Cooking is something that everyone should engage in. Not only can it help you make delicious, healthy meals at home for the fraction of the cost of restaurant food, but it also gives you the chance to explore and experiment with a wide range of different ingredients.
Most ingredients at the shop are generally within the price range of most people, but there are some ingredients that are so expensive that they’re usually only reserved for very special meals. Check out this list of some of the most expensive ingredients that you can buy and cook with.
White Italian Truffles
Most people have probably heard of truffles; those expensive mushrooms that can only be found by well-trained pigs. These mushrooms hold a very high buying price because of their extreme rarity, especially Alba White Italian Truffles, which are some of the rarest in the world, and only found in the Piedmont region of Italy.
The mushrooms are only available at certain times of the year, meaning that there’s a very small window to successfully get out and find them when they’re ready for harvesting. These are so rare that only half a kilo can cost as much as $2000.
Wagyu Beef
Wagyu beef is much more well-known, and is a particular favourite among beef lovers. The cows are bred and raised in a very particular fashion in Japan, and their unique diet means that by the time the beef is ready for cooking, it’s some of the highest quality that money can buy.
One of the reasons that this beef is so highly prized is due to the way that the fat marbles in the muscle. This makes it a great kind of meat to cook, and the distribution of the fat means that flavour permeates throughout the beef, giving it a strong, delicious flavour that no other kind of beef can compare with. With a price of around $600 per kilogram, Wagyu beef is truly a once-in-a-lifetime steak.
Saffron
This delicate but powerful spice has long been favoured in the world of cooking, but it’s very rarely used due to its extremely high asking price; the kind of money usually associated with old wealth or horse racing betting aficionados.
Saffron demands such a high price is because of the intense labour needed to carefully harvest the saffron spice from the flowers, specifically the dried stamen. To make around a kilogram of saffron, around 2 sports fields worth of flowers need to be harvested, and many hours of labour of picking without doing any damage.
Almas Caviar
Caviar consists of unhatched fish eggs, and due to its unique taste and relative rarity, it has become associated with the rich and famous. Not all caviar is made equal, and some tend to come with much higher market prices than others, such as Almas Caviar. This caviar is harvested from albino sturgeons that are around a century in age – something that’s becoming increasingly rare in the Caspian Sea.