While on safari for plainsgame in Namibia two years ago, I shot a trophy springbok one morning. At lunchtime that day we headed in another direction than we had for the few days before. When I asked where were going, I was told they had a surprise for me.

We arrived at a waterpump, on the high desert plain, where four Harari guys had arrived before us and had set up a hardwood fire and grill. On it they had the liver, kidneys, heart and intestines of the springbok cooking. The intestines had been cut in short lengths and turned inside out to cook. They called it puff adder, and you had to pull it through closed teeth like an artichoke leaf to eat the soft fatty flesh.

It was all served with sliced tomatoes, white bread and butter, and a stout RSA red wine. I had some good sea salt with me. I've eaten plenty of exotic things, but this takes the cake.

What's the most exotic meal you've ever had?

I'd have to say, a toss up between Hippo & Elephant. the Hippo was tuffer then the Elephant, but very tasty!!! Oh! wait a minute! Dassie was scrumptious!!!

I don't know if it was exotic, but the memory will never leave me:

In a Mongolian ger, sipping yak milk tea with dabs of dust covered butter and eating yak milk cheese - it seriously almost made me vomit.

Give Jeff my best and tell him I'll see him in Dallas if he makes it...

Damn,growing up on a ranch was like this, If you didnt like something it was kuz you just aint hungry yet. I learned to try everything. I havent been as far as you fellows but I liked baked racoon, rattlesnake,mountain oysters and I really liked BBQ Squid, I got that in Guam, spent 16 days there last year and am going back in a few weeks, They have a great street fair every week with all the locals BBQing. I think I tried it all last time. This time I will for sure.
Happy eating.

Ah well I'm chinese, so i'll eat anything.

some of the highlights have been Sago worms, taste prawny much different from mopane or wichety grubs...I do hesistate a little at bugs though. I see the bug carts in thailand alot and that grossed me out.

Eland liver, heart, springbok raw in carpaccio, blesbok brains, eland brains and marrow, wildebeest fillet, any bit from an impala, all excellent eating. gonads from many animals and beef penis satay in indo. They call it satay torpedo. its actually quite nice. their chicken skin satay satay kulit would be the all time best eat with a brew.

I like snake (python especially), croc,iguana and eat sashimi often on the boat we speared it from. I still have 2 kilos of prime buff biltong in the freezer Yummy! My next trip to africa is in march and i'll be aiming to nail a bush pig or warthog to test some recipes. mmmmmm roast pig!!!!!! this is making me hungry.

Trapmonkey, I spent almost a month last year in Wuxi, China and my hosts delighted in trying to find something that they would eat, that I wouldn't. We ate at almost every restaraunt in town and one of the guys from inner Mongolia had his parents send some dried Yak parts to him for me to try! There were some things that I didn't like, but I tried everything.
The one big thing I learned is that Chinese food in China is nothing like Chinese-American food!

I generally go by the addage that if it moves, eat it. If it don't move, kick it, then eat it! So except for the moldy camel stew, nothing much here sets me up except for the Balut. I swear that the most "exotic" meal I ever ate was in a Phillipine restaurant about a mile from my house! I like to eat. I'll eat most anything once but I tell you that Phillipine cuisine is the most foreign stuff on the planet. Bless their hearts, but given a choice between roast pork belly and their version of stuffed squid (complete with eyeballs and beak still in place) and mopane worms, just call me Mr. Insecticide!

Some kinda Monkeys in Panama. They chunked up the meat and had them on a long piece of split bamboo.Roasted it over coals and basted it with God only knows what!
But it was good.

A couple years ago in the Northern Province/RSA, just before our last evening meal on the last night of the hunt, the cooks grilled about a 4 foot section of eland colon stuffed with chopped heart, liver, some fat and a few other "things" until it was quite crispy. There was 8 of us and we were all supposed to relish this delicacy...
Not being shy, I reached in and sliced off a hunk, then another and another...everybody else started in and it was gone in 10 minutes...had a wonderful flavor...wish I could remember what they called it.

You guys make my most exotic meal seem like a trip to Mickey D's. How 'bout iguana tail in Panama and zebra in Namibia.

I have seen the PUFF ADER , but haven't tried it, and don't intend trying it!

Two or three times in the Luangwa Valley I have noticed when a Cape Buffalo is gutted, the large stomach is opened and cleared of it's contents, for tripe, BUT, the small stomach is kept includeing it's contents. The first time I noticed this, I said nothing but wondered what the wanted with the contents. That night we had Buffalo steaks, and delivered to the evening table with the steaks was a bowl of some sort of sauce for the steak. The color of the sauce looked exactly like the contents of the small stomach. I said nothing but passed on the sauce!

Anyone out there know what the contents of that small stomach is used for? I think I know, however!

Some of you are much more adventurous than me, worst food I have ever eatten was Balut in the Phillipines.

Like Ray I grew up eatting testicles after a long day of branding. But I still prefer a nice swordfish over any of the above mentioned objects - some of them can not be called food.

John

Ray,
Jeff Neal told me to tell you hello and that he taught you everything you know about hunting.

Puff Adder is normally served with braised Liver, that has been held over and open blazing fire and charred black and you eat the inside of the liver with the Puff Adder..Its quit good...

Testicles? Hell I have eaten them all my long life, we always take salt and pepper to the branding fire, toss the nuts into the coals, when they pop and flower out, you salt and pepper them and eat the white flesh, and nothing on this earth is better...

I have eaten a lot of croc, always wondered who he ate before I ate him? Tripe is a favorite of mine and its at its best in Mexican Menudo...

Lion, Mt. Lion, and any cat is good, as is Javalina, but one needs to know how to cook it, I have only eaten it chicken fried and all fat trimmed off it, but I could eat a skunk chicken fried, and if its too rank the put some pico de gallo (hot sause to you yankees) on it and you can eat anything.

But hey, I am a coyote at heart and not picky about what I eat, meats meat in my books....but the blood and curdled milk from the gourds of the Masai is one thing I will never drink again, it's taste like road kill smells and I never got used to road kills.

Ray, I would like to be your gastrointerologist when you get sick. No telling what someone would find.

Anything south of Interstate 10 in Louisiana that walks, crawls or slithers is eaten regularly. Give me "puff adder" over Cajun mystery meat anytime!!!!

Ever tried female Impala or Kudu head. You clean them properly take the skin off and rub some salt and pepper in. You roll it in tin foil and either bury it under the coals or slowly roast it next to the fire, takes about 6 hours of very slow cooking. It is delicious, the brains on toast is a real delicacy.

While on Wake Island we took a landing craft out over the reef and speared a Tuna.



We gutted it right there and then and ate the tuna steak raw with some wonderful Wasabi. Washed it down with some Vodka like liquor made on the island by some of the Thai workers at the base.



The Tuna was still quivering.



Wonderful stuff.



On the other side, while trekking in Bhutan in 2000 we had some grilled Yak in the Himalayas. Very tough and gamey, like a bland Deer.



Don

It might not be real exotic, but while out in the desert in Mauritania, we had an interesting "stew" made out of dried, moldy camel meat. The meat was boiled up with a bit of water, some dried bread crusts and a bit of onion. A pinch of salt was added too. It was for the most part not too bad, actually quite tasty after a long walk in the desert, but some of the pieces of meat were litterally so rotten that we just couldn't swallow them... These were deftly burried in the sand while Elouen, the guy in the picture, wasn't looking. Didn't want to offend him.





Another odd meal was had while heading south from Agadez in Niger. As we drove down south into the sahel towards Zinder and when it was nearing sunset, we turned off the sandy track to camp for the night. It wasn't easy finding a suitable place as the vegetation here in the Sahel was sparse and the terrain flat. Not much to hide behind! Hiding was kind of essential in this area due to bandits. We had made a pasta salad the evening before and kept it in our little Engel fridge so that we wouldn't have to cook this evening. It was very practical to do this sometimes, since the long days in the desert can be tiring. Just as we were finishing, a man with an axe appeared from the bushes and approached us. This in itself suprised us quite a bit since we were pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and hadn't seen any other people since leaving Agadez besides a lone camel caravan earlier in the day. It turned out that he and his family lived nearby, and he invited us to come visit them. They were Hausa nomads. This wasn't easy to understand, because he didn't speak a word of french (the official language in Niger), knew only a few words of english from when he'd gone to Nigeria to trade once, and we didn't speak any Hausa... We walked the 500 meters to his hut and sat down on a carpet that he ordered the children to bring out. Conversation was of course difficult, but we got the message that he wanted to kill a rooster on our behalf, so we could eat something. Since we just completed dinner when he first came, we were able to avoid this after a few attemps of explaining. We did have to oblige in drinking some warm camel milk that was offered in a bowl. It would have been very rude not to accept this, even though the bowl was so dirty that I wouldn't have fed our dog with it. It turned out that it was their only bowl, and thus all the family, and all their animals including a camel with a baby (hence the milk), a few goats, and a dog used this bowl. The dried muck on the rim was not very tempting to say the least, and images of ourselves with various stomage illnesses ran through our minds. But as usual in such circumstances, saying no would be a great offence. The camel milk was fine, and it couldn't have been fresher since it came straight from the camel, which was milked by the wife right in front of us. After an hour we bid them farwell, with the promise of returning the next morning. Finding the way back to the car wasn't too simple since there was no moon and the bush was pitch black. Eventually we did, but with around 1 million thorns and prickly grass seeds in our sandels and clothing!

The next morning we went over to the family and they greeted us with some of their breakfast. It was grinded Millet (a type of grain) in camel milk that had stood overnight to ferment in the same, not so clean bowl... A few curtisy spoon fulls was enough. It was like eating pure yeast, and the grains of millet were as hard as rock. Again, visions of us squating down behind sand dunes with the runs fled through our minds. But, miraculously our stomages dealt with the mixture just fine. Guess a few months in north/west africa had toughened our intestines!





A strange staple diet in Ghana is "Fufu". Which is often made from pounded and boiled cassava (Fufu can also be made out of pounded plantains/cooking bananas, and is then much better tasting in my opinion, and isn't slimy). Basically cassava fufu tastes, and looks like, some kind of slimy glue and is usually served with a spicy sauce. In Kumasi, Ghana we had the "pleasure" of eating this slime together with dried, rotten fishheads. The trick is also being able to actually eat it since only your fingers are used to scoop up the runny substance. Apparently it's a delicacy... It wasn't a delicacy in our view and tasted just like you'd expect rotten fish heads to taste. Even though the spices distracted our tastebuds slightly. Just the memory makes me shudder. And I'm known to eat, and enjoy, just about anything... Although I prefer to not know what the various "mystery meats" we ate some places in africa were. Ignorance is sometimes bliss.



Erik

When we were in Namibia, the owner of our ranch made an observation that was very true (just after we all tried "puff adder" and didn't any of us care for it too much): "You Americans. You never like to eat the insides of the animals. You are missing the best parts!"

Each to his own, I guess.

We also ate a lot of Hartmanns zebra, which, to my surprise, was very, very good.

Eland tongue on our last trip.In 2000 we ate waterbuck testicles seared in garlic butter for appetizers.

The most exotic thing I've eaten is White Rhino sausage. It was OK but too strong tasting for my tastes.

-Bob F.

Not too exotic by yall's standards, but hey, I don't eat organs. All the little nasties tend to congregate there, especially liver. Anyone that tells me the "meat" they are eating now was alive and full of $hit two hours ago, well, lets just say I don't trust their tastebuds or judgement!

Ever wonder why all those really wierd diseases come from Africa?????????