Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Eating jellyfish
Watching people eat jellyfish, you would think it wasn’t a delicacy. What is the matter with these folks? This stuff is good eats.
How do I describe it, though? That’s not easy, but I’ll try. First thing you have to realize is that jellyfish has little or no flavor of its own; it acquires flavor from its marinade. Typically, this is a mild sweet/sour liquid accented with sesame oil and green or red chili peppers. The jellyfish I had tonight at Tin’s Tea House Lounge (cuz I was too lazy to walk the extra block to P.F. Chang’s) was nicely salted, too, and they served it on a bed of sweet beans. Mung beans? Azuki? I have no idea. I liked them, though.
So yeah, the flavor isn’t difficult to imagine, but the texture is more of a challenge. Closest thing I can compare it to is fresh cucumber pickles — it has that same vegetable crispy-crunchiness (but NOT the crunchiness of a carrot, for example). Watching those YouTube videos, you might think jellyfish is slimy or chewy. It’s certainly not slimy, but chewy? Well, YEAH, you need to use your teeth on this one, but it’s not chewy the way geoduck, abalone, or calamari are sometimes chewy.
I don’t understand why folks have a problem with this. If people are able to stomach durian, they ought to have no problem at all with jellyfish.
I’ve only ever had to spit out one food in my life. My high school girlfriend’s mom said it was fish stomach and I believed her. It had the texture of phlegm. She called it jook, but I have since learned that jook is a rice porridge and does not have the texture of phlegm (or at least it shouldn’t). I think her “fish stomach” comment predetermined my response.
How about you — what did you have to spit out?
Keep it PG-13, please 🙂
D.
Lechee. I didn’t even chew it. I popped one in, and popped it right back out.
The last time I cooked chicken at home, I got half way through it, and spit it out. Not sure what happened, but I suddenly developed a distaste for it. Haven’t eaten much since.
The first time I ate Skittles here in the UK I spat out the purple one because there was something definitely wrong with it, so was the second purple one, then suspicious of the pack I threw them all away. Later I found out my favourite grape falvoured skittle, is blackcurrant over here.
Chitlins, moonshine. Yuk. That was many years ago but I remember thinking nothing could be as foul. Does gum count? I’m forever spitting gum out the car window. Tacky, I know.
almost any vegetable i’ve tried. most memorably horrid is green pepper.
there are others, but you already know i’m weird with food 🙂
Uni. Bleah. Maybe the piece I had wasn’t very good, but still… It was just plain wrong. Fishy and wrong, like a denizen of Innsmouth. If they could fit on a small ball of seaweed-wrapped rice, that is.
nox: lychee is good! Slippery, but then, so are skinned grapes. The trick is to avoid canned lychees which have a tinny taste.
lyvvie: could have been worse. Could have been durian-flavored.
CD: so YOU’RE the one who’s ruining my shoes 🙂
shaina: what DO you eat?
ps: yeah, I have a dim memory of trying uni once. Never thought of it as Old One Spawn.