Adventurous Asian food suggestions

[Utinil]

Recently my wife and I have been trying to expand our pallets by visiting the local Asian markets and selecting foods that we have never tried before (and some we don't recognize at all) and making a meal out of them. We have tried, cuttlefish balls (delicious), sea cumber (not bad), and grasshoppers (never again) as far as protein and an assortment of fruits/vegetables including durian. I am looking for suggestions on what to try next. I want something that is not normally seen in the United States and would be outside of most people's (in the US) comfort zone. The only allergies in the house are to Pecans and Walnuts so as long as it doesn't contain them it is an option. So what suggestions do people on this forum have?

[Deleted]

You shouldn't eat asians.

[Dug]

Maybe some kimchi if you can find it in a korean market? My korean friend loves the stuff and eats it all the time but it smells funky as hell to me so I'll pass. I think it's fermented cabbage and some other vegetables.

[Puupi]

Try Korean food. That shit is so nasty there are no words really. Kimchi+salad with living maggots. Delightful.

[Independent voter]

Century eggs! Can't get enough of them!

[Puupi]

http://listverse.com/2011/05/01/15-m...korean-dishes/

Here is a good selection of Korean weirdness.

[Glorious Leader]

Depends what you consider adventurous. Id suggest you look up an asian delicacy known as "balut" in the filipines. Ive also been told stinky tofu is also quite good but i just could not stomach the smell.

[Molis]

Gas Station Sushi

[Forgettable]

I can also highly recommend Korean food because I've eaten it myself in Korea, had it served to me by friends, and made some myself. Here's a good site for reference:

http://www.easykoreanfood.com/korean-recipe.html

For a beginning dish, I would recommend Ddeokkbokki (떡벆*) just because it's very easy to make and one of the most iconic Korean dishes. Just make sure you soak the rice cakes in cold water for 20mins before you cook them or you won't get the right consistency.

[Milchshake]

Depends what you consider adventurous. Id suggest you look up an asian delicacy known as "balut" in the filipines. Ive also been told stinky tofu is also quite good but i just could not stomach the smell.

Hah I tried balut once on a dare, could barely keep it down. Otherwise I love most of Filipino cuisine. Oxtail peanut stew , kare kare, is my favourite.
Singapore also has some fun dishes to try, like chili crab soup, and kaya jam on toast.

[Glorious Leader]

Hah I tried balut once on a dare, could barely keep it down. Otherwise I love most of Filipino cuisine. Oxtail peanut stew , kare kare, is my favourite.
Singapore also has some fun dishes to try, like chili crab soup, and kaya jam on toast.

Oh dude it's gross. My younger filipino friends can't stand it either but their older brothers and sisters all recommend it. They were native borns. I've been told it's also an excellent aphrodisiac.

[Milchshake]

I've been told it's also an excellent aphrodisiac.

Uh maybe if you're an emetophiliac. The taste wasnt horrible, it was the crunchy bits that made it hard to keep down. Friends joking "that was the beak", didnt help either.

[Deleted]

tasty dogs or cats?

[Clone]

Get your hands on stinky tofu. It stinks real bad but it's adventurous.

Try the pineapple cake too, it's not adventurous but it's good.

Pigs blood cake, not sure if you can get them here though.

[belfpala]

I've been making these for a while: http://www.hungryhuy.com/banh-xeo-sa...namese-crepes/

Not particularly adventurous. My recipe is a bit different, using some things I can only find at the asian market near me. But yummy.

I'd recommend diving into Southeast Asian in general and Korean. Indian too, yum.

[shadowmouse]

<bungee looks in fridge>

Fried silkworm chrysalis

http://bertc.com/subfive/recipes/worm.htm

A friend of mine loves these. She knows the owner of a restaurant near her business and once or twice a month she'll arrange a seafood feast for us, but she always gets a plate of these too. They're pretty good and it amuses me to have them alongside fried crab and clams, which sort of drives home the point that they aren't really any odder to eat.

Disclaimer: Long lead in, Bungee needs more coffee! Does contain comments on culture and eating.
I'm always surprised at how many foreigners come to China and on their rare adventures in Chinese food never make it past fried rice, jiaozi, and "Kung Pao" Chicken. There are enough that locals who are used to interacting with them treat me a bit like a talking dog when they find out that I'm willing to eat other things. Let me use last night's dinner as an example.

The oldest of my quasi adoptive daughters (gan nv'er) asked if I could help out her old, college roommate. They had both been English majors, and students of mine. The roommate had reached a point in her career where she wanted to go back to school and get her master's, and she wanted me to write a reference for her because she wanted someone who could comment on what kind of a student she had been. This is Beijing, and it seems like everything is brokered over dinners, so dinner it was.

Alright, I've had a good number of students over the years and I hadn't really talked to her for the last fifteen or sixteen years, so during our hike to the restaurant she caught me up on what she had been doing, why she wanted to go back to school, and she also tried to jog my memory of her days as a student. Ding! I'd had a group of particularly good students from Inner Mongolia; there weren't very many of them and she had been part of that group. That left us warily circling the details of dinner. She had gone on to teach English, and now works in a situation where she oversees quite a few foreign teachers. She was used to encountering the folks who stick to gong bao ji ding (Kung Pao Chicken) and offered Korean BBQ as a safe alternative. For my part, I'm used to being the talking dog and I'm also familiar with the common preferences of people from Inner Mongolia. I opted for hotpot, which had been the first place she suggested.

And now, back to food
She had picked a very popular chain, Hai Di Lao (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3320466.html). The middle one of my quasi adoptive daughters loves that place for their service and the flexibility of being able to get half orders of ingredients, so I had a favorite order to break the ice with -- duck blood. Score one for the talking dog!

To cut the story somewhat shorter, once she realized that I wasn't horrified by hotpot and would eat regular stuff she went wild. I don't think I've every met a young lady from Inner Mongolia who didn't love a good meal, and she was no exception. Another point to the talking dog -- I used to date a woman from Inner Mongolia who actually hauled me off to a restaurant to make sure I could survive their idea of social drinking -- so I mentioned that she could drink normally. Yep, after that, nothing would do but that I had to have a bottle of the local booze to go with our liter glasses of Hoegaarden. She horrified the staff by having me drink the Niu Lan Shan right from the bottle, because that's the way it was done back home.*

[* Side note: She was so happy that I would drink Chinese booze! As she said, back in her home region, for a get together and meal each man would have a bottle of booze to start the drinking -- their version runs 50%-70% alcohol by volume -- with a case of beer in liter bottles to wind down the evening. The staff kept wanting to pour the booze into a little decanter, with tiny glasses to drink shots out of. She was having none of that, booze was to be snorted down right from the bottle. Niu Lan Shan is not fancy, upscale stuff. ]

Inner Mongolians seem to see themselves as people who like good food, nothing very fancy, with lots of meat. So, I offer this as an example of a nice dinner, with moderate frills, and minimal strangeness by the local standards.
The final score:

Split broth -- Yunnan mushroom soup and ma la broth with beef flavor
Sesame paste with herbs for a dipping sauce
A bit of the mushroom soup served separately

Congealed duck blood
Duck intestines
Thin, machine sliced mutton
Thick, hand sliced mutton
Meatballs with a hidden pocket of broth in them
Tofu, previously frozen to create a spongy texture (I knew I was forgetting something)
Spongy sheaths of something that I'm told is an outer covering to bamboo shoots
Fresh spinach
Hai Di Lao's signature noodles

Fresh fruit
Peanuts and various pickled vegetables to accompany the drinks

A flask of Niu Lan Shan er guo tou for me
Hoegaarden
Chilled herbal tea
Chrysanthemum tea with Chinese Wolfberries

[PACOX]

http://listverse.com/2011/05/01/15-m...korean-dishes/

Here is a good selection of Korean weirdness.

You won the thread in my book.

[turboether]

You shouldn't eat asians.

At least ask them permission first.

[Garnier Fructis]

Ive also been told stinky tofu is also quite good but i just could not stomach the smell.

Get your hands on stinky tofu. It stinks real bad but it's adventurous.

Try the pineapple cake too, it's not adventurous but it's good.

I'm going to go with stinky tofu as well. It might be hard to try some if you're looking for packaged food or looking to prepare it yourselves, but it's worth trying. It does not taste anything like the way it smells. It's actually really great, and I found that the smell stopped bothering me after I tried it. After that, it paradoxically smelled good.

And yeah, pineapple cakes are good too if you're looking for desert. The desert-style breads that you can find in Asian markets are also pretty good. And interesting too.

[Dwarfhamster]

Well, in addition to the stuff others have recommended maybe look at Indian food--goat feet, goat brain curry.

I like congealed porks blood. Oh in Vietnamese food, there's a pickled raw minced pork thing.