“Stinky tofu starts out as regular nonoffensive tofu, but then it’s fermented for several months in a noxious brine of fermented vegetables, dried shrimp and other offenders. The brew has to be well covered because it’s a magnet for flies drawn to its fetid odor.

Like yogurt and sauerkraut, the stinky tofu fermentation process creates a number of beneficial bacteria and a rather potent vat of volatile but innocuous alcohols, acids, aldehydes, furans and other chemical compounds that sound mildly intimidating.

As the name implies, stinky tofu is indeed stinky. But stinky sounds cute and friendly like a baby fart. Stinky tofu is on another plane of stankiness. It’s like eating garbage inside a sewer on a hot day. Or maybe it’s like that time that when I was a kid walking in an orchard near San Jose City College and I came across an upended white bucket. Curious, I kicked it over and was assaulted by the sight and smell of a rotting goat head wriggling with maggots. No, that’s not quite it, either. How about this? When I worked in a cheese shop I was tasked with cleaning the blue cheese tray. After several weeks the Roquefort, Stilton and Gorzonzola and other blue cheeses oozed a fetid, yellow-green mucus that collected at the bottom of the tray. The smell burned through my sinuses, melting my olfactory glands with gassy, ammonia-meets-sun baked-soiled-diaper pungency. Stinky tofu smells kinda like that.”

[via Metroactive]

I’ve walked past stands of it on the street but still haven’t tasted it yet … regular tofu is disgusting enough for me.