The Best And Worst Thing You've Ever Tasted (THING! Not specifically food...)

[migxmeg]

Coming up with a best thing I ever tasted is pretty impossible given how much I love all kinds of food. Probably the best meal I ever had was this crazy 10 course thing in Italy from the days when I still ate meat with fantastic wine and dessert. Doubt I'll ever have anything that good again ;_;. Edit: now that I'm thinking about it, the soup in particular was sooo good. This was 15 years ago and I still remember this super thick soup which was a really gross gray color but oooooh did it taste fantastic.

Worst... was probably the last few bites of a stick of butter I ate on a bet. The first half wasn't bad at all but the end of it was misery.

[nathanKmcwilliams]

I tasted a lot of things as a kid. Dog food...ants...leaves from trees...I was curious. I used to love eating butter actually haha

[migxmeg]

I'm with you on dog food, ants and leaves. Dirt is fine, too. But something about the color and consistency of ear wax just screams don't eat me.

Butter is amazing - I'll still eat a little piece on its own, which is why I took that bet XD.

[Stargazer31]

Idk why but I love Parma Violets

[Stargazer31]

Best: Fresh, juicy lobster with garlic butter, chips (not too greasy, not too crispy) and salad, in a restaurant overlooking a beach. It's the best meal that I've ever had.
Worst: Vanilla extract straight out the bottle. Yuck.
That, or popcorn flavoured tic tacs. They taste nothing like popcorn at all, they're just disgusting.

[DanielRKM]

AGHHH! This is so hard! Even the things that I've once hated I've eventually acquired a taste for at some point.

Alright, I'm going to lose ALL the points for outing myself as the stuffy, gimmicky, aging hipster that I am, but here goes:

The best thing I've tasted was a peanut butter jelly burger at a thrifty, farm-to-table restaurant with a side of a double-dry hopped New England IPA and some artisan fries. And. It. Was. Sensational. I know it sounds straight awful, but the jelly was a pepper jelly (which really complimented the burger and wasn't fruity) and the peanut butter was lightly used, adding a nice savory quality to the meal.

I also really love salt-and-vinegar flavored chicken wings. Only ever found them in Vermont, but hot damn, they were mesmerizing.

Worst thing I ever ate... probably anchovy paste. I ate it straight on a dare during my days as a grocery store employee. As I tasted it, I even got that little bit of extra ambiance of one of my co-workers vomiting his share in a garbage can right next to me. The aromas haunt me.

Side note I also really hate 3 bean soup. So. Damn. Much (bland salt water with bean texture = Pure Hell).

[DanielRKM]

I am both delighted and amazed the burnt bottom rice worked for you. I've done similar things and created nightmare scenarios.

[DanielRKM]

@BLTX My mom used to take us home-made play dough (that was a salt/flour based) and it wasn't too bad. Haven't tried the real stuff, though, but I've been tempted (and I can't believe I just admitted to that).

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

Before I start, I'm gonna say this: I'm gonna need some of you to take some supertaster tests. Cuz I'm half-certain some of you are supertasters.

Okay, so, best flavors, worst flavors. I'm a little bit of a food nerd, so 'best' is a hard call. It's probably somewhere between very fresh salmon grilled on a charcoal grill with little more than salt, pepper, and rosemary (oh god), the authentic, brick oven pizza in a tiny town in Italy when I was 21, or the orange blossom chiffon cake from a local dessert place (I wasn't expecting this cake to be ANYWHERE NEAR as good as it was. I'm usually a chocolate person, but this made my eyes roll back in my head.)

As far as non-food flavors, I have to second @VibrantFox about cotton. It's pleasantly benign.

Okay! And for really unpleasant flavors...

Green. Bell. Pepper. It is one of the hard nope things I won't eat. Reminds me of vomit. No one in my household will eat it, and neither will my parents. I would sooner eat limburger cheese a second time than voluntarily eat green bell pepper. (Limburger isn't as bad as it smells, but it's not good either.)
I'm not a fan of the lingering bitter aftertaste of antacids either.

As a bonus, though, my husband says that the worst thing he's ever tasted, hands down, no contest, was a prescription mouth wash for stopping major infections, or preventing them before oral surgery. He doesn't remember the name of the compound, only that he can still remember the flavor more than a decade later.

Edit: For your reading enjoyment, here's his actual review of the prescription mouthwash in question:

"As far as that mouthwash goes I can only describe it, as a super taster, as tasting like bad. Not tasting bad, which it does, but tasting like Bad, as if it were some nightmare taste that oozed forth from outside the cosmos and coalesced a form from the platonic ideal of something tasting terrible. Every taste bud I wish never detected anything going off at once in a sanity-rending epiphany on the nature of true oral torment.

If someone told me I had to use it three times a day for a week or I would literally die, I'm not sure I'd make it past Wed."

[milkae]

Best thing: my mom's lasagna
Worst thing: that random piece of charcoal that this dude in my class gave me, saying that it was marshmallow (do not try this at home, kids)

[jurinova]

I feel like I keep finding new flavours I love and hate constantly, so it's hard to pick only a few but I'll try...

One of the best things I've ever eaten was my grandmother's homemade karelian stew. We had it every Christmas and it was just so full of flavour. The beef wasn't even the best part because the broth was so delicious. Absolutely amazing. Unfortunately my grandma passed away some years ago and it's a flavour that will forever remain in my memories. I'm a vegetarian these days, and it's the only meat dish I miss.

Generally though, when it comes to specific flavours I absolutely love blue cheese. But not just any blue cheese, it has to be a specific brand because it has a softer flavour than the others. Some of the cheapest blue cheese also tastes like what sock sweat smells like and that's not what I want at all, no sir!

Recently I've been absolutely loathing cilantro. Or coriander... Wait, which is it? Anyways, I seem to pick up if there's even the smallest amount of it and it ruins the whole meal for me.

The absolutely worst taste was this stomach medicine I had to take once. It was in liquid form and it was vile. Absolutely horrible. I feel like it was really evil to have a stomach medicine taste so bad because it just made me want to throw up.

(On a sidenote, I once got strawberry flavoured sedative at a hospital and they gave it to me in a pink syringe with cartoon characters on it. I was an adult already but I now consider that the best medicine I've ever gotten. Adult sedatives should also be strawberry flavoured.)

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

Recently I've been absolutely loathing cilantro. Or coriander... Wait, which is it?

Same plant. Cilantro, however, refers to the leaves, and coriander is the seeds.

[DanielRKM]

Does cilantro taste like soap to you?

[jurinova]

Honestly, I'm not sure if that's how I'd describe it. For me coriander has a dull and disturbing taste for sure but difficult to describe. It kinda makes all food taste like it's starting to go bad. I am aware that for some people it tastes like soap because of genetics, but I haven't had problems with coriander until recently. It could be that I just haven't eaten much of it before and only now discovered that I am one of the unlucky ones.

[BLTX]

Well at least you didn't actually lick it.

[BarBarKetrab]

One of the best things I've ever tasted was this Mexican sweet potato soup that I've eaten a few times (among other things, of course).

The worst was probably that one time 7 year old me thought it would be a genius idea to spice up a leaf of cabbage with a teaspoon of sugar.
"It's gonna be just like salt!" I thought.

[smolcat]

The best thing i have ever tasted is the Choco éclair I bought from the café under Eiffel tower that one time I went to Paris. I still remember its taste and how the entire thing just melted in my mouth. I hope I can go back there one day
The worst thing I ever tasted is liquid dish washing soap mixed with water and i actually swallowed one gulp of it My mom asked the maid to wash my water bottle along with the other dishes so she put the dish soap and water inside the bottle but unfortunately forgot about it, and then after she went home and I came back from my extra lessons all quenched up, I gulped down that water from the nearest bottle i could find. I really felt like bringing my insides out and washing them like a utensil.

[BLTX]

I washed a glass before pouring in Ginger Ale a few weeks back, but didn't wash the soap out as well as I thought I did. I just threw it out in the sink.

[AnonymousHouseCat]

oh no! D: Yeah, luckily the stir fry didn’t take very long, so there wasn’t enough time for the rice turn fully black/set the apt on fire haha

[AnonymousHouseCat]

I am convinced one of my friends is a supertaster! She has a SUPER long list of foods she won’t eat, I have seen her turn bright red from black pepper (she says it’s too spicy) and she eats mostly bland foods. Once she told me to try this cake with no frosting that she said was “delicious,” but to me just tasted like slightly sweet bread… Also that is an amazing description of the mouthwash XD.