Feasting on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches is usually supposed to save you money, but not if you opt for the variety served at Chicago restaurant PB&J, where a single sandwich will set you back a whopping $350.

The owners of PB&J, which unintuitively stands for ‘Pizza, Beek & Jukebox’ not peanut butter and jelly, came up with the idea for the world’s most expensive peanut butter and jelly sandwich after stumbling upon the former record holder and realizing all it really had going for itself was a 24K gold toothpick keeping the bread slices together. They decided that they could do better, so ‘The Golden Goose’, a decadent treat featuring some of the finest ingredients in the world was born.

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Kek Lapis Sarawak is a traditional Malaysian cake famous both for its intricate kaleidoscopic appearance and the grueling process required to make it.

Inspired by the spit cakes that Dutch colonists used to enjoy, Kek Lapis Sarawak was born in Malaysia’s Sarawak state, sometime in the 1970’s. It’s basically a much more complex version of the layered Kek Lapis Betawi, which Sarawakians pretty much elevated to an art form. While its beige or brown outer layers do a good job or concealing the complicated inner cake, slicing one of these treas reveals a kaleidoscope of colors and geometrical shapes that require both logical thinking and a rich imagination to create.

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An amateur confectioner from Vietnam has been getting a lot of attention for her stunningly-realistic tangerine-shaped steamed buns.

Le Thuy, a secondary school teacher from Ho Chi Minh city, is well known among the confectioner community of the Vietnamese capital, especially for her jelly and bean cakes. However, she recently managed to surprise her peers as well as thousands of social media users with her unique buns designed to resemble real tangerines down to the tiniest details. Her amazing creations look like fruits on the outside, but tear them apart and a soft, spongy interior is revealed.

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A Thai family got the shock of their lives when they took home a box of sushi to eat only to see it glow bright blue in the dark after allegedly becoming infected with fluorescent bacteria.

Last Tuesday, Arun Yolpaiboon, 58, and her son, 21-year-old Natthanai Kanchanawasa, had just returned home with some boxes of sushi, which they consume regularly, when they noticed that some of the pieces of shrimp glowed an unnatural blue in low-light areas of their home. Even after boiling the pieces of sushi, the unnatural glow remained, so the pair shot a video showcasing the bizarre blue color of the shrimp. Then then woman’s son ate one of the radioactive-looking pieces just for fun.

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If you’re tired of growing or eating the same old green cucumbers, you’ll be pleased to hear that there is actually an alternative – albino cucumbers.

As their name suggests, these heirloom cucumbers are a bright white, even though the stalks they grow on have a common dark green foliage. Albino cucumbers don’t simply occur as an anomaly, although that may have been the case with the first such specimen. They are actually a slowly developed variety of cucumber that dates back to the 1893, when the Burpee seed company featured it in its famous catalog for the first time. It had been sent in by a customer in 1890, and Burpee spent the next three years breeding and evaluating the plant before launching it commercially.

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Seattle-based Lauren Ko is a self-taught baker who rose to fame thanks to the mathematical precision of her pie designs, most of which are inspired by complex geometric patterns.

A former executive assistant in higher education, Lauren Ko got into baking completely by accident. She saw a picture of a really beautiful pie while surfing the internet and asked herself if she could do something like that. Little did she know that the seemingly unimportant self-challenge would change her life forever. After baking her first pie in 2016, Lauren never looked back, and soon after starting her Instagram in 2017, her mesmerizing pies were already a big hit on the popular social network. It wasn’t long before juggling her job and pie making got too difficult and she decided to focus her efforts exclusively on her passion.

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Gyromitra esculenta, or the False Morel, is a Spring mushroom that contains the toxin and carcinogen gyromitrin, which makes it illegal to sell and cook in countries around the world. In Finland, however, it is considered a delicacy.

False Morel mushrooms have historically been consumed in northern Europe for centuries, but as chemistry and medicine evolved, it became somewhat of a forbidden fruit due to the dangers of consuming even small amounts of gyromitrin. Symptoms associated with the ingestion of this known toxin and carcinogen include severe headaches, vomiting, nausea, extreme dizziness, diarrhea and, if the damage to the liver is too serious, even death. Their sale in countries like Sweden and Norway was made illegal years ago, but in Finland people still eat it with gusto.

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From flamboyant wedding cakes shaped like fantasy castles, to edible optical illusions, we’ve featured some amazing cakes here on OC, but this collection of marine-themed treats definitely take the cake!

The Covid-19 pandemic has made vacationing in a tropical island paradise a lot harder this year, but you can satisfy your craving for tropical destinations as well as your sweet tooth with some ultra-realistic paradise island cakes. We didn’t even know something like that even existed, but it turns out some cake masters are so skilled that they can recreate a tropical island setting using regular baking ingredients, food coloring and jelly.

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Redefined Meat, an Israeli startup specializing in alternative meat, recently unveiled what it calls the world’s first 3D-printed plant-based steak called Alt-Steak.

Using its own patent-pending 3D-printing technology, Redefine Meat has allegedly been able to create a meatless steak that features the appearance, texture, and, most importantly, the taste of the real thing. The company was apparently to achieve all this by working with expert butchers, chefs, food technologists and Swiss flavor company Givaudan. The revolutionary Alt-Steak is created by mixing Redefined Meat’s Alt-Muscle, Alt-Fat, and Alt-Blood plant-based formulations in several layers. The end result is a sustainable, high-protein, cholesterol-free steak that looks, cooks and tastes like real meat.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade or so, you’ve probably seen pictures of Japan’s square watermelons doing the rounds online. I know I have, but what I never knew was that these weird-looking fruit are basically inedible.

Perfectly sized and shaped fruits are big business in Japan, and it’s not uncommon for the rarest and most coveted varieties to sell for thousands of dollars a piece. Back in 2016, a supermarket owner made international news headlines after paying $11,000 for a bunch of Ruby Rose grapes, the world’s most expensive grape variety. But it’s not just grapes, specialty fruit shops charge hundreds, even thousands of dollars for fruits of all types, which may seem strange, but it is closely tied to Japanese culture. Rare and expensive fruits are traditionally offered as gifts to clients, business partners or relatives, and people will gladly spend a small fortune on a single fruit just to show their respect for someone. But while most of these expensive fruits can be savored by the recipient, there is one that has a purely decorative purpose – square watermelons.

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Numazu Port, in central Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture, was more famous for its seafood dishes and arresting views of Suruga Bay, but ever since photos of a visually striking blue pudding started doing the rounds online the port town has become known for its gourmet desserts as well.

The Numazu Deep Sea Pudding Factory (Numazu Shinkai Purin Kōbō), opened its gates in July of 2018 and managed to make a great first impression with the help of an inspired selection of gourmet sweets, that included puddings, ice cream and uniquely-flavored soda. Right from the start, the owners set out to create a product that captured the essence of Numazu, and the adjacent Suruga Bay proved to be the perfect inspiration. Famous for hosting the deepest ocean pits around Japan, Suruga Bay was perfectly represented by a whimsical blue dessert named Deep Sea Pudding.

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Believe it or not, the Vietnamese province of An Giang, in the Mekong Delta, is less known for its breathtaking natural attractions than for the giant loaves of bread that went viral online a couple of years back.

It all started in 2018, when lifestyle and entertainment website Brightside published a list of the world’s strangest foods, including a giant loaf of bread that was supposedly very popular in Vietnam’s An Giang province. There were those who claimed the accompanying photos of the bread were either photoshopped or shot from a certain angle to create the illusion that they were much larger than ordinary loaves, but then other photos and videos of the unusual bread started going viral online. Vietnamese media started giving the giant loaves a lot of attention, and soon the whole world knew about the now famous giant bread of An Giang.

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I understand that the title reads a bit strange, but then again this is no ordinary cheese we’re talking about. It’s the hardest cheese in the world, and yes, it can be chewed like gum for up to two hours.

Chhurpi or Durkha is a traditional Nepalese cheese that has been a means of survival or many remote communities for centuries. Made out of the milk of yaks, or chauri (the cross of a yak and a cow), chhurpi comes in two varieties – soft and hard. The soft stuff is usually consumed as a side dish with rice, as filling for traditional dumplings, or ever as a soup. But it’s the hard variety that makes chhurpi famous all over the world. You may think you’ve tried hard cheeses before, but trust me when I say that this Nepalese staple puts them all to shame. It’s as hard as a rock, so you can’t even bite into it for at least an hour or so.

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Shaped more like a like a jalapeno pepper than a citrus fruit, the small finger lime yields tiny caviar-like pearls that burst with flavor when you bite into them.

Originating from the lowland subtropical rainforests of coastal Australia, Citrus australasica, or the Australian finger lime has become one of the most sough-after ingredients by Michelin star restaurants around the world. It’s not that they taste radically different than regular limes or lemons – in fact their flavor is described as a combination of the two – but the texture of their pulp really makes all the difference. Somewhat similar to the pomelo, these tiny citrus fruits contain caviar-like pearls that can be used to garnish posh dishes, ensuring a burst of acidic flavor when a person bites into them. Hence the nickname “caviar of citrus” and the crazy price tag that comes with it.

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When it comes to making bread that’s almost too good to eat, few bakers even come close to Hannah P, a North Carolina food artist who has taken Instagram by storm with her intricate bread designs.

From loaves of bred decorated with plant-inspired designs hand-carved into the dough, to pastry creations adorned with colorful fruits and vegetables, Hannah P.’s works are nothing if not eye-catching. Using a razor blade attached to a kitchen utensil the name of which escapes me, the artist posting on Instagram under the name “Blondie + Rye” takes bread art to a level that I for one have not seen before. Sure, there are lost of talented bread artists showcasing their creations online these, days but Hannah is definitely one of the most talented ones, if not the best.

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