Bizarre Food - Stinky Tofu

I love watching Bizarre Food on Discovery Travel and Living Channel. And I do love watching the show from 1 to 2 pm while lounging in my rocking chair; usually after a jog in the park and lunch with my parents.

Oh, a slight diversion, I saw Lum May Yee, the actress from 12 Storeys. She is very fair and actually looks very homely in a food court. No wearing of sunglasses while indoors like Fiona Xie and Wong Li Lin whom I met. I actually did not notice her immediately even though she is just opposite me. It took like 10 minutes before I figured out that I was looking at a former celebrity. Her prettiness is the angular sort - very fair complexion with very sharp features.


Back to Bizarre Food. Bizarre Food is a TV programme where a fat chef called Andrew Zimmern travelled to foreign countries to try so called "Bizarre Food". While I am typing this, Zimmern is summoning his courage to try Taiwanese Stinky Tofu. Oh dear. You just know it is going to end in tears; like Abraham Lincoln telling his wife: "hey, let's go watch opera tonight! yay!"

Zimmern thought that Taiwanese Stinky Tofu should not be scary because he already had some experience with Stinky Tofu from Xinjiang, China. Since he liked those tofu from Xinjiang, he thought these tofu from Taiwan should not thwart him.

Well, he thought wrong. He couldn't swallow even the first bite, which is quite amazing for Zimmern since he eats almost anything (except durian, which is another story). I think his eyes almost popped out when he first tasted the Taiwanese Stinky Tofu. Apparently, those Taiwanese Stinky Tofy was so putrid that it was nothing like those from China. It was like a weapon of mass stink destruction for him. Worst, the shop that Zimmern was at served Taiwanese Stinky Tofu and Thousand Year-Old egg on the same plate. Ouch.

I think it takes a special Asian palate to appreciate Thousand Year-Old egg. I am not a big fan of Stinky Tofu and I suspect all of us try it for fun or pass a test of courage. But to enjoy it is a different matter all together. It is like Wall-E compacts rubbish into a one-foot square junk cube for a living but doesn't mean he enjoy it. It takes an Asian to enjoy eating a Thousand Year-Old egg with porridge and ginger slices. And not throwing it up all over the place like an amateurish foreigner.

But Stinky Tofu is probably the ultimate in stink levels. If Bizarre Food around the world are levels in Street Fighter, Taiwanese Stinky Tofu is probably Akuma in an Iron Man suit. When I was in Taiwan, I could smell them in Shilin Night Market like six roads away. Terrible. I am not sure why there are so many people eating it. Either they are eating it for bravado or they are actually eating normal tofu but pretending that they are stinky tofu.