Most Expensive Fruit: Yubari King Melons
What: Yubari is to melons what Kobe is to beef. The Japanese city has become famous for a particularly tasty melon cultivar that's a cross between two cantaloupe varieties. Known as the Yubari King, this orange-fleshed melon is prized for its juicy sweetness as well as its beautiful proportions. Yubari King melons are often sold in perfectly matched pairs and are a highly prized gift sure to impress a host or employer.
How Much: The choicest melon pairs have been auctioned in Japan for as much as $26,000, but a standard Yubari melon costs between $50 and $100 in Japanese department stores.
Why Pay More: In a word, trendiness. The melons must be grown in Yubari to bear that name, and the small town produces only a limited number of these cult items each year.
Most Expensive Fungus: White Truffles
What: The white truffle is found almost exclusively in the forests of northern Italy between the months of September and December. Its unique flavor-nutty, savory, and sweet ~ is commonly sampled in shavings atop dishes heavy on eggs, butter, and cheese, such as fresh pasta, fonduta (a mixture of melted cheese and wine), or a decadent scrambled-egg breakfast.
How Much: White truffles retail for $7 to $11 per gram, or $3,000 to $5,000 per pound. Prices can be as high as $90 for a standard 8-gram portion, with an additional premium for a particularly large specimen.
Why Pay More: No one has yet succeeded at cultivating white truffles, so the supply is extremely limited. The only way to source them is to forage within their limited natural habitat with the help of specially trained pigs and dogs.
Most Expensive Poultry Product: Swiftlet Nests
What: More expensive by weight than any single bird are the nests of the high-flying swiftlet species, who forge these small, cuplike structures from strands of their saliva. The swiftlet nests dissolve in broth to create the gelatinous texture of bird's nest soup, a Chinese delicacy, and are touted as valuable sources of nutrients. Nests were originally foraged from caves in Southeast Asian countries including Indonesia and Malaysia, but given the rising demand from China, they are now also "grown" in purpose-built concrete nesting houses in the same part of the world.
How Much: Swiftlet nests retail for approximately $1,000 per pound, which is $2 per gram or roughly $20 per nest.
Why Pay More: It takes up to two months for a male swiftlet to build a single delicate nest. Each bird will build only two to three nests per year, solely in the spring. Nests must either be foraged from the hard-to-reach interiors of caves or culled from custom-built houses that require a significant up-front investment.
Most Expensive Pantry Staple:
Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale
What: Genuine traditional balsamic vinegar, or balsamico tradizionale, is made from late-harvest white Trebbiano grapes that have been boiled down to form a concentrated must. The must is then placed in a series of cloth-covered barrels, allowing water to evaporate over time until the liquid transforms into a thick, dark, sweet, and complex syrup. The product must be made in either the Modena or Reggio Emilia provinces of Italy in order to bear the name balsamico tradizionale, and each province has its own consortium of experts who approve the balsamic before sealing it in its official 100-milliliter bottle.
How Much: You think wine is expensive? The best balsamicos will typically set you back around $200 for 100 milliliters, or $60 per ounce.
Most Expensive Coffee: Kopi Luwak
What It Is: Kopi luwak, or civet coffee, is coffee that has passed through the digestive system of a nocturnal catlike animal called a civet. Wild civets, found predominantly in Asia and Africa, eat the fruit of the coffee plant as part of their natural diet and then excrete the beans in their dung. These same beans, having been fermented by the animal's stomach acids and enzymes, are purported to produce smoother, less bitter coffee. Although many Thai, Filipino, and Indonesian producers are now caging civets and force-feeding them the coffee cherries to spur production, the best kopi luwak is said to be foraged from the droppings of wild civets, which paw-pick only the best coffee cherries to consume.
How Much: Kopi luwak retails for as much as $500 per pound, or about $1 per gram.
Why Pay More: A very pricey process. Not only must each bean of wilderness-sourced coffee make it through the digestive tract of a civet, but it must also be collected by a forager then cleaned and roasted.
Most Expensive Meat: Jamón Ibérico de Bellota
What: Jamón Ibérico de bellota refers to the cured leg of a pata negra pig that has been raised free-range in the old-growth oak forests of western Spain. The pigs eat a diet rich in acorns, wild mushrooms, herbs, and grasses, yielding meat that's richly flavored and low in saturated fat. Each ham is cured for a minimum of two years before reaching the market.
How Much: A 15-pound bone-in leg of jamón Ibérico de bellota retails for around $1,300, or $87 per pound.
Why Pay More: The acorn-rich forests of western Spain make up an ecosystem that exists nowhere else in the world, and each pig requires at least 2 acres of land for ample foraging. That, in turn, strictly limits the amount of jamón Ibérico de Bellota available each year.
Most Expensive Spice: Saffron
What: Saffron is derived from a type of crocus that grows most extensively in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Its brightly hued threads are graded for quality by the Switzerland-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which ranks the product on a scale from 0 to 250 based on color, fragrance, and taste.
How Much: "Coupe" saffron, which carries an ISO grade of 190 or greater, retails for $10 to $15 per gram, and the highest-grade coupe saffrons can reach almost $30 per gram. However, saffron is pungent enough that a little bit goes a long way: The 15 to 20 threads used in a typical paella recipe weigh in at only a very small fraction of a gram.
Why Pay More: The labor-intensive picking, cleaning, sorting, and toasting of these tiny saffron stigmas is to blame for the staggering price tag. It takes a football field-size plot of saffron crocuses to produce just 1 pound of saffron threads, which must be picked immediately upon blooming.
Most Expensive Seafood: Sturgeon Caviar
What: Sturgeon caviar is the salted eggs, or roe, of the massive sturgeon fish. The world's most expensive caviar comes from the beluga species of sturgeon, but imports of this variety have been banned from the United States since 2005 in order to protect the endangered fish. Farmed osetra sturgeon caviar is currently the highest-end sustainable option on the U.S. market, prized for its firm, juicy eggs and nutty flavor. But beware: The term caviar is also used to refer to the salted roe from less desirable fish, including paddlefish, whitefish, trout, or lumpfish.
How Much: Osetra caviar retails for up to $12 per gram for the choicest grades, which translates into roughly $500 per serving.
Why Pay More: It takes the female osetra an average of 10 years to produce her first eggs, at which point she may weigh hundreds of pounds, which means that farming the roe is a long, expensive undertaking. And since the wild osetra sturgeon is endangered due to overfishing and pollution, buying and selling the wild version isn't a viable alternative to the costly farming process.
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