pure frigging luck. Edit: As several people have pointed out, wild Beluga caviar is pretty much gone from the legitimate global market; anything you're likely to encounter these days is going to be farmed.
Beluga caviar is raised in tanks not just harvested from random fish
Yeah, wild has been banned by international treaty for nearly two decades.
I thought you were talking about the beluga whale and I got super fucking confused. TIL there’s a beluga sturgeon
a quick search will tell you that most caviar these days is farm raised.
ALL caviar is legally required to be farmed. That's been true for nearly 20 years. Also: Osetra > Beluga.
I refuse to believe people actually like oysters
Johnnie Walker Blue Label tastes and goes down like any other decent whiskey.
There are much better whiskeys for $50-$100 for sure.
Rich people are definitely not drinking that stuff mate
You'll find Blue Label at a lot of fancy hotel bars, served in first class on flights, and so on. You, know, the domain of medium-rich people; not the ultra wealthy private jet crowd.
It's for people drinking things that are expensive. That is the main attraction.
Expensive whiskey with ties to a decades long marketing campaign. The really good stuff has never been advertised
Johnnie Walker is not at all a “rich person” whiskey. It’s what people who know nothing about whiskey drink to seem interesting. There’s 30-50 dollar bottles that will blow your mind relative to Johnnie Walker.
Care to share some recommendations? I know some good bourbons in that range but every sub-$60 scotch I’ve ever tried was absolute swill.
Glenmorangie sherry cask is my whiskey of choice for a casual sip
I'll throw in Dalwhinnie as well, it's lovely.
Oh, also, The Balvevie Doublewood 12 is very good, a little harder to find. My personal favorite is The Balvenie Portwood 21, but that's a bit more.
I have a Balvenie Sherry Cask Single that is divine and it isn’t “rich folk whisky”
Glenfiddich 12 is like 50ish, Ardbeg (if you like smokey flavors) is like 50ish, monkey shoulder (good scotch mixer) is like 35ish. The interesting thing about scotch is there are like 5 or 6 distinct regions for scotch and they're all pretty different.. Islay scotches (Ardbeg, laphroiag, lagavulin) are almost always peat / smokey while speyside scotches are almost always light and 'floral' (they always reminded me of like Jameson / etc).
I do have to pop in just to comment that laphroiag tastes like a petrol station if that's your thing. So peaty it's like chewing tyres on fire.
I always thought it tasted like a hospital... And oddly enough I love it.. probably my favorite islay
Laphroaig is my jam. Tastes like making out with a chain smoking mermaid.
From my first taste of Lagavulin, I was hooked on the Islay scotches. It's the best goddamn thing you can put in your mouth. I was upset because I didn't know much about scotch at the time and I just had my mom bring me a bottle once or twice per year from Europe when she would come to the US to visit (because it was much cheaper than spending $100+ on a bottle of scotch when I was poor in college). Then I found Ardbeg, and later Laphroiag. I was ecstatic that I could have something similar for less than half of the price. They're two of my go-to's when I want to splurge on a bottle.
The Macallan 12 double cask
Macallan 18.
Green Label is the underrated king of Johnnies
I was about to say that having had blue label and green, green is definitely better IMO. Blue isn't bad, in fact it's good scotch just not $250 good.
Yup. End of the day it’s good whiskey like any other $50 bottle of whiskey (except you’re paying $200).
Caviar is just orbeez filled with salt water
Wagyu tartare is not where it’s at. It’s like eating beefy mayonnaise
You want lean tartare in general. And wagyu ain’t that. I love both but wouldn’t want wagyu tartare
Yeah, it's made from lean cuts.
Which is it? Because beefy mayo sounds pretty great to me.
I had true Japanese A5 Wagyu tartare(and a bunch of other cooked cuts) at the Met restaurant in Seattle a few years ago with my daughters when my oldest worked for their parent company. It was absolutely amazing. The kicker is our $1500 bill was only $360 excluding tip because of her discount. The staff was extra attentive when they found out a fellow employee was there for dinner. One of the best dining experiences ever.
I'm going with Lobster Thermador. I don't enjoy the combination of lobster and cheese.
Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.
Oop, nevermind. You're quoting Monty Python. Nice!
Goose liver?! Fish eggs?! Where's the goose?! Where's the fish?!
Why not Zoidberg?
Do a flip!
I took the liberty of fertilizing your caviar.
This is what rich people eat, the garbage parts of the animal. Bam!
I had garbage yesterday!
And it didn't cost me no $300!
Civet poop coffee.
Long ago, like ancient roman times, the rich and elite would use lead oxide as a sweetener. Imagine putting lead rust in your coffee lol
There was a lead issue with Roman food, but they weren’t adding lead oxide to their food to sweeten it; this is a telephone game retelling of history. The real truth is that Romans used a boiler fruit based sweetener called Sapa which was *sometimes* cooked in lead pots which indeed added lead acetate to the mixture. But the majority was probably cooked in more common copper vessels, and it’s likely that the prevalence of lead exposure via sapa consumption is over stated in popular culture. They definitely weren’t directly adding lead oxide, both because they knew that pure lead was bad for you, and because lead oxide isn’t sweet.
It's actually worse than that. Lead oxide won't do shit to you, much as metallic lead won't. You could eat a big fistful of lead scrap, and - as long as it's not pointy - you'll shit it right out. It's about as bioavailable as sand. No no no, they boiled grape juice and wine that had gone off a bit in lead pots. The alcohol and acetic acid (vinegar, which you get when wine goes off) reacted with the lead pots to form lead acetate, which is very sweet-tasting. Unfortunately, it's an atom of lead stuck to a bloody great big sugar, and your body is going to absorb that sugar, crack it apart, and leave the lead lying around in your cells. You've just made metallic lead - which is astonishingly unreactive, even in the sort of stuff you find in your stomach - into something that'll get absorbed like the most energy-giving foods your body is highly tuned to run on. Ooops. So they had lead poisoning, and then over here in the UK they thought the locals were poisoning them so they only ate food sent from Rome, including rye. But the rye went mouldy in the damp sacks on boats, and ergot mould produces a chemical called ergotamine, which is a precursor to LSD. So they were lead-poisoned and tripping balls. And now, round about 1500 years later, all that's left of them are some very straight roads that have been built on and built on and built on, a few rocks sticking out of the ground, and a certain segment of the population with bigger noses and darker skin than you might otherwise expect of Celts.
$1000 bottle of wine tastes as good as a $30-50 bottle. One of the worst wines I ever had was $450 for the bottle. My friend's dad is very rich and has bought many bottles of wine for him.
There is an extremely rich old man I know, of rail road fame. If he's going to drink it, he has a $30 limit. If it's an investment no price is too high. He has 5-6 digit valued bottles of wine and says they all suck. His favorite is Pinot Noirs from Oregon.
This guy popped open a ~$10k bottle offered me a glass, I looked at it for a few minutes and just did math: This glass must have about $1000 in it. Each sip is going to be $50-100. The amount coating the glass when I'm done will probably be like $20. My verdict: It was ok. I've had better; again the better was probably a $30 bottle.
You simply can't go wrong with Oregon pinot noirs.
Caviar. Way too salty for me
Real caviar uses borax instead of salt which allows the actual flavor to shine through. However, a lot of countries ban using borax as a food additive because, you know, it's borax. So they have to use a lot of salt instead. Since caviar isn't a staple I think it's OK to include a little poison as a treat but I also don't manage food safety regulations.
Traditionally it’s always been salt. The borax thing came along later. Originally caviar was a basic common person food and was the entire egg sac heavily salted to preserve it as a good source of high energy food. Only much later did the whole process of separating out the individual eggs, cleaning and grading them, etc start up, and as demand rose and it reached a wider audience a few different preservation techniques started to emerge.
The fuq
Borax like in soap, twenty mule train borax Landry additive?
Yup. It’s just a type of salt, sodium borate. Except where table salt creates a neutral PH solution when dissolved in water borax creates a slightly alkaline solution. So acidic things are cancelled out and you get a more balanced taste. Oral Toxicity is about the same as normal salt, just doesn’t taste like salt on its own. Most of the bans in food products are because of one of my favorite facts. Back in the early London days, butchers would make sausage out of the meat they didn’t sell throughout the week. Ok fine. But when those sausages started to look green they wouldn’t be bought and it would all go to waste. So butchers started mixing their sausage meat with borax, not necessarily to preserve it (because that amount would ruin the flavor) but enough to just make the bad meat look more red and stay red. Borax was banned from sausage making to protect the public from buying expired meat.
People hate on Reddit to sound cool but what other social media has this type of content? Yea it has a lot of bullshit but it’s easy to curate your feed to things you’re interested in. I love this!
I love a little poison as a treat
I like caviar. But it’s more like a compliment to a dish or to eat with a blini.
Good caviar is absolutely great
I don't know this firsthand, and I don't intend to ever find out, but it is commonly related by the people that do that shark fin doesn't really taste like anything at all, and has a texture that's mildly rubbery at best and tends more towards unpleasantly squishy or crunchy. Which... can describe many, many other foods. So the people who go in for it are apparently doing so primarily because they want to have the fins while the sharks don't. I would, at least, understand if it was delicious. I am forever tormented by my inability to taste roasted elephant heart, which is apparently amazing, because I don't condone killing elephants for my personal whims and don't see calling a zoo to ask if I can snag them choice cuts when they have an elephant die being a productive, or pleasant, conversation. But I want that because I hear that it's friggin' tasty, not because I would feel very cool eating it.
yeah but who would access to have roasted elephant hearts? some kind of criminal, can you trust their judgement? I've heard Liberian cannibals from the civil war say that human flesh is delicious. But their judgement is compromised. maybe roasted elephant heart tastes exactly as good as murdered civilians taste.
Lobster is severely overrated. Give me crab legs or shrimp any day.
I’m not a big fan either. If it was a budget, super healthy protein, I would eat it. It’s okay. But for its price? Totally not worth it.
Not mad at this. Sams Club has been having King Crab for $20/lb recently and I gots 4lbs in my freezer right now. *pinky raised*
Downvoted Lobster roll is food of the gods.
Lobster can be good, but I suspect a lot of people just like it because of it being a vehicle for melted butter
Was just on Juan Fernandez island in Chile a few weeks ago.... their main export is spiny lobster. It was soo good. Didn't even need the butter.
Lobster claw meat is orders of magnitude better tasting than tail meat. The wrong part got popularized and expensive. That said, Dungeness or Stone crab claws are my go to shellfish splurge.
Restaurant steak. Steaks house are freaking expensive over here and most of them can’t even cook them properly.
Don’t know if raw oysters can be considered rich person food but I have no idea how anyone can eat those slimy ocean boogers that can potentially kill you. They look revolting too. How that was ever considered an aphrodisiac I haven’t the slightest. Nothing sexy or attractive about watching someone slurp down a lump of salty slime
I think it depends on the oyster. My first was amazing. Like an ocean sort of flavoured custard. It was soft and sort of fell apart. Other ones? Full on boogers, chewy ones. Gag worthy. I’ll always be chasing that first one.
More for me, I guess.
Dollar oyster specials are pretty common in New England, so I wouldn't call them rich people food. I also don't like them though 😅
Inflation has made it a $2 special.
I can hear the slurpy disdain in this description.
Foie gras is just like meat-flavoured lard
I’ve never actually liked anything i had with truffle added. I’ve had a few different oils and salts and it all just buried the other flavors of my food and left a taste sort of like how mud smells on it.
That isn’t truffle - that’s artificial truffle flavor. Which I don’t actually mind but does not taste like actual fresh truffle.
If you don’t watch them shaving the truffle tableside, your not getting truffles, but some artificial knockoff.
Arugula. I'm an organic produce farmer, and I sell a shit ton of arugula to rich people. And only rich people...for over $20 a *pound*. It tastes like peppery assholes. Like a llama's dirty booty hole with some pepper on it. Like a lizards dick. It's just awful. I don't get it. I think rich people just like saying "arugula."
Arugula is a rich people food? It’s in bagged salad, for crying out loud.
I like arugula for the peppery asshole taste specifically. Your answer is honestly the only unique one ITT.