10 Crazy Expensive Ingredients That Aren’t Saffron or Truffles

Yes, you can make moose cheese. But there’s only a single place in the world that’s chosen to do so: the Algens Hus, or Elk House, in Bjurholm, Sweden. 

Part of the reason no one else does it is because moose are very large creatures that don’t like being milked. They also produce vastly smaller amounts than, say, a cow. Given all the work that goes into coaxing the ingredients out of a moose, it’s not surprising that moose cheese has a high price: around $300 a pound.

Bottarga goes by many names, and is prepared differently in different cultures, but they’re all the same thing at their base: the full, cured and dried roe sac from a fish. The price varies depending on the fish, but a four-ounce piece is safely in the double-digits even for the cheapest, most common offering: grey mullet. For a premium fish like tuna, you’re on the wrong side of $50 for the same amount.

Shellfish is already a category of protein that you’re probably not eating on a budget, unless you have a particular grudge against your digestive system. Still, abalone resets the market when it comes to shelled sea snacks. It’s a sea snail that has made itself hard enough to harvest to drive up its own price. A single abalone — though they’re at least hefty fellas — can cost $45.

Vanilla’s price tag might be a little surprising given how common of a flavor it is. Nobody’s breaking the bank on the default flavor of Breyers, after all. That’s largely because imitation vanilla is widely available and pretty solid. If you’re looking to use real vanilla beans, though, that authenticity is going to cost you. 

Real vanilla comes from a mercurial orchid flower with a hell of a death drive, and most of the world’s vanilla originates from a single place: Madagascar. It’s a process that requires an incredible amount of labor, and only pays off once a year. With all that in mind, it makes sense that if you want real vanilla beans, you should be ready to pay anywhere up to $300 a pound. A single high-quality bean can hit double digits all on its lonesome.

Here we’ve got an ingredient that hits a few common characteristics on this list: It’s hard to harvest, made out of weird animal substances and it’s an ethical issue. Whenever you’ve got that trifecta going, get ready to take out a loan. This is the case with swiftlet nests, a bird’s nest made out of hardened swiftlet saliva. Swiftlets also prefer to nest in cave crevices, so add another annoyance to procuring them. 

With all this effort, when checkout time hits, for the favored red swiftlet nests, you’ll be paying close to $7,500 a kilogram. In fact, one bowl of bird’s nest soup, an iconic dish made with the item in question, can cost around $75 all by itself.

Truffles might be the go-to when you’re thinking expensive mushrooms, but Japan has its own high-roller fungus. They’re known as Matsutake mushrooms, and they’ve been a delicacy for centuries. They also have the price tag that usually goes along with things described as “delicacies.” They ring up at about $40 bucks a shroom, but particularly perfect specimens can reach $80 each.

If a wild animal eats a bag of coffee, you’d probably assume that you were writing those beans off at a loss. However, if those beans happen to be eaten by the palm civet, the value has actually gone up. 

Kopi luwak is the name for coffee that’s been eaten, digested and pooped out by civet cats, a digestive process that apparently gives it “smooth flavor and a lemony tang.” If you want to try it for yourself, you’ll be dealing with both some big ethical questions, given the civet cats’ treatment, as well as a hefty credit card statement, since kopi luwak can sell for $100 a cup when prepared, or $600 a pound if you want the beans to brew yourself.

Gooseneck barnacles, or percebes, are a delicacy from Galicia in Spain. Maybe in an attempt to be a little harder to harvest, they’ve chosen to grow in dangerous seaside caves, and harvesting them is a risky job. Risk that you’ll pay for, with prime specimens fetching up to $500 a pound.

You’re probably more familiar with yartsa gunbu fungus than you think. Yartsa gunbu, which means “summer grass, winter worm” in Tibetan, is actually a type of the Cordyceps fungus, the same fungus that inspired the video game and television phenomenon The Last of Us. Turns out, they shouldn’t have been leaving those clicker corpses behind, since this fungus goes for $50,000 a pound.

Foie gras of any description isn’t exactly a budget item, coming in at the upper half of a hundred dollars per pound. There’s an additional moral cost, too: Traditionally, foie gras, which is fatty duck or goose liver, is created by force-feeding the birds in an inhumane process called gavage. It isn’t cheap to feel better about yourself, though, as ethical foie gras (i.e., sans gavage) costs about 200 euros for 180 grams.