- How about some unique delicacies for your sweet tooth?
A tasty treat is just what you need to wrap up a perfect meal. But what people consider a treat can be wildly different from place to place.
After all, different folks have different tastes in food, so it makes sense that they’d like different desserts too. Some of them might seem strange to people from elsewhere, but hey — don’t knock it ‘till you try it.
Here are eight desserts from around the world that seem a bit strange. But we’d sure love to taste them.
1) Sweet Chicken and Milk Pudding (Turkey)
Chicken is an ingredient that most people would keep out of the dessert course. But the Turks prove that it just might work.
Tavuk gö?sü is a rich Turkish pudding made from rice flour, sweetened milk, cinnamon — and chicken breast. But instead of serving the chicken as a hunk of meat, it’s boiled down and shredded into thin fibers.
Variations of this dish have been known ever since the times of the Roman Empire. It really can’t be that bad if it’s survived for thousands of years.
2) Noodle Pudding (Portugal)
Here’s another sweet milk pudding, but instead of chicken and rice, this one features noodles. Coming from Portugal, Aletria mixes thin vermicelli noodles with milk and vanilla.
You won’t have to slurp up the noodles, though, since once cooked, they become perfectly soft and creamy. Like Tavuk gö?sü, Aletria is also finished with a healthy sprinkling of cinnamon.
The top of the pudding is generally decorated with elaborate stenciled designs. Aletria is a traditional feature at Portuguese Christmas tables.
3) Deep-fried Mars Bar (Scotland)
When you absolutely, positively have to clog up every single one of your arteries, here’s a dessert for you. The deep-fried Mars bar is exactly what it sounds like — a Mars chocolate bar that’s been battered and fried.
This calorie bomb emerged in Scotland at some point in the early ‘90s as a novelty item in fish-and-chips shops. Since then, its popularity has spread and you can find variations of it in many other countries.
Needless to say, the deep-fried Mars bar is controversial. Some consider it a delicious treat, while others see it as a symbol on unhealthy Western diets.
4) Chocolate-coated crickets (Thailand)
If you saw this treat while visiting Thailand, you might think it’s just a bug-covered novelty chocolate. But then you bite into and find a genuine, bona fide cricket encased in chocolate.
Different kinds of insects, from crickets to caterpillars and grubs, are fairly common fare in Thailand. The origins of eating insects lie probably in the traditionally difficult agricultural conditions in parts of the country, forcing people to eat anything they could find.
It makes sense, then, that they’d also make dessert out of them. Crickets are actually very high in protein, but it’ll take an adventurous traveler to give this treat a go.
5) Worm-like Iced Jelly (Southeast Asia)
Let’s say you ate your fill of chocolate crickets and went looking for other desserts. When coming upon a bowl of cendol, you might think you still haven’t escaped the bugs.
But don’t worry — those bright green worm-like things that seems to wriggly around are just extremely wobbly noodles of rice flour jelly. The jelly is usually served with ice and other toppings, like diced jackfruit, sweetened red beans, or other fruits.
So go ahead and dig in. As soon as you get over the worm-like appearance, you’ll taste something much like shaved ice and fruit.
6) A Coral Spit Cake (Eastern Europe)
Here’s another delicious treat with a misleading appearance. Šakotis, from Eastern Europe, looks like some kind of a deep-sea coral or sponge formation.
In reality, though, it’s a cake that’s cooked on a spit. Šakotis gets its unusual appearance when the spit is rotated and a batter of flour, eggs, sugar, butter, and cream is slowly drizzled over it.
To the Eastern European mind, the Šakotis actually doesn’t look that weird. Its name, after all, translates directly to “a branched tree.”
7) Sweet Soft Tofu (Asia)
In the West, tofu is mostly used as a meat substitute. In its homelands in Asia, however, this bean curd is an ingredient of its own used in many different dishes.
Of course, it’s also found its way into desserts. Tofu used for desserts is usually a silken or even softer variety that’s generally served chilled with various sweet sauces or toppings — or plain.
There are more examples of tofu desserts than we can reasonably list here. To give you just one, douhua is a Chinese delicacy of soft tofu served warm with a sweet syrup dressing.
8) Avocado Cream (Brazil)
Here in the U.S., we primarily use avocado in salads or as a topping on sandwiches. But in South America, avocado is a popular dessert fruit.
Take, for example, Crème de Abacate from Brazil. Translating literally to avocado cream, this dessert consists of fresh avocado blended with condensed milk and lime juice.
Crème de Abacate often finds is way into pastries or cakes as a filling, but it can also be served on its own. Then, it usually gets to you chilled, with a sprinkling of crushed nuts as a topping.