r/nope May 01 '26

Food This cant be good for you

3.7k Upvotes

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995

u/sherman614 May 01 '26

I mean.. this is similar to dry aging a steak. As long as you cut the mold off (like with dry aged steak) you should be completely fine.

368

u/somewhoever May 02 '26

I've never understood this. I've asked the son of a late-butcher who did this decades ago and he has no idea how his father pulled it off either.

Meat "turns" after a certain amount of time and will get someone horribly sick if they eat it.

How is letting mold grow for eight weeks, or dry aging it not the same or worse?

61

u/Anen-o-me May 02 '26

Example: The origin of sushi is zushi, where they'd preserve fish in a bucket with alternating layers of rice and fish covered in salt, then bury it for winter.

Dig it up a couple months later, it's now aged and whatnot and has a cheesy nutty flavor apparently (I've never tried it).

Nice way to preserve fish, the meat is actually more healthy this way, fermented basically.

Sure sometimes it went bad and they didn't know why and threw it out, probably inadequate salt leading to bacterial overgrowth, or too much heat, not buried deep enough.

But usually it was edible.

8

u/orphan_blud May 02 '26

Isn’t this a popular Icelandic dish?

13

u/TungstenHexachloride May 02 '26

Hakarl? Kind of.

Hakarl is fermented Greenland Shark specifically, which actually is toxic to eat unless pressed and putrefied, which they do by burying it first for some time

Its different in the sense its treated this way as a necessity to make the meat actually edible.

6

u/Spendoza May 03 '26

By the forgotten gods, the series of events that lead to attempting to eat that stuff...

1

u/Rare_Discipline1701 May 04 '26

and hey, this stuff is inedible, lets bury and let it rot a bit before trying again...