Believe it or not, you can actually cook meals in a dishwasher. It sounds kinda gross, but it’s a surprisingly popular cooking technique and actually produces decent results!

Dishwasher cooking has apparently been around since the 1970s, but the trend ‘caught steam’ in 2013, after Italian food writer Lisa Casali, a self-proclaimed dishwasher-cooking expert published a book on the subject. Cucinare in lavastoviglie (Cooking in the Dishwasher) was a big hit, and Casali also posted a series of videos online demonstrating how the technique works.  “It’s an easy technique within everyone’s reach and you can gain great advantages from it,” she says in one of her instructional videos. “All you need is a dishwasher and the will to experiment.”

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Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood is home to a mysterious restaurant that serves delicious home-cooked Caribbean Food through a hole in the wall. That’s actually what the owner, a man named Papa who moved to Brooklyn from Jamaica eight years ago, and his patrons call the unique eatery.

The name ‘Hole in the Wall’ isn’t just clever wordplay, it’s as literal as it gets – from the outside, the restaurant is just a rectangular hole cut out from a storefront grate located on Kingston Avenue. There’s no sign, no hours, no menu, and not even a door to walk through. Papa simply opens up the hole each morning when the food is ready, and closes it when the stock for the day is sold out. His Caribbean dishes are fresh, tasty, and best of all, free from sales tax.

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Owakudani, also known as the ‘Great Boiling Valley’, is a large volcanic caldera that formed 3,000 years ago when Mount Hakone erupted. The explosion was so powerful that the area is still active with boiling pools of water and huge vents that expel steam and volcanic fumes of sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide. That hardly sounds like an ideal tourist destination, but hordes of people visit Owakudani each year in search of the mystical black boiled eggs, locally known as ‘Kuro-Tamago’.

These black eggs might look other-worldly, but they’re actually just plain chicken eggs. The strange black hue comes from boiling them in the sulphur-rich hot water pools of Owakudani, near Hakone, Japan. The sulphur in the water reacts with the eggs’ shells, making them black and imparting a sulphur tinged flavour and odour to the cooked egg inside.

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Normally, it would be unthinkable to consume meat that’s over a few days old, but thanks to French butcher Alexandre Polmard it is actually possible to enjoy ‘vintage’ meats from cows that were butchered decades ago!

Polmard offers his customers the world’s most expensive meat, aged through ‘hibernation’, a special process that his grandfather and father invented in the 1990s. Cold air is blown over the meat at speeds of 120 kilometers per hour, in a -43 C environment, making the meat theoretically last forever. It will not rot with age, and will continue to taste fresh indefinitely.

Meat prepared through Polmard’s process obviously doesn’t come cheap. The 2000 vintage cote de boeuf (rib steak), for instance, costs about €3,000 ($3,200). The steep price not only covers the hibernation process, but also the cost of raising an exclusive breed of cattle called ‘Blonde Aquitaine’.

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ChefCuisine is a new kitchen gadget that’s all set to revolutionise (read: eliminate) home cooking. Thanks to this offering from Swiss startup Nutresia, pretty much anyone can produce restaurant quality food at the touch of a button!

The machine, inspired by Nestle’s coffee capsule Nespresso machines, is capable of preparing fancy dishes from vacuum packed capsules or sachets. Each sachet contains a microchip that tells ChefCusine the exact cooking time and temperature.

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In his quest to discover the perfect instant noodle, Japanese ramen lover Toshio Yamamoto has tasted over 5,600 varieties from 40 countries, in the past two decades. He reviews every kind ramen he tries on his website and scores them on a scale of 1 to 5. The best rating he’s given out so far is a ‘4’.

On i-ramen.net, 55-year-old Yamamoto offers detailed information on each of the 5,600 varieties of noodles he’s tasted, including the country of origin, cooking time, sodium content, calories, texture, and flavor. The website is hugely popular with thousands of fans around the world, and has recorded over 1.4 million hits since 1996. Some of his fans even send him packages of noodles from overseas.

“When you finish eating the noodles, the content will be gone even though the packaging remains,” Yamamoto explained. “I want to keep records of the content.” He also produces video reviews of instant noodles that he puts up on YouTube – they’ve gotten millions of hits as well. And his book, titled ‘Sokuseki Mencyclopedia’, features info on packets of instant noodles from around the world.

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If you ever dreamed of co-owning a restaurant for free, this may be your best shot. A New York chef is offering a lifetime 10% of his restaurant’s profits to whoever completes his crazy food challenge. All you have to do is polish off a ginormous 30-pound burrito worth $150 in under one hour!

The offer is currently on at At Don Chingon, a restaurant in Park Slope Brooklyn, where chef German Villatoro created the monster wrap aptly named ‘Gran Chingon’ (huge badass). It consists of a handmade tortilla about three-and-a-half-feet in diameter, filled with chicken, steak, carnitas, chorizo, cheese, rice, beans and salsa. Only one Gran Chingon burrito is made every day, and the order must be placed 24 hours in advance, because it takes two hours just to prepare.

To win the contest, you have to finish the giant Mexican dish in under 60 minutes and as if that wasn’t hard enough for anyone with a normal appetite, there are a few other rules challengers must abide by – contestants must have a ghost pepper margarita along with the meal, any bathroom breaks or “discharge of bodily fluids” (vomiting) will result in a forfeit, the restaurant is not to be held accountable for any sort of health complications or the death of daredevils attempting the Gran Chingon challenge, and ownership of the prize is not transferrable. But follow the rules, eat everything in an hour, and in the words of co-owner Vic Robey, “you’ll have free food for life, in addition to 10 percent of the profits.”

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Six months – that’s apparently how long it takes to truly make a sandwich from scratch. And we know this thanks to 28-year-old Andy George, host of the YouTube series How to Make Everything. He actually spent six months and $1,500 growing and preparing every single ingredient that went into one, very regular, sandwich.

Andy recently shared a time-lapse video titled ‘How to Make a $1,500 Sandwich in Only Six Months’ on his YouTube channel. The video shows him doing all sorts of tasks that people normally take for granted when they buy stuff off store shelves. He grows vegetables, makes salt, bakes bread from scratch, and even kills a live chicken. His goal? To make everyone realise that things don’t magically appear in supermarkets.

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A new restaurant in San Francisco is making headlines for entirely doing away with human staff. Instead, customers at ‘Eatsa’ directly send their orders to the kitchen through iPads. When the meal is ready, it will appear through a small glass compartment. Although there are real people working behind the scenes, patrons don’t have to interact with any of them.

It’s a radical alteration from the traditional model of dining out, but Eatsa owners feel that San Franciscans are ready for the change. They did have concierges in red shirts on the opening night late last month, to help customers place their order, but the restaurant is now fully automated, with no sign of staff anywhere – no cashiers, no waiters, no maître d’. Customers jokingly call it the “robot restaurant”.

It might sound rather inhospitable, but the restaurant, located in the Financial District, has is so far proving a success. “We are producing food at an incredible rate,” co-founder Tim Young said. “And we’re creating a new kind of fast food experience. What we’ve designed creates a sense of mystery, creates a sense of intrigue.”

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Neon udon noodles are the latest addition to Japan’s ever expanding list of bizarre foods. Taking their place among winners like poop-flavored curry, deep-fried maple leaves  and citrus-scented eggs, these psychedelic noodles hardly look appetizing.

Food writer and mad scientist Kurare Raku, who invented the glow-in-the-dark noodles, posted a couple of photographs on Twitter last week. One displayed neon pink noodles swimming in a neon green broth, topped with slabs of blue tofu. The other bowl had dark pink noodles topped with tofu that suspiciously resembled strips of Scotch Brite scrub pads.

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Flour, butter, eggs, and sugar were apparently too boring for this super wealthy Arab family, so they decided to throw a few diamonds into their cake mix. They recently splurged an eye-watering $75 million on a bejweled cake for their daughter’s birthday-cum-engagement party.

British designer Debbie Wingham, who turned to baking after previously creating the world’s most expensive dress, was commissioned to make the cake. The identity of the family – living in the UAE – has not been revealed, but there are plenty of pictures online of Debbie and the extravagant dessert.

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Pig’s meat is undoubtedly delicious, but I’m not so sure you could say the same about its milk. Nevertheless, a family-run farm in the Netherlands has produced the world’s first cheese made from pig milk. They’re selling it at a whopping £1,500 ($2,300) per kilogram – more expensive than the former world’s costliest cheese, made from Balkan donkey milk!

Erik Stenink, free-range pig farmer and owner of ‘Piggy’s Palace’ is the brains behind pig milk cheese. He decided to do it because mainly because he was curious to see if it would work, given that pig’s milk is richer in protein than cow’s milk. But milking pigs is quite a labor intensive process, so he only managed to produce half a kilo of the “chalky” cheese. A bit of it was sold to an anonymous buyer last week, and the proceeds were donated to a children’s cancer charity.

“It’s a product which has never been made before and a lot of people are very interested in it,” Erik said. “We’ve only just recently tried to milk the sows. We’re very happy with it all and although for us it’s a one-time thing, if someone wants to give us £1,500 we’ll make a kilo, but it’s too intensive to make without an order.”

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Archaeologist-turned-entrepreneur Nancy Warner is making headlines for creating the world’s first jam made purely from beer. But before you get too excited, let me tell you it’s non-alcoholic, so there’s no real chance of getting tipsy at breakfast!

Nancy had already quit her job as an archaeologist to start a preserves company called ‘Potlicker’, when she stumbled upon the unique recipe by accident. She had run out of fruit to make jams and jellies one day, so she reached into her beer cupboard instead. After much experimenting, she managed to come up with a clear ‘Beer Jelly’. It is now so popular that she’s producing about 3,000 jars a week!

“I’m actually an archaeologist by trade and spent close to 10 years working in south eastern US archaeology before my husband Walter and I moved to Vermont,” the 34-year-old said. “I could not find archaeology work, so I developed a food blog hobby to keep me busy. The blog lead to a canning addiction, the canning addiction turned into a small business. I had bills to pay and lots of jam on the shelf so Walter packed me up and sent me to the farmer’s market.”

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We’ve featured our fair share of bizarre foods on Oddity Central, right from jam-filled sausages to charcoal cheddar cheese, but this latest dish in Japan definitely takes the cake as the weirdest ever. A new eatery owned by Japanese adult movie star Ken Shimizu has actually chosen to serve poo-flavored curry!

The dish is meant to be a tribute to Shimizu’s debut film – he apparently made it big by eating poop in a movie. So he decided to make ‘unko curry’ (poop curry) the signature dish at the newly opened ‘Curry Shop Shimizu’. The curry is supposedly made of ‘healthy ingredients like green tea, goya(bitter gourd), and cocoa-powder. But it looks at tastes like crap – and to amplify the gross effect, it is served in a toilet-shaped bowl!

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The Oxbow Brewery in Newcastle, Maine, has come up with a brand new brew that combines two of the state’s summertime favorites – beer and lobster. The offbeat lager, called ‘Saison dell’Aragosta’, is made by cooking live lobsters in unfermented beer.

‘Aragosta’ is Italian for lobster or crayfish. The name was chosen to honor Giovanni Campari, the brewmaster of one of Italy’s finest breweries, Birrificio del Ducato. According to Tim Adams, co-owner of Oxbow, Giovanni travelled all the way to Maine last summer to work with him. The duo initially wanted to brew an “esoteric German beer that was low in alcohol and used wheat along with barley.” They wanted a tart and acidic flavor profile, with salt playing an important role. But the evening before they set to work on the new brew, they happened to eat lobster rolls for dinner. That, instead, proved to be their inspiration.

“Giovanni turns to me and says, ‘We gotta put some lobster in the beer we’re brewing,’” Adams said. “I was slightly taken aback and hesitant, but I couldn’t say no to him. The guy traveled all the way from Parma to Maine.”

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