In the world, China has always been the leader in the world of foodies. Whether it is flying in the sky, running underground, or swimming in the water, there is nothing that Chinese people dare not eat. However, there are still some things that Chinese "foodies" regard as "junk", but they are delicious in foreign countries.
Let’s take stock today: what Chinese people consider “garbage” is delicacy in foreign countries. The third type will definitely open your eyes!
Maple Leaf
Every year in autumn, maple leaves will begin to slowly turn red and gradually fall. When the trees are full of red maple leaves, after a gust of autumn wind, large pieces of maple leaves fall, forming a unique landscape.
Every year, countless tourists come from all over the world just to enjoy the beautiful maple leaves at Xiangshan in Beijing. It was a poet who, after watching the beautiful scenery of maple leaves, wrote down the famous saying of the ages: "I wish I could have seen the peach and plum blossoms, the mangroves all over the city are in the autumn breeze."
But it is this kind of maple leaves that we admire that has become a delicacy among the Japanese. What is going on?
Talking about Japanese food, it can be said that it is very strange, which makes many Chinese people unable to accept their eating habits. For example, the Japanese like to eat sashimi. Fresh fish that has just been caught will be sliced and eaten raw. This is a very unhygienic behavior in our opinion. It is okay to try it once in a while, but we dare not treat it as a normal eating habit, because it is easy to be infected with the parasite .
But the Japanese are not afraid at all, and have also developed another kind of delicacy, a fried food called " Tempura ". This kind of delicacy is to coat various ingredients in flour, throw them into a pan, fry them and then take them out.
In their eyes, everything will become delicious after being "tempura". So some people focused on the fallen leaves of the maple trees, picked up the maple leaves, and after coating them and frying them, they were deeply loved by Japanese residents. They also gave this delicacy a very resounding name "red leaf tempura".
You must know that in our great China, this kind of fallen leaves are now "garbage". During the falling leaf season, the country spends a lot of manpower and material resources to clean up the fallen leaves of maple trees. There are only two final destinations for these fallen leaves of maple trees. One is natural degradation in the wild, and the other is put into the trash can by workers who clean up the fallen leaves.
So how did maple leaves, which are regarded as "trash" in our eyes, become a popular delicacy in Japan?
Japan is a small island country surrounded by the sea. It does not have much land to begin with. Japan has also reproduced its population without restraint. This has resulted in the area that can be cultivated becoming very scarce. Therefore, Japan can only go out to sea to fish in large quantities to meet the needs of domestic residents. However, Japanese residents cannot only eat seafood every day, so Japan can only spend a lot of money to import vegetables from abroad, which also makes the price of domestic vegetables in Japan very expensive.
In Japan, it is a luxury to have a meal of fruits or vegetables. If you cannot afford vegetables, some people will turn their attention to other plants. Not only will there be a lot of fallen leaves in Japan every year, some people will start to collect these fallen leaves specifically to make "tempura". Among them, "red leaf tempura" is the most popular.
First, simply grind the collected fallen maple leaves, then take them out, spread the batter evenly on the surface, and put them into a pan for simple frying. When the dough on the surface is mature, take out the maple leaves. They taste crispy and delicious. It is a very classic fried snack in Japan.
At this time, someone will definitely ask, isn't it just leaves, simply wrapped in batter? What’s so delicious? It’s all about the batter. They are very good at adding sugar, sesame seeds, and many other condiments into the batter. After being fried, these condiments will give off a unique taste when eaten in your mouth, so that you can’t taste the taste of leaves at all.
Even though it is just a small maple leaf, it is a huge profit. After the maple leaves are simply processed by merchants like them, the price of a maple leaf is 15 yuan in RMB. Even at this price, there is still an endless stream of people coming to buy it every day. A small store can sell thousands of maple leaves in a day, which is a daily income of tens of thousands of yuan in RMB. According to them, Japan has been eating maple leaves for more than 150 years.
So when you see this, you must have the same question in your mind as me, that is, maple leaves are full of dust and insect eggs, which can be said to be very dirty, and are maple leaves not poisonous? Wouldn't it kill someone if eaten?
In fact, the Japanese are not that stupid. After picking up the maple leaves from the ground, they will not immediately throw them into the batter and fry them in the pan. They will actually do a lot of processing on the maple leaves before frying them in the pan.
First, they will clean the collected maple leaves repeatedly. After confirming that there is no dust, they will soak the maple leaves in potion to ensure that the insect eggs can be killed. Next In the future, the cleaned maple leaves will be placed in a salt tank for a year-long development. After going through these steps, they will be coated in batter and fried. As for whether the maple leaves are poisonous, the Japanese can definitely eat them for so many years, and there are still people who continue to eat them. I guess there is no big problem.
So for this unique delicacy, everyone has many different opinions on it: Some people think that maple leaves are just fallen leaves no matter how they are processed, and have no nutritional value at all, and express that they really do not understand Japanese food culture. Someone also gave a completely opposite opinion. He felt that the Japanese can reuse discarded things like maple leaves, and we should respect them. After all, this is their unique eating habit.
So do you dare to try Japan’s unique fried maple leaves?
Dirt
At the end of each month, everyone jokes that they are so poor that they eat dirt. However, everyone is just using this method to show that they have no money and will not really eat dirt. After all, although dirt is everywhere and can be seen, it is not delicious.
In some places in Africa, people there are so poor that they eat dirt. Not only is it eaten by everyone, it has become a local delicacy.
The methods of eating soil are different in various parts of Africa. For example, Cameroon people like to eat soil in the shape of earth cakes, and Tanzanians like to eat soil in the shape of French fries, but no matter what form it takes, the raw material is soil. They regard soil as their daily diet. So everyone must be curious, will eating soil in this way not kill people?
In fact, Africans don’t just run to the roadside and eat a handful of dirt when they are hungry, as we think. They are also very particular about eating dirt. First of all, when choosing soil, they will not choose ordinary dirt that can be seen everywhere, but will carry it on their backs. Using bamboo baskets, they traveled thousands of miles up the mountain to "find soil." After determining the soil they were looking for, they would remove the surface soil, then pick up a shovel and dig down several meters to find the red soil hidden underneath, because soil of this color contains iron, zinc and other trace elements needed by the human body.
Secondly, the production process is also very complicated. They will carry the excavated soil down from the mountain, then pick out the large impurities that can be seen with the naked eye, and then crush all the remaining soil clods. Then they use a unique fine mesh to carefully screen, so that some small stones in the soil will be left on the screen. These rigorously screened soil, they will start kneading it just like we add water and flour.
Then the kneaded soil is poured on the ground little by little, and then pressed into the shape of a cake with hands, and shaped like this. During this period, conscientious traders will bake the shaped soil on a high fire to achieve a simple sterilization effect. Of course, some people will add flavorings such as salt or sugar to this kind of earth cake to make the earth cake taste less monotonous. However, after adding these flavorings, the price of earth cake will be more expensive than ordinary ones.
These mud cakes will be sold to local children and pregnant women. The price is also very humane, usually 10 cents for five mud cakes. It can be said that there is an endless stream of customers.
Because in Africa, the economy of these villages is usually very backward. As a result, after a woman is pregnant or when her child is growing, her family cannot afford to buy goods to supplement nutrition. So someone discovered the trace elements present in the soil and made the soil into earth cakes and sold them, which met the daily nutritional needs of the African people.
Then there must be some people who are very curious about how this kind of earthy taste tastes?
The taste is actually not very good. It may feel crispy when you first bite it, but when it melts in your mouth, it feels like eating a handful of fried flour. If you don't drink water, you will choke and feel very uncomfortable.
In fact, they are not the only ones. People in the north of our country also have the habit of eating earth, but they do not eat pure earth like in Africa. They eat a kind of food called "earth bun", which is made of raw materials. The ingredients are steamed cornmeal, then rolled into small balls and rolled in carefully selected fine soil. This way, the food will be coated with a thin layer of soil powder, giving it a unique flavor. However, you will not eat too much, because the soil will not be digested in the stomach, which will make you feel full.
With the rapid economic development, fewer and fewer people in Africa eat earth cakes. Are you interested in trying the earth cakes they eat?
Scavenger
Our country can be said to be a big country of foodies. We can eat everything from flying in the sky to swimming in the river. However, there is one kind of fish that Chinese people avoid, and that is the "Scavenger".
At first, the scavenger was loved by everyone because it could clean up the food residue in the fish tank and purify the water quality. But soon everyone discovered something was wrong. Although the scavenger could clean the impurities in the water, this guy was a predator secretly. He would stare at the small fish or fish eggs in the fish tank when he had nothing to eat.
Therefore, in a fish tank with a scavenger, most of the other fish will be killed or injured. In order to prevent the scavenger from continuing to harm the small fish, everyone abandoned the scavenger one after another. However, this approach led to a direct flood of scavengers.
Because the scavenger has no natural enemies in our country, this guy just eats fish eggs. This has also led to the near extinction of other fish in places where there are scavengers. This guy not only eats fish eggs but also reproduces quickly. He can reproduce thousands of fish eggs at a time. Guangdong, our country, has suffered greatly from it.
Maybe you have this question, isn’t it enough for Chinese foodies to eat so many of them?
In fact, the Cantonese people have already tried this problem. After they caught the scavenger, they found that the shell of this guy can be said to be very hard. It usually takes a long time to cut it with a knife to break its shell. When it is opened, , I found that this guy has a little bit of meat that is edible. The problem is that even if the meat is small, the meat of this guy is still very fishy. No matter how we cook it, we can't cover up the fishy smell. It is a typical thankless task. Even the overlords in the water like crocodiles will not eat scavengers.
But this kind of scavenger that we despise has been taken advantage of by Indian foodies!
The Ganges River in India is the "holy river" of Indians. A series of their domestic garbage and the corpses of their relatives will be thrown into the Ganges. These are the food that scavengers like. In addition, India has the same climate and temperature as my country, scavengers soon overflowed in India. But what I didn't expect was that this time it came not to heaven but to hell. Because India is poor, many Indians are often hungry. How could they let go of such a ready-made delicacy as scavengers?
Although scavengers are not small in size, usually only more than 30 centimeters, and the meat quality is very poor due to the "garbage" and carrion in the Ganges River all year round, and because they are in the Ganges River, there are many viruses on their bodies, but despite this, Indians still do not dislike them.
The toxins on the scavengers are not worth mentioning in their eyes. They roast the caught scavengers directly on the fire and then serve them with Their curry rice, eaten with the bones, is very crunchy, so it is deeply loved by the Indian people. There are countless stalls selling this kind of barbecue scavenger on the streets of India. Each grilled scavenger can be sold for 10 yuan, and it is still in short supply in India.
The scavenger may never have imagined that he would have developed an "iron wall" ability and defeated the "foodie" Chinese, but fell at the hands of the Indians.
