If you’re looking for something hot and naughty-looking to spice up your meals, look no further than the willy-shaped Chilly Willy pepper.

I know what you’re all thinking “Photoshopped or genetically modified”, but in fact, Chilly Willy is a completely natural pepper variety that hasn’t been altered in any way. That’s just how they look… The plant itself is very rare species and while it was originally native to American states like Texas and Louisiana, it was mostly found in the private collections of very few gardeners. Luckily, now you too can grow your own phallic-shaped chilly peppers thanks to Chilli Willy kits that come with growing instructions.

Also known as Peters Peppers or Penis Peppers (for obvious reasons), these funny-looking bad boys also pack quite a punch; they have a heat level similar to Tabasco peppers and are 10 ten times hotter than Jalapenos. Chilli Willy is a registered trademark and the company behind it sells all kinds of products and accessories based on the shocking shape of the pepper. Read More »

Akane Niikura, 10, has passed the Sake Institute of Japan’s expert test even though she’s 10 years too young to even taste the traditional rice wine.

Akane was already considered a child prodigy in Japan, for her cooking skills, but now that she’s an official sake expert, her notoriety is expected to grow even more. Although it will be around 10 years before she is allowed to taste sake, the 10-year-old connoisseur can already tell what dish will complement a certain variety of sake, simply by smelling it and observing the way it clings to the glass. Her small nose proved so accurate an instrument that the Sake Institute of Japan had to acknowledge Akane Niikura as a sake expert, after she passed their tests without drinking a drop of rice wine.

As the daughter of a sake bar owner, Akane was always around different types of rice wines from various regions of Japan, and in time managed to tell them apart and learn what foods they best go with. After school, this amazing fourth-grader helps her mom in the bar by recommending sake to customers. Most of them seem pleased with her choices and that’s when the little girl feels happiest. When she grows up, she wants to be a sake bar owner, just like her mother.

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As consumers turn to micro-products, the “mini” trend seems to affect all areas of our lives. We keep seeing ever-smaller telephones, computers, cars, and apparently fruits are no exception.

While they might look genetically-engineered, Pepquinos come from an ancient wild plant in South America, and are 100% natural. They are just 3-cm-long and 2 cm in diameter, but apart from their size, they look just like regular watermelons. But only on the outside, because once sliced, the juicy green flesh of a cucumber is revealed. They also have the crisp fresh taste of cucumbers and usually served in luxury restaurants, as appetizers, in summer salads, stir fried and even as a sorbet.

The rare Pepquinos were discovered and brought to Europe in 1987, by a Dutch company that later began producing them and selling seeds. They’ve only recently started cultivating them in the US and Asia, but their popularity in foodie communities is growing rapidly. The growth cycle of the Pepquinos plant is between 60 and 85 days, and a single string yields 60 to 100 fruit.

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Peter Lardong, from Berlin, Germany, was the first man to produce a playable chocolate record that could be listened to and eaten once you got bored with it.

67-year-old Lardong invented his world famous chocolate records after he was fired from a local brewery. He tried using cheese, butter, beer, cola and sausages as materials for his unusual records, but none of them worked very well, but chocolate was a whole other matter. He uses cocoa, cocoa butter and lecithin to make his special chocolate, heats it in on the stove and pours it in specially made silicone molds. Once the disk is hard enough to be played, you can play it up to twelve times, and then it. I’m not sure you’ll be able to use the record player’s stylus after playing a chocolate record, but hey, at least you’ll have listened to the sweetest music on Earth.

Apparently, the chocolate record isn’t the only brilliant thing Peter Lardong has invented, in fact he’s been a regular at Berlin’s Patent Office for the last 30 years.

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The last “world’s largest hamburger” weighed a massive 590 pounds, but that didn’t stop Brett Enright from blowing it right out of the water with an even bigger calorie bomb.

Enright, CEO of Juicys traveling barbecue catering service, first thought about attempting to make the world’s largest hamburger last December, while on vacation. He looked up the Guinness Record for the world’s biggest burger, and after a talk with Nick Nicora, co-owner of Ovation Food Services, he decided to try and beat it, at this year’s Alameda County Fair.

On July 2, at 5 am, Brett and his helpers started working on their fast-food monster, by preparing 600 pounds of meat, which they expected would shrink to 400 pounds, after cooking. Then they molded 340 pounds of dough into two buns, which after baking were covered with 50 pounds of cheese, 20 pounds of onions, 30 pounds of lettuce, 13 pounds of pickles and 20 pounds of mustard and ketchup (10 of each). The burger itself was cooked on a giant, mobile barbecue called The Outlaw Grill. This mean contraption spends most of the year on the road, traveling from NASCAR events to concerts and fairs, cooking up a storm wherever it goes. This huge burger was its biggest challenge yet.

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A pub in Wellington, New Zealand, has caused quite a stir after it decided to serve apple-flavored horse semen shots to its customers.

Steven Drummond, co-owner of the Green Man Pub, in Wellington, was looking for a new drink as the entry for the nationwide 14th annual Monteith’s Beer & Wild Food Challenge, when he realized the sperm harvested from a nearby Christchurch stallion farm would make a fine choice. Add some apple flavor and voila, you have the most disgusting shot ever served in a bar. And the weirdest thing is people actually pay big money to try it. If someone paid you to drink horse semen, I’d (kind of) understand, but when you’re the one paying $20 for a shot of the stuff, you have a problem.

According to Green Man Pub chef, Jason Varley, the horse semen drink known as “Hoihoi tatea” is particularly preferred by the female clientele. Most ladies down the stuff and afterwards make jokes about going home and getting their husbands to eat grass, or about the possibility of their children being born with long faces. Varley admits he tried horse semen himself and claims it tastes “ok”, “like custard”, but says it’s not very popular with men, in general. Read More »

It may not be the first of its kind in the world, but it is the first ice-cream truck for dogs in America, and pooches in the L.A. area have already grown to love it.

Patrick Guilfoyle, the man behind Phydough, came up with the idea of an ice-cream truck for dogs after seeing most dog-food manufacturers thought more about profit than the dogs eating their products. He wanted to bake wholesome, preservative-free cookies for dogs, and by combining his wish with the popular “gourmet truck” trend that’s sweeping the nation, he came up with Phydough – an ice-cream truck offering all kinds of delicious cookies and ice-cream for pooches.

According to the official site, Phydough uses only the finest organic ingredients bought from quality grocers like Whole Foods and local farmers’ markets, so while prices may seem a bit steep, you can rest assured your puppy is eating healthy. A scoop of ice-cream costs around $2.50, and you’ll have to spend $16 for 12 flavored cookies, but your dog will love you more for it.

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Every year, teams of chefs from all over Serbia, gather in the remote mountain village of Ozrem to cook various testicle dishes, in the World Testicle Cooking Championship.

For most people, the mere thought of eating any kind of testicles is sickening, but for the Serbians, who believe testicles contain a lot of testosterone which helps men’s libidos, it’s just a welcome challenge. So, to turn it into a competition, Ljubomir Erovic created the World Testicle Cooking Championship, back in 2005. Since then, it’s been organized every year, and more and more tourists come to try, or see others stuff their faces with various testicle-based foods. The festival has become so popular that Erovic, a seasoned testicle cook, has even published a testicle cookbook.

The motto of the event is “Scots have their scotch, the Swiss – their cheese, and we, the Serbs, have balls,”, and judging by the number of testicles cooked and consumed by the audience, I’d say that’s very true. The cooks use testicles from all kinds of animals and birds, including bulls, pigs, ostriches, roosters, kangaroos, or turkeys. Each of them have original recopies which they hope will land them the annual prize and the title of testicle cooking champion. Read More »

It was definitely not a piece of cake, but Cake Boss star, Buddy Valastro, managed to create an incredibly realistic cake shaped like the Chevrolet Camaro-shifting Autobot, Bumblebee.

With Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon scheduled for a July 1st release, the people at General Motors though this was a good pretext to gain some exposure for their gorgeous Chevrolet Camaro, so they asked Buddy Valastro to create a detailed cake shaped both as a yellow Camaro and as Transformers star, Bumblebee. Many asked if he could deliver something impressive enough, but when the rolled in at the 2011 New York Auto Show, no one had any more doubts.

The event was featured on TLC’s Cake Boss, in an episode that aired June 20, and viewers got to see one of the biggest, most incredible-cakes ever made. The Camaro-Bumblebee cake weighed 1,500 pounds, and was made of yellow sponge cake, Rice Crispy Treats, buttercream frosting, and yellow and black frosting for the Transformers figure. The unique cake had moving wings, lights and pyrotechnics.

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The global food crisis is a very serious issue, but professor Ikeda thinks his latest invention, an artificial meat based on protein from human excrement, could be of great help.

The Japanese researcher from the Okayama laboratory says its country has more sewage mud than they can handle, so Tokyo Sewarage asked him to explore its possible use. Knowing the wacky nature of many Japanese scientists, it’s no surprise he came up with a turd burger. During his research, he discovered sewage mud contains a great deal of protein so he began developing a process of extracting that valuable protein and turning it into a viable meat substitute.

Sewage mud is high in protein, because it’s full of bacteria, most of which comes from human feces. However, these microorganisms are harmless, because they are killer by heat during the manufacturing process. According to initial tests, the artificial meat even tastes like beef, thanks to added soy protein, and Ikeda added some red food coloring to give it a more natural look. In terms of nutritive values, the turd burger doesn’t sound bad at all: it’s 63% protein, 25% carbohydrates, 3% lipids and 9% minerals. Read More »

When you think about expensive food, potatoes aren’t exactly the first ingredients that come to mind, are they? Believe it or not La Bonnotte potatoes are one of the world’s most expensive foods, served only in the most luxurious restaurants.

The price of one kilogram of La Bonnotte potatoes can reach $700, making it the most expensive potato on Earth. Its ridiculous price doesn’t just have to do with its delicious salty flavor, but also with the fact that it’s very rare. This variety of potato is only cultivated on Noirmoutier, an island off the coast of western France, and just 100 tons are produced every year, mainly because they have to be picked by hand. La Bonnotte’s tuber remains attached to the stem making too fragile to harvest by machine, not to mention it also needs to be fertilized with algae and seaweed to give it that distinct earthy, salty flavor. Its fragile nature simply didn’t make it profitable enough for large agricultural companies, and it was only because of teh love and care of a few French potato lovers that it didn’t go extinct.

Also known as The King of Potatoes, La Bonnotte is planted in February and ready to be picked in the first week of May. The entire crop is usually exhausted by the first weekend of the month, because they retain all of their flavor if their picked and shipped to the restaurant the same day.

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Probably not, but Nino Selimaj, owner of Nino’s Bellissima Pizza, in New York, seems to think there are many food lovers who would fork out $1,000 for a slice of heaven.

Selimaj himself came up with the idea for this expensive pizza, in 2007, after spending a whole year just researching the ingredients. In the end, he settled on a creme fraiche base,  four types of caviar, sliced lobster tail, salmon roe and some wasabi. Each $250 slice contains a different kind of caviar and while Selimaj admits his gourmet creation isn’t for everyone, he says there are plenty of people who can afford it.

In 2010, during a CNN Money report on pizza in New York, Selimaj said the financial crisis hit his $1,000 pizza as well, and while he used to sell between 2 and 10 pies a week before the crisis, sales were down to one every two weeks, even one a month. I don’t know if he’s doing any better now, but I think he’ll keep it on the menu just for the pride of selling the most expensive pizza in the world.

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Fancy menus may be enough for most restaurant diners around the world, but not in Japan. Here, image is everything and before going in for a bite, people want to see exactly what the food they want to order looks like. That’s where Japan’s realistic plastic food displays come into play…

Japanese fake food models can be traced back to 1917, but it wasn’t until 1926 that a restaurant owner decided to use them in a glass casing, to attract more customers. His idea was a big hit and people flocked to his venue hoping to get a serving of the delicious meals displayed outside. Soon, other restaurants followed his example and fake food display making became a lucrative business. In 1932, Iwasaki Ryuzo set up up a company that made and sold fake foods to restaurants and today it’s Japan’s top plastic food manufacturer. Business is very lucrative, as estimates show it produces revenues of billions of yen every year. For an entire menu, executed to perfection, luxury restaurants will pay up to one million yen.

In the old days, fake food models were made from wax. It was melted and pored into molds made from kanten (a seaweed jelly), but today manufacturers use silicon molds in which they pour liquid plastic and heat it up until it hardens. Modern materials and techniques apparently make the food considerably more realistic.  Restaurants send fake food makers the exact item they want replicated, along with photos. Silicon is poured around and over the disk and solidifies into a mold, which is then filled with liquid plastic and cooked in an oven. Then comes the really hard part – getting the details right. Oil based paints, regular brushes, air brushes, knives and carving tools are all part of fake food artist’s arsenal, but they all keep their techniques a secret.

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57-year-old Don Gorske ate his first Big Mac 39 years ago, to celebrate buying a new car. He was hooked and on that same day he went back and ate eight more before the McDonalds restaurant closed. On May 17 2011, he ate his 25,000th Big Mac.

The retired prison guard planned to eat his 25,000 Big Mac in the same restaurant, in the same day and at the xact same hour he ate his first heart-stopping burger. The McDonald’s in his home town of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, celebrated the event by organizing a ceremony for their most loyal customer, and posted a sign beneath the logo’s golden arches that said “Congrats Don Gorske 25000 Big Macs.” Before biting into the burger, he said “It’s been seven years since 20,000. Same thing goes this year folks. You can’t have the carton and it probably still takes 16 bites for me to finish a Big Mac.”

Gorske fell in love with the Big Mac in 1972, when he walked into the local McDonald’s and bought three burgers to celebrate buying a car. He loved them so much that he came back to the restaurant twice that day, and ate a total of nine before it closed down. “I plan on eating Big Macs until I die,” he said. “I have no intentions of changing. It’s still my favorite food. Nothing has changed in 39 years. I look forward to it every day.” Throughout the nearly four decades since he started eating Big Macs, he’s only gone eight days without his favorite meal. One of the reasons he skipped a day was to grant his mother a dying wish, and the last day without a Big Mac was on Thanksgiving 2000, when he forgot to stock up and McDonald’s was closed for the holiday.

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Marquis Los Cabos luxury resort, in Baja California Sur, Mexico, offers its guests the most exclusive popsicle they’ve ever tasted, priced at 1,000 US dollars.

So what makes a simple popsicle cost so much money, apart from the chance to savor poolside in one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Well, rich people tend to have a soft spot for gold, so the world’s most expensive popsicle contains 24 carat gold and Tequilas Premium Clase Azul Ultra, a special brand of tequila which sells for $1,500 a bottle. The frozen treat is served poolside, on a classic plastic stick, with some gold chocolate coins. Although salt would have been much more appropriate for a tequila popsicle, this one contains sugar, to take the edge off.

If you don’t have a sweet tooth and real gold flakes don’t impress you enough to throw a whole grand on a popsicle, the guys at Marquis Los Cabos will gladly serve you a simple shot of Tequilas Premium Clase Azul Ultra for a mere $500.

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