Name: How the World’s Stinkiest Fish Really Tastes
Uploaded: 2025-07-18T17:03:56.000Z
Duration: 8 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This tin of fish has been coined the worst-smelling food in the world.

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Made from fermented herring, its aroma is described as something between rotting flesh, dirty diapers and stinky cheese.

And in a worldwide ranking, it outstinks durian fruit and Korea's fermented scapefish.

So stromming has been banned from multiple airlines and has even become a global vomit-inducing eating challenge.

We have hundreds of people coming every season to buy.

I always have some extra jars in my cellar, in my fridge here.

We're on a mission to debunk the haters and learn how to enjoy the world's most pungent food.

No, don't huff it like that. That's diabolical.

We'll show you what makes it so smelly, why it's a delicacy and how to enjoy it the proper way.

So before we eat anything, here's why stromming has such a distinctive aroma.

Herring caught in the Baltic Sea is delivered to salteries across Sweden.

Here, the fish is lightly salted and placed into barrels where bacteria break down the proteins and fats, releasing hydrogen sulfide, propionic acid and butyric acid.

These compounds are also found in flatulence, rancid butter and Swiss cheese.

Together, they give stromming its unique aroma.

After a couple of months, a salt master tastes the fish every day until the flavor is perfect.

By the time it hits the shelves, it's been fermenting for at least six months.

Before we find out what this tastes like, we want to know why such an acquired taste is a Swedish delicacy.

Hmm, if only we had some local fish experts.

And we're the owner of this typical Swedish fish store.

I'm not a great fan, if I should be honest.

I mean, that you meet lots of friends and then we get lots of typical Swedish season, what you eat.

A lot of people in Sweden from up north, they really like it.

So they have this stromming party for more than once a year.

We're beginning to understand that this is more of a special occasion dish.

The stromming has been a part of the culture for a really long time, since the 1500 century.

History suggests that a salt shortage was behind its invention.

The story goes that sailors couldn't preserve their barrels of herring with the limited salt supplies.

When it didn't get so much salt, it got fermented.

And they thought it was smelly, but they realized it was really good.

But it must taste good to have survived this long.

To eat it the proper way, we've enlisted the help of Marlin,

Swedish chef and esteemed member of the stromming academy.

The academy works to promote and also to protect the fermented herring.

The smell, the odor can be quite heavy if you do it inside.

But I want you to try this one because the salt monster has chosen this barrel to be the best from this year.

At this point, a very strong wad of cheese floated behind the cameras.

Because of the fermentation, the bones are quite soft.

So they're not so sticky if you got them in your mouth.

All salteries have their own recipe and they are a secret.

They don't tell you how many grams of salt and how long time they do the fermentation.

Marlin is preparing our stromming two traditional ways.

On a crisp bread and in a soft wrap with potatoes and fresh toppings.

It's really nice with this saltiness and acidity from the herring.

Time to see if it tastes better than it smells.

But in a restaurant setting, now it's been open, I do feel like familiar with it now.

I would say it's got like a herby burp smell to me personally.

So plate number one, we're going for the flatbread.

It's almost like, you know how you have anchovies and you get that like salty kick.

I think I do have a problem as soon as I start to...

Yeah, I've got prejudice I need to detach from my mind without question because as soon as you're taking it away from your mouth, you're smelling like pungent cheddar.

It's kind of the burrito of the sea, isn't it?