What Did I Eat Last Night? (No This Isn't About Food Poisoning.)

April 30, 2011 7:04 AM

Last night I at something at a Northern Indian restaurant that was really terrible tasting. Any ideas what it might have been?

I love Indian food but I'm something of a neophyte when I'm ordering. In order to get a bunch of different flavors, my wife and I ordered a combination platter. The food was really good and I'm happily using my naan to pick up pieces of meat and rice and just loving the tastes.

Then something happened. I was tasting what might have been an unusual combination- a Tandoori chicken leg dipped in a cucumber based Raita.

The flavor was awful. It didn't tasty rancid, just horribly "fishy" and I had to spit it out. It was so bad it ruined the end of the meal for me. I lost my appetite after tasting it. My wife tasted it too and didn't like it but didn't have the aversion to it that I did.

I should let you know I'm not a seafood eater, especially shellfish (I'm not allergic I just can't seem to develop a taste for it), and this reminded of some crab soup I inadvertently once tasted in a Chinese restaurant.

I didn't bring this up with the waiter because with the language barrier it was just too confusing. There was no easy way to convey "The food was excellent except for the last bite I took."

After checking out the potential ingredients in Tandoori Chicken and Raita, I'm stumped. There doesn't seem to be any unusual spices in either one. The only shellfish on the menu was shrimp. Is it possible the chicken got cross-contaminated?

Any guesses as to what I might have eaten?

posted by JohntheContrarian to Food & Drink (10 answers total)

Hard to say--might it have been undercooked asafoetida? That stuff smells really foul when raw.
posted by brianogilvie at 7:25 AM on April 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

The only flavour bombs that I've had in Indian cooking come from cardamom, but it doesn't taste "fishy" (to me, anyway? My family cook with green cardamoms. While you can get powdered stuff, they like to just put the entire seed into the dish (usually a rice dish) and then it's your job to get them out while eating. Munch down on one and it's absolutely horrible, an extremely strong taste. Sometimes raita is flavored with cardamom, but I've never heard of whole cardamoms being put in. That's basically all I can think of - there's no other "fishy" anything in either raita or tandoori chicken.
posted by tra at 7:44 AM on April 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

My best guess is that a pinch of something wrong and weird-tasting got dropped in the raita. It could well have been asafoetida (which doesn't go in raita normally).

If it had a sulfurous taste, it could also have been a big clump of "black" (AKA pink) salt, which is commonly used to flavor yogurt sauces in northern Indian cuisine. You are supposed to add a very moderate amount and mix it in extremely well (eating in Indian homes I've often seen it offered on the side so that people can add it to taste). If the black salt was clumpy and someone wasn't paying attention, however, you could have gotten a big bite of sulfurous nastiness.

My typical guess for "oh ew unwanted icky fishy flavor" would be fish sauce, though northern Indian cuisine doesn't really use fish sauce as far as I know.
posted by Sara C. at 8:04 AM on April 30, 2011

I have known people who have very adverse flavor reactions to pickled lemon/lime.
posted by gimonca at 8:36 AM on April 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

Did you eat the chicken and the raita on their own? Did they taste fine on their own? And its only in combination that it was a problem?
posted by Kololo at 8:36 AM on April 30, 2011

I don't know the answer, but I can confirm the syndrome. It happens to me about once every 6-8 times I eat Indian food. Sometimes it's in the raita, more often it's in pakora. I assume it is some kind of small seed or seed fragment because the whole thing doesn't taste that way (though I've never identified a crunch or pop as if I bit into something).

I don't think I've ever thought it was fishy exactly, but it does taste like something bad to me. I have always assumed the problem was me, not the food.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:11 AM on April 30, 2011

Pickled lemon/lime is highly unlikely to be an ingredient in either item OP ate. Though it's certainly something that could have been dropped into raita accidentally. It doesn't taste fishy, though, just extremely sour/pungent/vinegar-ey.
posted by Sara C. at 11:25 AM on April 30, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers everyone. I'm leaning towards something in the Raita, probably the pink salt mentioned up thread. I was eating the Raita with other foods and didn't notice anything unusual so a clump of something strange could have been in the last piece I ate.

I can see me identifying a sulfurous taste as fishy since that is my default description for a taste I really don't like.

I think its amazing that I immediately lost my appetite. The body really does protect itself from bad food, even if it's not always right.
posted by JohntheContrarian at 3:41 PM on April 30, 2011

The two things I advanced the last time something similar (but not the same) came up were asafoetida and black salt. Which I see Sara C. has beat me to here.
posted by jocelmeow at 5:06 PM on April 30, 2011

I was tasting what might have been an unusual combination- Tandoori chicken leg dipped in a cucumber based Raita.

Totally not an unusual combination. I vote for raw asafoetida as well.
posted by desuetude at 9:54 PM on May 2, 2011