Get a Life-Size Tattoo of a Burger, Win Free Burgers for Life

Cafe 51, a popular burger joint in Melbourne, Australia, is offering anyone the chance to receive a free burger per day, for the rest of their lives, if they get a scale tattoo of one of their delicious burgers, anywhere on their bodies.

“Tattoos are for life, so why shouldn’t burgers be free for life too, right?” the #freeburgersforlife campaign page on the Cafe 51 website states. “It’s simple, pick a burger, any burger from our current menu and get it tattooed anywhere on your body. You are then forever part of our #burgerfamily and you qualify to get this burger absolutely free everyday for the rest of your life. Coz we reckon that since you love us enough to join our #burgerfamily by getting a tattoo of one of our burgers, we love you enough to give you a free burger every day for the rest of your life!”

The controversial promotional stunt had been teased for about a month and finally launched on Sunday night. By Monday, over 450 people had registered, and at the time of this writing, over 3,000 Cafe 51 are waiting to get their favorite burger tattooed. Considering all the media attention the campaign is getting and the fact that Cafe 51 plans to take registrations all through October, the number of applicants will probably reach into the tens of thousands.

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World’s Spiciest Tortilla Chips Are Sold One at a Time in Coffin-Shaped Boxes

Using extract from the hottest chilli pepper on the planet, American company Paqui Chips has created the world’s spiciest tortilla chip – the Carolina Reaper Madness. It’s apparently so hot that it only comes in packs of one.

Usually, when you open a bag of tortilla chips, you never stop at one, but when it comes to Carolina Reaper Madness chips, Jeff Day, Brand Manager for Paqui Chips, says that one is all you need. “It’s the hottest chip you’ll ever have, I can guarantee you that. After you eat that one chip, trust me, you’re not looking to dig back into the bag and have a second one. So, one chip is what we created to have the experience,” he says.

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Introducing the Hamdog – The Crazy Hamburger-Hotdog Hybrid You Never Knew You Craved

From now on, when you get the munchies for a delicious street food snack, you’ll no longer have to choose between a hamburger and a hotdog, because you can have both in the same bun. Introducing the Hamdog, probably the craziest fast food hybrid ever.

Mark Murray, of Perth, Australia, came up with the idea for the Hamdog in 2004, and by 2009, he had already obtained a patent for the uniquely-shaped bun of the treat. Last year, he appeared on Channel 10’s Shark Tank show to pitch his idea to potential investors and secure enough funding to get his fast food business off the ground. The judges were not impressed, and even laughed when he described eating the Hamdog as “a party in your mouth”. But Murray didn’t let the experience bring him down, and one year later, he’s selling Hamdogs in his home city and wants to expand nationally.

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Former Inmates Are Obsessed with These Heavenly-Tasting Jail Potato Chips

The Whole Shabang chips reportedly taste like heaven, but until recently, you literally had to commit a crime to get your hands on a bag. That’s because they are jail chips available exclusively to inmates and jail visitors.

To say that former inmates are obsessed with The Whole Shabang chips would be an understatement. For years, people who got to try these crunchy delicacies behind bars have been scouring the internet for them, posting messages on the Facebook page of Keefe Group – the company that supplies them to jails – and setting up groups to petition for their availability on the outside. But apart from rare eBay auctions, getting your hands on a bag of The Whole Shabang was an almost impossible task, unless you actually went to jail or visited someone there. Until not too long ago, the only place you could find them was the prison commissary.

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Eat Up or Pay Up – German Restaurants Charge Patrons Extra for Not Finishing Their Meals

A number of restaurants in Germany have come up with a somewhat controversial way of fighting food waste – charging patrons a small fee if they cannot finish all the food on their plates.

Yuoki, a sushi restaurant in Stuttgart, Germany, is not your everyday all-you-can-eat buffet. For starters, there isn’t an actual buffet to fill your plate at. Instead, patrons are seated at a table and provided with iPads which they can use to order up to five small dishes every ten minutes. They can eat as much as they want for 120 minutes, but having the food delivered at short intervals allows diners to constantly assess how hungry they are and order accordingly, preventing food waste. Also, owner Luan Guoyu believes our “eyes are bigger than our stomachs”, so not being able to see the cooked food at the buffet prevents people from ordering more food that they can actually eat just because they like the way it looks.

But Luan Guoyu’s most effective way of fighting food waste, and the one that has attracted media attention, is his €1 ($1.15) fine for food still left on the plate. “It’s called ‘all-you-can-eat,’ not ‘all-you-can-chuck-away,’ he says, adding that the extra charge is not meant to increase his profits, but to act as a reminder not to waste food. In the two years since Yuoki implemented this “eat up or pay up” policy, Guoyu claims he has collected €900 ($1,020) to €1,000 ($1,133) in food waste fees, which he plans to donate to charity.

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Food Expert Creates Unmeltable Premium Freeze-Dried Ice Cream for the Masses

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could enjoy a nice refreshing ice-cream on a hot summer day without having to constantly lick at it to keep it from dripping all over your hands? Well, thanks to Gastronaut ice Cream, now you can!

34-year-old Rob Collington, founder of Gastronaut Ice Cream, had always been a big fan of Astronaut Ice Cream, a freeze-dried ice cream sold at space museums and camping stores across the US. He has enjoyed eating it since he was a little boy, even though he admits it doesn’t very good, because it’s made with the cheapest ice-cream available and contains artificial ingredients. But it does have a big advantage over even the most delicious traditional ice cream – it doesn’t melt, no matter how hot the sun burns.

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New York Restaurant Sells Bone Broth Popsicles

Springbone Kitchen, a New York restaurant famous for its trendy bone broth, has found a way making the meaty liquid appealing even when it’s hot outside by turning it into a popsicle.

The bone broth diet trend has been around for a while, but it really picked up steam last winter when celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Salma Hayek and Shailene Woodley revealed they were big fans. Soup-themed stores and eateries started popping up in major U.S. cities and Dr. Kellyann’s “Bone Broth Diet” book became a bestseller, with many health dieters relying on the meat-flavored soup as a meal replacement. But while it’s understandable that the hot broth became popular during the cold winter months, it’s a lot harder to sell when it’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

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The Last Prince of Italy Is Selling Pasta from a Food Truck in California

One of the last places you would expect to find a real Italian prince is driving a food truck on the streets of Los Angeles, California. But that hasn’t stopped His Royal Highness Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, the only male heir of Italy’s exiled king, Umberto II, from trying his luck in the American mobile food business.

“I came to Los Angeles six months ago for an event and I realized there were various Mexican and Asian food trucks around,” the prince told Italian magazine, Chi. “I thought ‘why don’t I try it?’ With a food truck with fresh Italian pasta that is loved around the world.” So he bought himself a food truck, painted it in the colors of House Savoy and named it “Prince of Venice”, after one of his would-be titles which are not recognized by the Italian government.

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This Turkish Pudding Proves Chicken Makes a Great Dessert

Meat doesn’t sound like a great ingredient for desserts, but that’s probably because you’ve never tried ‘tavuk göğsü’, a creamy, sweet pudding with chicken breast as its main ingredient.

Legend has it that tavuk göğsü was invented centuries ago, when one of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire got a craving for something sweet in the middle of the night and cooks at the Palace of Topkapı had to work with the only ingredient left in their kitchen – chicken. That’s just a legend though, and even in Turkey, a country so proud of its rich culture, there are those who claim there isn’t any chicken at all in tavuk göğsü. It certainly doesn’t taste anything like chicken, but Turkish cooks specializing in this unique dessert say it’s because the meat is pounded into small bits and boiled until it dissolves in the pudding. Its main purpose is to give tavuk göğsü a different texture than regular puddings.

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This “Impossible Burger” Is Made of Plants, Tastes Just Like Real Meat

San Francisco-based startup Impossible Foods might have just achieved the impossible – making plants tastes like meat. Their Impossible Burger is made entirely of plants, but sizzles on the grill, oozes fat and reportedly tastes like a delicious cooked beef patty.

Red meat consumption around the world is at an all time high, but producing high quantities of meat to satisfy demand is not sustainable and it’s already taking a heavy toll on the environment. In recent years, experts have been busy coming up with alternatives to animal meat, like switching to a protein-rich insect-based diet, growing meat in the lab and even artificial meat made from sewage mud. But one San-Francisco company may have discovered a much more viable solution – a mashup of plant-based ingredients that tastes just like real meat. Impossible Foods has been working on an alternative to meat for the last five years, and its soon-to-be-launched Impossible Burger is already receiving high praise for its likeness to beef patties in taste, texture and appearance.

When former Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown founded Impossible Foods, he set his goal on creating a product that would change the world, and the Impossible Burger might do just that. He and his research team have spent years analyzing meat molecules to find out what makes a burger taste, smell and cook the way it does, in the belief that everything animal can be replicated using plant-based compounds. And judging by the testimonies of the few people who have actually sampled this revolutionary burger, Brown was right.

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World’s Oldest Twinkie Turns 40, Still Refuses to Decompose

In 1976, Roger Bennatti, a chemistry teacher at George Stevens Academy, in Maine, unwrapped a fresh Twinkie and placed it atop a classroom chalkboard so he and his students could see how long it took for it to decompose. 40 years later, that question remains unanswered, because mould simply refuses to grow on the world’s oldest Twinkie.

The official shelf-life of a Twinkie – as stated by the company making them nowadays – is only 25 days, but as the famous Twinkie of George Stevens Academy clearly shows, it’s really a lot longer than that. It has been sitting in a glass case for four decades now, and even though it might not be safe to eat, it is looking fantastic for its age. Its shape hasn’t change a bit, and if mould hasn’t grown on it so far, chances are it never will.

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This Meat Lover’s Chocolate Is 50 Percent Beef

Red meat hardly seems like the perfect ingredient for delicious chocolate, but a New Zealand-based food scientist is willing to bet that his high-protein, 50% beef chocolate recipe is going to be a hit.

Mustafa Farouk, Senior Food Technologist at Ag Research has partnered with Auckland boutique chocolate maker Devonport Chocolates to bring meat chocolate to the masses. The quirky idea of combining the two very different ingredients came to Dr. Farouk one day, while looking at ways of adding value to beef and pondering ways the staple food might be consumed in the future. Mixing beef and chocolate seemed like the perfect way for people to get proteins and other nutrients in meat, because chocolate is such a popular dessert.

So Farouk took a very lean cut from the hind quarter of a Waikato-raised bovine, turned into what he calls “chocolate butter”, which I assume is a sort of fine paste, and handed it over to Devonport Chocolates to use in their confectionery. The resulting combination reportedly has a consistency similar to a Turkish delight, and while the food scientist admits you can tell that it’s not regular chocolate, the taste of meat is almost impossible to pick up. In an interview with the New Zealand Herald, Farouk described the taste of beef chocolate as “wonderful”, adding that although people are initially put off by the unique dessert when they here it is 50% beef, once they bite into it and taste the rich chocolate flavor, most agree that it is excellent.

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Winecream Makes It Possible to Get Drunk by Eating Ice-Cream

If you’re all alone on your couch watching TV and can’t decide between drinking a glass of wine or stuffing yourself with ice-cream, you’ll be happy to know you can now have both, thanks to Winecream, an ingenious dessert that combines wine and gourmet ice-cream.

Created by Crossroads Company, a family-owned business in Baltimore, Winecream is a mashup of craft-made fruit wines and super-premium, gourmet ice-cream. Customers get to choose a wine from various house-made options including pineapple, mixed berry, peach, or strawberry, which is then mixed in to a cream and sugar base and flash frozen using liquid nitrogen, a food-safe cryogenic liquid that’s nearly -320 degrees Fahrenheit. First announced back in 2014, Winecream has so far only been available at wine festivals and private events, but Crossroads Company has recently made the adult dessert available for online orders and plans to launch it in liquor stores in Baltimore and Washington D.C. later this summer.

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Popular New Jet-Black Ice-Cream Is Made with Coconut Ash

You couldn’t really tell by just looking at it, but this pitch black ice-cream doing the rounds on photo-sharing sites like Instagram is actually coconut flavored. It’s made with coconut milk, coconut cream, coconut flakes, and, for that unique confusing color, coconut ash.

The Coconut Ash Ice-cream recently made its debut at Morgenstern’s Finest Ice-Cream parlor, in downtown Manhattan, New York. Owner Nick Morgenstern said he had been “monkeying around with coconut ash for a while”, and then had a fancy chocolate bar which also used the ash as an ingredient. So when he finally decided to include coconut as a flavor in his new ice-cream menu, it all came together. “I just had to use it,” he says. As bizarre a color as jet-black may seem for an ice-cream that’s not chocolate or coffee flavored, it proved a big hit with customers, who instantly started flooding Instagram with snaps of the unusual treat.

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This Tasty New York Doughnut Is Made with Bone Marrow

The last ingredient you would expect to find in a delicious doughnut is bone marrow, but that’s apparently the secret behind this popular treat served at a New York doughnut shop.

The doughnut market has become very competitive in recent years, and businesses have to come up with something really special to get an edge. Some rely on crazy combinations to create hybrids like the popular Cronut, others cover their doughnuts with extravagant decorations like edible gold and sugar diamonds – see Donutopia, the $100 doughnut – and a few go the bizarre route. The treat we’re talking about today falls in the latter category.

The Doughnut Project, a fancy bakery in New York city, partnered with local butcher shop Hudson & Charles to create what we believe is the world’s first bone marrow doughnut. That sounds pretty disgusting, but the experienced bakers claim that bone marrow actually makes their hand-crafted, yeast-raised doughnuts more delicious. The chocolate pastry cream filling is whipped with roasted bone marrow that apparently enhances its richness and gives it a velvet-smooth texture. The unique treat is also glazed in clementine and sprinkled with orange-infused chocolate shavings.

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