Food that smells bad to you
4So today’s offer with Maple Syrup, is my arch nemesis. Smelling maple syrup makes me extremely nautious. Can’t eat in a room where I can smell it. However, I know lots of people who get hungry at the mere suggestion of the stuff.
Vinegar is the same, vinegar is obviously very versatile, and I use it when cooking occasionally too, but I always gag a little when adding a little vinegar to my sauces… yet other people love vinegar…
What common food smells do you despise that other people seem to love?
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Anything spicy. Sadly, my asthma has a zero tolerance policy.
Coffee. I can detect even tiny amounts of it, and a lot of people ruin brownies and fudge with it. Ick, yuck, NO!
@werehatrack ooh… You’d hate this one spot where I pass each day. They roast coffee beans there and you can smell it strongly driving by on the highway.
Smells heavenly to me, but presumably wouldn’t be for you.
@OnionSoup When the wind is from a certain rare vector, I can smell the Maxwell House roasting and packing plant that’s about six miles away. Happily, that’s perhaps once every two or three years.
@OnionSoup @werehatrack I used to work third shift in a converted mill building that housed several other companies, one of which was a coffee roaster. They must have had a lot of dark roasts, because it usually smelled like burnt coffee when i was leaving in the morning. I love the smell of fresh coffee, but that was a bit much!
@werehatrack I like the smell of coffee well enough, because it triggers a happy childhood memory. I can’t stand the taste of it, though. You’re right; it spoils everything.
Also, any fermented cheeses. They stink of spoiled milk.
@werehatrack well, in a way, that is exactly what they are.
Coconut.
My mother was on a kimchi-making kick for a while when I was a kid
. I like it okay as a condiment but wow, does it ever stink while it’s fermenting.
@Kyeh Worse than sauerkraut?
@werehatrack Probably the same.
Cambodian Fish Sauce (similar to Thai and Vietnamese Fish Sauce - my kid’s friends always wrinkled their noses and commented if she had used it), coffee, beer, and probably other stuff I can’t remember at the moment. I buy my own food so avoid the stuff that stinks.
Probably a common aversion, but that fish market smell. You know the one, similar to low tide. I enjoy cooked fish, but keep the raw ones away from me!
Buffalo wings
@tinamarie1974 ooh. Good one.
/image uni sushi
@ybmuG
But so delicious!
(definitely an uncommon taste)
Some people like the aromatic smell of durian while others can’t stand it.
Rutabaga, nasty.
Raw onions. I love them cooked. But raw is pure evil. My Dad used to eat them like apples
@llangley Your dad probably would have liked this book:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/175645524706
Also at A’zon.
I read it as a teen.
@llangley I used to work with a guy who said he ate a raw onion every day. I chalked it up to him being Canadian. j/k
Goat milk, cheese, pretty much any kind of comestible that comes from goats.
You are welcome to my portion, TYVM.
Cilantro or any of the stinky cheeses (feta, blue, etc)
@donpratt Be aware that a bad bedbug infestation smells remarkably similar to cilantro.
@donpratt
yeah, it’s funny how cilantro smells/tastes like soap to some folks (thanks to the OR6A2 gene cluster)
@chienfou @donpratt
@chienfou Yep. My wife loves it, but I’m definitely not a fan.
@donpratt @Kyeh
No pico de gallo for you!
@chienfou @donpratt Oddly enough I’ve gotten more tolerant of cilantro in Mexican food. I still don’t like it in Asian food, and I could never just eat it plain and raw the way some people do.
Side eyes husband eating his lunch…hot dogs.
I’m with you maple syrup. I grew up with ribbon cane syrup for pancakes and waffles… so much better.
That food on the stove tonight that was pretty good yesterday for lunch.
I don’t remember putting sour milk into it.
Limburger cheese, raclette and other washed rind cheeses. I am also not crazy about certain Indian chaat with black salt.
Not foods but certainly enough to make one gag and other wise run away. Thioacetone, putrescene, cadaverene, skatole, mercaptan (methane thiol) are among the biggest stinkers of all time. Quite gagable actually.
During my long career as a chemist, I had occasion to work with various thiols, with hydrogen sulfide, and with certain small carbon number acids such as butyric acid, caproic acid and pivalic acids. During which time, my clothes, my shoes, my automobile, and me smelled pretty bad for a couple of weeks.
But not as bad as Wallace P. Flynn, "The Old man who loved cheese" so much his family left him.
@Jackinga
Now I know what to label bottles I don’t want people to open!
@djslack @Jackinga Mercaptan works for those familiar with it.
@djslack @Jackinga I would 100% open those bottles.
@djslack @werehatrack mercaptan (methyl thiol is the smell of natural gas. It is added to warn folks of the presence of gas as methane is odorless.
@brainmist @djslack Wobeunto any who would even touch a bottle containing any of these. Putrescene smells like rotting meat as does cadaverne which smells like even more rotting meat. Skatole smells like shit. Just touching a bottle of any of these is probably enough to get some trace amounts on your skin. One can smell these things in concentrations of parts per billion.
Back in the 1960s when I was working with some of the lower carbon number acids such as butyric (sweat) and caproic (goat, very, very strong goat odor), I think the pivalic acid was the worst, as it smelled like essence of pig pen on steroids.
During that time, I recall going to a local section American Chemical Society meeting. No matter where I stood, there was a clear space around me. LOL. Too bad, I didn’t ride a subway or a bus during that time as I would have had no trouble finding a seat even at rush hour.
@brainmist @djslack If you did open such a bottle, I guarantee, you would be 100% sorry, if it’s contents were true to the label.
@brainmist @djslack @Jackinga
Why were you working with them?!
@brainmist @djslack @Kyeh I was working with an imadazole compound that was used as a catalyst for both epoxy resins and in some urethane reactions. I was trying to make a delayed cure or a room temperature cure catalyst by making a salt of the imadazole with weak organic acids. So I ordered up a bunch of low molecular weight acids and set to work. Little did I know what I was in for!
Didn’t work, btw.
The project came about because one of the application chemists, a guy named Eric K., seemed to have stumbled on a room temperature cure by mixing the imidazole with copper sulfate. Bars made in a mold had pretty respectable heat deflection temperatures indicating good cross-linking.
When I was assigned to figure out what was happening, I soon discovered that the technician, Andy Campbell, (who is now late, bless his heart) was heating the molds before pouring in the Epon 828 epoxy plus the imidazole-copper sulfate mixture. Apparently the epoxy wouldn’t pour and fill the molds very well if they weren’t heated. So Andy said, “I always heat the molds in the oven for a half hour,” in a matter of fact off handed way.
Well, what he was doing was getting the reaction started which was slightly exothermic to begin with.
So after I figured this out and rained on that parade, I was assigned the task of trying to make the thing work some other way.
That was my reward.
@Jackinga I knew I’d heard of mercaptan but couldn’t place it. And I assumed the names of the ones I mentioned were quite descriptive, and that turned out to be true.
@brainmist @djslack @Jackinga Oh, I thought maybe the work had something to do with the smells, but that was just incidental, I see. I hope you got kind of “nose-blind” while you were doing the work!
I’ve had to adjust to a lot of scents, but the tastes I can’t do are black licorice and green bell peppers. And of course anything spoiled is straight out. (My fridge died recently, making for fun times in ‘is it spoiled’ olfactation.)
@brainmist Funny, I love black licorice and green bell peppers.
When I was a kid, my sister and I would fight over the black jelly beans which were licorice flavor. We also loved Black Jack gum and some cough drops that were licorice flavored as well as the black wafers in a roll of NECCO wafers. Those were the best!
@brainmist I used to work in a grocery store, mostly at the customer service desk. I was the one people brought their spoiled meat and milk to. Some of it you could smell from several feet away; IDK how long people let it sit before they brought it in. Spoiled chicken is the worst, with fish a close second.
I hate everything to do with green peppers. The taste of them contaminates whatever dish they’re in, and you can smell that they’re in there before you even taste it. I used to hate scanning them when I ran a cash register because I could smell them, even through the plastic bag.
@brainmist @Jackinga
I enjoy raw bell peppers and carrots, but when they’re cooked, I cannot abide their taste or smell.
I learned to tolerate the smell of coffee but even a hint of the taste makes me physically ill.
Whiskey, whether scotch, bourbon, or rye odor or taste just the same.
For what it’s worth, in my college A&P class I found out that I’m a super-taster, so brussels sprouts, brocolli, etc., are all vile to me as well.
Cumin. Smells like B.O.
@curtw4 Yeah, it kinda does. But it tastes so good!
Celery. For whatever reason, uncooked celery (and cooked to a degree) smells like melted plastic to me. (And I’ve smelled a lot of material that should not be smelted, or things one should not smell because of the bacteria around decay.)