It has taken something I’ve wanted to try for years to force me back into it.

Kopi Luwak is a coffee made from beans which have been partially digested by the small, cat like Asian Palm Civet.

Until recently, the only place I knew of in Australia which served this delicacy was a café in Townsville, and was charging AU$50 a cup for it.

This has all changed of late.  Apparently the coffee was featured in the movie The Bucket List, and since, demand has grown.

This is good news for coffee lovers everywhere.

I had the pleasure of having a Kopi Luwak espresso recently at Olio at St. Leonard’s in Sydney’s North Shore area.

At AU$9 a cup, it definitely isn’t priced like your average coffee, but it was worth every last cent.

The coffee has next to no bitterness, the smoothest coffee I have ever tasted.  This is due to the way the beans are digested.

The civet selects only the sweetest, most ripe coffee berries (which contain the bean).  Then, as the bean passes through the animal’s digestive system, various enzymes enter the beans, which result in several slight biochemical changes.  These changes are what make the bean so smooth and lack of bitterness.

Olio serves their Kopi Luwak with a shot of soda water, lemon and ginger to cleanse the palette, and a ginger biscuit with a delicious ball of chocolate and nut to have afterwards/during drinking the coffee.

No related posts.

So I’ve decided it’s finally time to eat something which I know I can’t handle, and will hopefully shut me up about needing something hotter forever.

This is the bhut jolokia, also known as the ghost pepper.

It is certified as the hottest chilli in the world by the Guiness Book of World Records, after tests performed by the New Mexico State University’s Chile Pepper Institute, apparently the most authoritative academic source of information on chillies in the world.

You can’t seem to buy these things as chillis in Australia.  I’m assuming that there would be such a low market for something like this, that the things would be off by the time they’re sold.

I’ve found it is possible to buy seeds on eBay, however…

And thus begins, the first of hopefully a two or three part post on my odyssey with the ghost pepper.

Apparently it’s very difficult to germinate these things from seeds.  I’ve planted about 10 seeds in total, in three different peat pots.  I’m keeping two on top of the fridge (one of them covered loosely in glad wrap), and the other is sitting outside covered loosely in glad wrap.

This is the first thing I’ve ever actually grown from a seed, in fact it’s probably the first plant of my adult life, so I really have no hope of these things actually germinating.

So, once again, eBay to the rescue!  I found a guy in Canberra who every few weeks puts an auction up for a young bhut jolokia plant.  I was somewhat dubious about having a plant sent to me through the postal service, but it arrived this morning and looks wonderful!

I’m really hoping that I don’t kill this, and quite literally get to reap the fruits… (sorry, I couldnt’ resist).

Anyway, stay tuned for an update, and hopefully within a few months we’ll see a video of me actually eating the world’s hottest chilli!

No related posts.

The most odd, and I’m sure to many, shocking weird food discovery was dog meat.  Dog meat is relatively popular in Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, East Timor and certain areas of China and Switzerland.  I was expecting to find dog meat in Vietnam, and I did.  I didn’t dare try it though; I’m a bit of a wuss!

There were many signs in restaurants which read “Thit Cho”, which is Vietnamese for dog food.  We didn’t actually realise this until one of my last days in Vietnam, when a local guide we hired for the day told us.

The only time I actually saw dog meat in person was on my first full day in Hanoi, at a local food market called Hang Be.

The dogs are apparently farmed, and people’s pets are not stolen for the meat.

Obviously eating dog seems odd to westerners, and obviously it does to me or I wouldn’t have put it on here.  We have to remember though, that eating cows (who are sacred, not just pets) to Hindu people must be greatly offensive, just as eating pork in front of a Jewish or Islamic person could be equally offensive.  Each culture has their own taboos, and this series on my blog is basically on exposing some of those taboos!  Anyway, enough of the lesson in cultural understanding,  just remember this before casting stones.

Dog meat wasn’t the only weird food item at Hang Be market; both pigs tails and pig trotters were quite popular.

And even assorted parts floating in water.

The weird foods didn’t stop at mammals here in Hanoi, of course.  There was a platter of some sort of bug, or grub, or silkworm larvae or something!

One thing I do have an ethical issue with is eating endangered species.  Some species of turtle are endangered; I’m not sure what species these are however.  Turtles are eaten in many places in the world, including lots of Asia and some coastal regions of and islands off of Africa.  Either way, it is what I view as a very weird food!

The French also left their taste of frogs with the Vietnamese.  The markets were full of large cages with none-too-appetising looking frogs.

Last up for the markets, there also were a couple of sacks with some poor unknown animal inside!  I’m guessing that they were rabbits, but you be the judge!

The Vietnamese seem to believe that the more dangerous an animal that you can put in your rice wine, the stronger the wine will be.  You see bottles mainly with snakes (mainly cobras), but also scorpions, and others!

I also had the opportunity to taste alligator for the first time.  This was in a restaurant in Hanoi.  The taste was somewhat reminiscent of crocodile, which I’m not a massive fan of.

In one restaurant, one of the options for the type of meat you wanted in your soup, alongside chicken, pork and beef, was swan meat!

This has been one of the more colourful travel destinations in regards to the variety of foods on offer!

See the full photo gallery of this trip to Hanoi: http://www.nickspics.net/v/Travel/Vietnam_2009/

Related posts:

1. Weird food: Cambodia
2. Restaurant Bobby Chinn

I was in Cambodia about six weeks ago, and I was witness to some of the most bizarre food being sold and eaten that I’ve experienced.

I’d heard of the general availability of spiders and insects as food in Cambodia for some time, and was surprised after arriving in Siem Reap that I couldn’t find any in any of the markets.

I thought for sure, when I got to the capital, Phnom Penh, I would find them quite easily.  I scoured all the markets in the city in search of my prey.  Finally I found a small vendor in an alley at Psar Thmei, Phnom Penh’s central market who was selling assorted insects!

I asked her if she had any spiders, and she did not.  What I was seeking was still out there, somewhere!

After a couple of days in Phnom Penh and no sign of spiders, I decided to get a car and a driver to take me several hours out of the city to a village called Skuon, known colloquially as “Spiderville”.

Apparently the residents of Skuon, as well as in other areas of Cambodia, started eating spiders out of desperation during the dark days of Khmer Rouge rule.  The Skuon locals took a liking, and now choose to eat spiders for the taste.

So, we arrive in Skuon and I’m offered insects by lots of people.  I appear to be the only non-Cambodian in town.  I walk around the markets and, while very interesting, still no spiders.

I speak no Cambodian, and most people in Skuon don’t speak English so I had my driver translate and ask around where we could find some spiders.  As it was the beginning of the dry season, it turned out that the spiders all go away and so they were effectively out of season.

Someone finally told my driver about a restaurant on the highway about 10km out of town that may have some.  We quickly got in the car and drove to the restaurant.  Lo and behold, we found them.

That’s right, spiders.  Deep fried tarantulas to be exact.  I couldn’t bring myself to try one.  The children were trying to convince me that it’s nice, and to just try a leg.  I should have!  I think it will be one of my life’s regrets for not having tasted them.  Anyway, I bought half a dozen and gave them to the kids.

After seeing the spiders, we began the long drive back to Phnom Penh.

Mikey had been sick with terrible food poisoning, and so was sleeping in the hotel room most of Phnom Penh.  By the second last day, he was ready to venture out.  We walked down the street the afternoon the day after I visited Skuon, and on the very street our hotel was on was a car selling all sorts of odd foods, including… tarantulas!  A different cart was there the next day also.  I could’ve saved a long trip!  Oh well.

The cart was also selling insects and snakes on skewers, yummo!  I think some of the insects were cockroaches.

The weird food that Cambodia has to offer wasn’t all unpalatable (or more to the point, wasn’t all too scary to try!).  “Happy” pizzas are very common across the country.  These are pizzas with, err, different herbs spread all over them.  You can ask for it as happy as you’d like.  Mikey and I ordered a couple of pizzas at “Happy Angkor” in Siem Reap.  One just happy, and one extra happy.

It takes a while to come on, but when it hits you, oh boy does it hit you!  Made for a very fun evening!  The pizza itself was quite awful however.  Well worth it though!

In Cambodian culture, as with a lot of South East Asian cultures, no part of an animal goes to waste.  You can find entire pigs heads and pigs trotters in markets quite commonly.

I’m not certain what animal these small brains were from.

Now for a couple of the more disturbing scenes from Cambodian markets.  Frogs are eaten in Cambodia, and they are sold still alive for freshness.  Unfortunately sometimes they are also skinned alive, and can be seen jumping around with no skin on them.

As refrigeration is not as common in poorer parts of the world, food is kept fresh by keeping the animals alive as long as possible.  For the poor chickens however, this means that their legs are bound, and their wings are broken to prevent them escaping.

And thus concludes the first post in Nick’s Universe’s Weird Foods series!  Next up, Vietnam.

Complete Cambodia photo gallery: http://www.nickspics.net/v/Travel/Cambodia_2009

Related posts:

1. Weird food: Vietnam