Caviar, Truffles, And 9 Other Really Expensive Foods
If you can scrape together a buck or two, you can most likely find something to stave off your hunger. There are some foods, however, that are the ultimate luxury items, meant to be savored, and in some cases even small portions of them can cost thousands of dollars. We tracked down what may very well be the 10 most expensive foods on earth.
Caviar, Truffles, and 9 Other Really Expensive Foods (Slideshow)
Every few months, it seems like one restaurant or another devises a super-expensive burger, pizza, or the like, usually involving some combination of foie gras, caviar, truffles, and gold leaf. In most cases they don't taste very good and are simply marketing stunts. We're not rounding up those dishes here; we're talking about the actual foods involved, the base ingredients that are so exorbitantly expensive that when they appear on a dish they're usually measured by the gram.
Foods can be super-expensive for a variety of reasons. In some cases they're simply extremely rare. In others the level of skill needed to produce it means that only a handful of skilled artisans can make it. And for many of the world's most expensive foods, their value also lies in their allure. Take truffles, for instance. Truffle oil is relatively inexpensive, as are canned black truffles, but chefs add them to dishes all the time (whether they complement them or not) in order to give them an air of opulence (though we admit that fries tossed with truffle oil are pretty darn tasty).
There are some foods that are so outrageously expensive that only the very wealthy can afford them. Even foods that are expensive in any format, like caviar, have super-high-end variants that take the price tag up to stratospheric levels. Read on to learn which 11 foods are quite possibly the world's most expensive.
Alba White Truffles
These ugly little lumps of fungus might look funny, but when shaved over pasta or eggs, the Alba white truffle is stunningly delicious. They're notoriously difficult to come by and are in high demand, resulting in a shockingly high price tag: in some cases they'll set you back nearly $10,000 per kilo.
Caviar
Caviar in any form is going to be expensive. Nowadays you can find it in supermarkets, but even there it's out of most people's price ranges. Most "real" sturgeon caviar sells for well over $100 per ounce, but the most expensive caviar on earth is called Almas caviar. The older a sturgeon is, the more valuable its caviar, and these sturgeons are the oldest ones around. It's not always available, but when it is, a kilo can easily sell for $10,000.