For the last 20 years, people have been coming to The Bagel Store in Brooklyn, New York, to have a taste of the world’s most beautiful bagel. Aptly named “Rainbow Bagel”, the unique treat looks more like Play Doh than actual food, but reportedly tastes much, much better.

Scott Rosillo, the “world’s premier bagel artist” and owner of The Bagel Store, is the mastermind behind the popular rainbow bagel. “It’s an absolute labor of passion and art,” he said during a video interview with Insider Food. “A tremendous amount of discipline is required to make the world’s most beautiful bagel”. The process is apparently so complex that the store only makes about 100 of them every five hours. Rosillo says that he and his team can make 5,000 ordinary bagels in the same amount of time.

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If you’ve been trying to lose weight forever, you’re definitely going to be interested in how this New York chef shed a whopping 101 pounds eating pizza every day for seven months. It probably goes against every single bit of dieting advice you’ve ever been given, but hey, the proof is right there in the pudding. Or in this case, the pizza.

Chef Pasquale Cozzolino revealed that he put on a colossal 370 pounds after he moved to the US from Italy. “I discovered the Oreo, which we never had in Italy,” he confessed. “It was like an addiction. I’d eat 10 or 12 Oreos, one time I even ate the whole box. It was like a drug for me.” He was also drinking two to three cans of soda a day at one point.

These habits made Cozzolino so overweight that he could no longer do the things he loved, like playing with his son in the park. He was wearing pants with a 48-inch waist and his doctors warned him that he was at high risk for heart disease. “I had knee problems, back problems, three ulcers in the stomach,” he said. The time was ripe for him to shed the excess pounds.

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Even if you’re into weird foods and like trying new and exciting things, you’ll still probably find the menu at this Japanese restaurant too hardcore. With dishes like cooked crocodile feet, grilled piranha and battered, deep-fried whole salamander, this place makes frog legs seem like baby food.

Located in Yokohama’s Noge district, Chinju-ya (rare meat monger) Restaurant is certainly not for the faint-hearted. In the six years he has been running the place, chef Fukuoka has taken pride in serving customers the rarest and most unusual meats from across the world. using his international connections, he can apparently get his hands on anything from axolotls and isopods to black scorpions and even camel meat. Their twitter feed ‘@Noge_chinjuya’ is frequently updated with their latest and greatest imports. Read More »

Did you know electricity can alter the way we taste food? Proving this fact is a revolutionary electric fork designed by Japanese researchers that can make any dish taste salty, thus acting as a substitute for the popular seasoning.

According to Hiromi Nakamura, a Post Doc Research Fellow at Tokyo’s Meiji University, the technology can be very useful for people on special diets. Patients with low blood pressure, for instance, can easily go on a low-salt diet and still enjoy delicious food. And with the fork, there’s absolutely no risk of over-salting your food. Luckily, the voltage is so small that there is no risk of electrocution either.

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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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In a bid to attract more customers and boost sales, a husband-and-wife baker duo in France have decided to hide diamonds in their pastry products. Nicolas Lelut, 35, and his wife Julie, 30, are expecting a mad rush outside their bakeries – ‘Délices de Belleville’ in Paris, and ‘L’Amandine’ in Custines, where the two diamond-containing pastries will go on sale among 800 ‘plain’ ones.

The promotional sale is all set to take place on January 6, on the occasion of The Epiphany, a Christian feast day that celebrates the incarnation of God the Son as Jesus Christ. Customers who visit either Délices de Belleville bakery on the day will have a 0.25 percent chance of winning a 0.20-carat diamond worth 600 euros. The pastry at Délices de Belleville will contain a white diamond, while the one at L’Amandine will carry a blue one. Both the rocks have been provided and certified by a reliable local jeweler.

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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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Prem Kumar, from New Delhi, India, regularly shocks people with his high tolerance to heat – the man can fry fish with his bare hands, dipping them into and out of a wok of boiling oil. The 65-year-old runs a street food stall in Karol Bagh, where he serves fried fish to thousands of customers each day. Most of them come just to watch him perform the rare feat of nonchalantly plunging his fingers into hot oil.

Kumar sells about 150 kilograms of deep-fried fish every day, along with other north-Indian delicacies like seekh kabab, mutton tikka, paneer tikka, and tandoori aloo. But a trip to his eatery is incomplete without witnessing Kumar prepare fish with his now-famous heat proof fingers. “I do not fry fish with hands all the time, it’s only when customers ask me for it,” he said. “I normally use kitchen utensils like tongs, but with people coming from all across India and requesting me to do hand frying, I cannot say no.”

Kumar claims to have inherited his special skill from his father, who opened the roadside eatery in 1960. Miraculously, the father-son duo have never suffered a single burn or blister during all these years of business. But Kumar says there’s no magic involved and attributes it to years of practice. “This is no miracle or gift of God,” he insisted. “As a child, I saw my father doing it and got curious how he could pull off that feat. I started with dipping my one finger in the boiling oil, then two, and so on. I realised that it did not cause any burns or injury whatsoever. Over the years, I built up confidence and now it as is easy for me as breathing.”

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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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Li Yongzhi, 48, is fondly known as the ‘king of chilli’ in his home village of Shawoli,  Henan Province. He starts his day with a chilli mouthwash and continues to eat copious amounts for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He recently told local media that he’s loved spicy food since childhood, and that chilli is his staple food – he could eat meals without meat or eggs, but never without a handful of chillies.

“Most people brush their teeth in the morning, I just eat chillies to freshen up my breath,” he proudly stated. “Without chillies, any meal is tasteless.” In fact, Li’s chilli needs are so great that he grows his own supply of eight different types of peppers in his backyard.

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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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