The American publication Taste Atlas has compiled a rating of the 50 most terrible dishes in the world (the full list is at the end of the material). There was only one Russian one, but it was the one that topped the rating. This is a salad (or rather an appetizer) “Indigirka”. The rating was compiled based on the results of user voting for recipes presented on the publication’s website.
The salad got its name from a river in northeastern Russia that flows through the territory of Yakutia. The recipe was invented 30 years ago by the Yakut chef Innocently Tarbakhov, a culinary genius and expert in the cuisine of the peoples of the North, who worked in the restaurant at the four-star Tyyn Darkhan hotel in Yakutsk.
The salad recipe is simple: stroganina (frozen fish cut into shavings) is cut into cubes rather than into thin shavings, then salted and filled with oil. Onions are also added. That’s all. Therefore, “Indigirka” is rather a snack, a spoonful of which is very pleasant to put into your mouth after an ice-cold shot.
Today there are many variations on the Indigirka theme. There is a salad with lemon, and with herbs, and with caviar, mainly red, with lingonberries and so on. Simple, tasty, healthy and not as ordinary as sushi.
It seems that someone is simply finding fault with Russian cuisine. Yes, some people may not like stroganina, but calling it the most disgusting dish in the world is overkill. But the publication, thanks to the voting results, did excellent PR and promotion for Innokenty Tarbakhov’s Yakut appetizer, and Russian cuisine, and the country itself, in which the worst thing is simply the Indigirka salad.
Denis Savelyev, CEO of TexTerra:
“I am omnivorous and not squeamish if we are not talking about unsanitary conditions, but about cooking specific to our tradition. I love exotic cuisine, I always eat at street eateries “for the locals” – both in India and in Thailand. I am calm about various sea reptiles or insects.
The most specific thing I have ever tried, I tried not in exotic countries, but in the Russian North. It was the so-called Pechersk salted fish. Fish of valuable varieties is salted in barrels, and then kept for several months in a cool but not cold room (usually a cellar) while it ferments.
Olga Bezmaternykh, HR Director of TexTerra:
“About 25 years ago I vacationed on Seliger as part of a youth labor camp. The holiday was, to put it mildly, extreme. Weeding hectares of beds with nettles, kayaking 20 km with a complete lack of skills, living in tents in the pouring rain and cooking dinners in the rain. The icing on the cake was a trip to one of the Seliger islands for a day, the main task of which was to survive by getting water and food on our own.
And one of the dishes on this trip was the larvae of some tree beetle, which we found under the bark of fallen trees. Against the backdrop of the whole holiday, this was not the most extreme, but it didn’t taste like shrimp, of course, not shrimp))) Perhaps, even the milk soup with burnt vermicelli, which they gave in the Soviet kindergarten, and which I really didn’t like, pales against the background of these larvae I loved and didn’t even try to love later.”
Yulia Blynskaya, commercial director of TexTerra:
“The most controversial dish for me over the past few years has been ramen. I decided to try it and my first reaction was – what kind of strange broth is this? Some kind of rubbish. I was so surprised by the discrepancy between expectations and reality that I wanted to experience it again and tried it in another, purely Japanese restaurant. As a result, heaven and earth, two completely different dishes! This time it was unusual, but very tasty! Whenever possible, I always take it, but in trusted places.”
Alexander Monakhov, director of content and marketing at TexTerra:
“The most lame (and let thousands not understand me!) of the dishes is the typical Russian rassolnik. Pickled cucumbers, pearl barley (the worst thing in the world) and meat… And sometimes they add olives. Who just raised their hand to combine all this in one bowl.”
Ekaterina Sibiryakova, head of the SMM department at TexTerra:
“Until I was 18, I didn’t drink coffee at all and didn’t understand coffee, because as a child I accidentally grabbed hot, strong and sugar-free coffee from my dad’s mug. And I hate liver and jellied meat – jellied meat is too “characterless” for me because of its consistency and generally as a combination of incompatible things, and liver is bitter and strange. I also didn’t like the tartare, although many people are delighted with it. The consistency and feeling that I was eating raw meat immediately caused a storm of emotions and I realized that this was not for me.”
Svyatoslav Groshev, art director of TexTerra:
“RATATOUILLE! As a child, I watched a wonderful cartoon of the same name – how interesting it was to find out how tasty this ratatouille is. I dreamed of trying the right one. But somehow it didn’t work out. And so, literally four years ago, my wife and I prepared this very dish.
In general, I was very surprised why this particular dish was prepared by rats for a restaurant critic in a cartoon. Fuubeeee! It’s bland, just vegetables, not an ounce of meat! I don’t understand at all what its highlight is. In the end, I couldn’t even finish the plate. Now I know that vegetable dishes do not suit me. I would like some meat, but more.”
Anastasia Banina, head of content marketing department at TexTerra:
“Paradoxically, my opinion is similar to the opinion of the editors of the American portal. This is stroganina. I tried it in Kaliningrad last year – just thin slices of frozen fish called “Pelamida”, caught in the Baltic Sea. It’s raw and frozen, that’s all. Fresh too. In general, I have never eaten anything more terrible.”
