Shark meat has an unpleasant taste due to the presence of high concentrations of the waste product urea in the tissue. Sharks store urea to maintain an osmotic balance with seawater so as not to have a water loss problem.

Sharks must be bled and iced immediately upon capture. The shark’s blood contains urea, a compound that helps maintain the animal’s body fluids. After the shark dies, bacteria break the urea down to ammonia, which can impart an off-taste to the meat. Do not use shark meat that smells strongly of ammonia.

Isn’t that the same as akvavit? I drank a whole bottle once. Dry heaves for days.

we also tried sheep’s balls and sheep’s head. my girlfriend liked the rotten shark. but she also likes rotten cheese. I can’t stand rotten/sour things. I need a steak with peppercorn sauce! NOW!!!

As you know, Bob, people in much of the world eat fresh shark meat just fine. In fact, the shark population worldwide is under serious pressure due to overfishing.

I wrote most of a long response about how weird it was that the hakarl articles stated that shark meat contains uremic acid – I think there’s no such thing; perhaps they mean uric acid? – and/or cyanide and is deadly poisonous unless given this treatment. The article Teresa linked says “Fresh shark meat is said to have caused people to vomit blood” which seems nonsensical.

Then I noticed that there’s a specific type of shark referenced in hakarl, the Greenland shark, about which Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) states: “The flesh of a Greenland shark is poisonous when fresh. This is due to the presence of the toxin trimethylamine oxide, which, upon digestion, breaks down into trimethylamine, producing effects similar to extreme drunkenness. Occasionally, sled dogs that end up eating the flesh are unable to stand up due to the neurotoxins.” Huh. Whaddya know.

On further reflection, it seems to be another case of the food equivalent of Rule 34 – “No matter how poisonous something is, somebody somewhere in the world will have found a way to eat it – and like it!”

A canonical example is cassava, a staple diet in much of the tropic world, even though it contains cyanide compounds which can kill or severely poison you if you don’t cook it sufficiently. Despite this, it tastes OK, and it’s one of the easiest to cultivate sources of starch, and that’s turned it into a nearly world-wide staple food.

Fortunately the same can not be said for Greenland shark.

A whole bottle of anything in that proof however… I couldn’t drink rum for years after one college night and its aftermath.

A Finnish urban legend tells that after WWII, Finland started receiving UN aid only after their reps had visited the country during easter holidays and witnessed the locals eating Mämmi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A4mmi ).

Mämmi sounds pretty good, actually.

I saw this on a doc years ago. Good as this recipe sounds the guy in the doc pissed on it as well before burying.

Piss Shark.

Done.

Isn’t rotten shark basically “kim chee for carnivores”?

Sell the drizzle, not the sharksteak.

What was their thought process?

“Hey, here’s some fresh shark! Let me take a bite! (chomp) Bleccch! Tastes terrible!”

At this point, most sane people would chalk it up to experience and not try to eat shark again.

But no. Somehow, they decided:
“Hey, maybe if I buried it on the beach for a couple of months it’d become edible!”

What I think really happened was something like this:

(coincidentally, there was a similar thread on Consumerist last week, and I posted about this there)

Person 1: We’re all out of food. We haven’t had anything to eat for days.

Person 2: Well, there is that shark that washed up on the beach a couple months ago that we buried. Go dig it up.

Person 1: Ew. But I’m hungry… (chomp chomp)

Person 2: How is it?

Person 1: Shut up and eat.

– weeks later –

Person 3: Hey, how did you guys survive?

Person 1: We ate the rotten shark.

Person 3: Eww!

Person 2: No, no, it’s really good! Yeah, that’s it! It’s delicious! Really! Not disgusting at all! No! Not at all! Here, try some…

And a new culinary tradition is born.

Icelanders had no good method of storing food, no salt-mines and no efficient way of getting salt from sea. The only storage choice left was to just let the things dry up (dried fish, now that is a delicacy, we call it harðfiskur (hard fish)) or rot and ferment (see shark above and various other dishes, such as fermented stingray which is a tradional Dec 23rd dish), also some sort of a pickling mechanism for meat. With short summers and long winters, a lot of dry, pickled and rotten food was consumed.

This is why we currently have a wide choice of restaurants in Iceland, hardly any of them serving traditional food from the days of old.

I’ll stick to the Skyr!!

A toast with a piece of graflax and traditional graflax-sauce (mustardy with herbs) is something everyone should taste and most will like. Our dutch guests loved it and I’ve yet to see someone refuse it!

It is much better than smoked salmon (reyktur lax) by far.

I make mine on an old box-fan that the front plastic ‘OMG-Think-of-the-children’ grill fell off of and a couple of bog-standard furnace filters. You know the ones that have the paper-thin and folded filter that looks like a washboard? They cost me $3 each (I get 5) and the fan was ‘free’. I put the meat I want to dehydrate into the little ‘valleys’ that the furnace filters have, then put another filter on top. I do this for 4 layers. Then I put the last one on top (no meat on that one) and I turn on the fan.

Sweet, delicious, and mouth-watering meaty smells blast forth from the fan, which I leave running for about a week, maybe shorter if I can’t wait that long. This also works remarkably well for drying fresh herbs out on. Same procedure, just with the plants.