I'm Japanese (American) so I can say (write) this.

Lots of Japanese food stinks. Also, I have a crappy apartment "exhaust" that just barely moves the air over the stove and recirculates it.

I had a cryovacced hamachi from Catalina so I thought I'd do it as sashimi. I bought all the fixings (real wasabi (dehydrated)), daikon, etc.

I must say I was somewhat disappointed with the hamachi. Catalina is supposed to sell very good "sushi-grade" stuff but this was a little fishy smelling. I ate some anyway but with a sense of trepidation. Nothing happened.

I marinated the rest of the fish in my teriyaki and cooked it in my grillpan. Stinkay. I added to the miasma when I made daikon oroshi (grated daikon) which, quite honestly, smells like a SBD.

I also cooked up some miso soup and made sushi rice. Now we add rice vinegar and miso the the greenish cloud in my apartment.

At some point, after most of this was made, I had to go out. When I came back, I was blown away by the smell.

Being that I can get Japanese food as good as this in a resturant, I am loathe to cook it again without being able to open all the windows for a good length of time.

Are there any stinky foods that you will not or avoid cooking?

Curries. I loath the smell of curry in the house.

I made a Vietnamese dish one time that started with the making of a caramel sauce (just sugar in a hot pan). You were supposed to add water when the sugar was caramelized, let that cool, and then add fish sauce. I decided to skip the water and the cooling part and added the fish sauce to a hot pan. I got atomized fish sauce in my entire house. I had to pull out the HEPA air filter and run it for an hour to get rid of the smell.

I have a bottle of asafoetida overpackaged in a glass jar, and I used disposable gloves to put it in there, so there's absolutely no chance of the resin being on the outside of the jar or the lid. The pantry still smells like an Indian grocery store anyway.

I refuse to deep fry; can't stand that oil smell.

Once a certain very good friend [ahem] brought over a haggis to cook for a party I was throwing. That was one nasty smell.

Boiling kidneys is not the most pleasant smell in the world. I have been told that next time, I have to use the outside grill.

Growing up our kitchen always stank. But at least it had doors that shut it off from the rest of the house - I think that's a must-have for any Chinese household. Especially with our highly reactive smoke alarms that would freak when vegetables were dropped in a hot wok.

I think I dreamt of growing up in a Caucasian household with cookies and cinnamon buns. Beef liver, fried fish, Chinese medicine, burnt Chinese medicine is even worse with my less than vigilant mom. And there were no air fresheners in the house, because I think my parents thought they caused cancer. But I will say this, despite the fact that the smell of most things gives me a headache, none of the smells from things cooked in our house ever gave me a headache. And our house didn't smell as bad as the houses of my other Chinese friends which tend toward mothballs.

Sauerkraut. Mom's heirloom sauerkraut, which was brought down from upstate New York because that was the only place she could BE SURE that it had been stomped on by barefoot transplanted rhinemaidens and valkyries and then left to ferment in some shed behind the hard cider. She would pop a precious jar of it into the crock pot with a pork roast 6 hours or so before company was coming over and I would find excuses to leave the house.

I'm just now getting to the point where I can eat it. I tried kimchee before I tried sauerkraut because of that crippling and lingering childhood sense memory.

Lobster stock.
Microwave popcorn - but that goes without saying does it not?

Fresh bottled horseradish. I've discovered that to avoid a HAZMAT situation and severe respiratory distress, this needs to be ground outside on the deck or screened porch preferrably during a stiff breeze.

No one has said durian yet?

I microwaved fresh brussels sprouts once. Once.

Boy, I can't repeat the line my friend got off after walking into oue apartment one day, but I will say that poorly cooked, probably old calamari can leave an oder that lingers many days.

I didn't deep fry for years for that exact reason, then I was given a deep fryer when a friend moved. At the same time I acquired an Indian cookbook that had pakora recipes in it. I love pakoras. A lot. Crispy on the outside, meltingly tender and steaming inside, spicy, fried puffs of happiness. I needed to deep fry in a bad way. My solution was to set the fryer outside on the deck. It limits your frying to days with good weather, and you have to use a splatter screen to keep various outside stuff from falling in, but that is better than no frying at all.

Edited to add that I do the same with onion confit - the crock pot goes outside - because those first few hours are unbearably stinky.

I don't mind most of those strong, challenging smells that linger long after a kitchen spree. Even a few that I do mind, like the reek of a really pungent piece of Ardrahan or Gubbeen cheeses, I'll put up with for a few days.

But I do draw the line at "stinky tofu".

I'll make anything, especially now that I have a tornado-strength hood.

I'm not particulary fond of the smell of my fryer, but I do use it nonetheless-especially for buffalo chicken nuggets.
Not so much a smell, but oven roasted Tater Tots release a greasy haze into the air (or at least it seems that way to me) that makes it hard to breath. Can't do it, unfortunately, because I love them.

I watched Andrew Zimmern on "Bizarre Foods" --he's the guy who eats all manor of stinky tofu, bugs and snakes and lizards-- try to eat some fresh durian at a durian plantation in Thailand. He retched and couldn't get it down. "I can't do it..."is what he said to his cameraman. Amazing. this is a really popular fruit in SE Asia.

I think he gagged with extremely stinky tofu as well. It was fermented in hell..i can't remember what-but he could not get it down the gullet. Just would not go down. Amazing for him. I watch him at times through the fingers covering my eyes. And he eats those;eyes!

There are a few things that I'm not *allowed* to cook (most of them are fishy things), but the smell doesn't bother *me*. The worst worst worst "cooking" smell I've ever been responsible for was the time I tried to cure home-grown tobacco leaves in the oven. Because "ashtray"? Not a fun smell to have permeating the kitchen.

The fish smell isn't great, but the only thing I've cooked so far that's smelled really bad is devil's tongue jelly (konnyaku). Smelled like a marine creature invited itself into your house and promptly died under the stairs about three weeks ago. Now I'm worried that I'm cooking Japanese food all wrong.

almost all the stuff I cook seem to smell, Indian and korean, latin, and other asian. The food permeates the cloths and the furniture. Even when I do stock (I did chicken stock this weekend) the whole house smelled. I just think food and cooking smell and that is what you get. I have been moving cooking stuff out door some. I've been doing a lot of stock out side as well as indian food cooking. I would love to have an outside kitchen but that is only a thought for now? I do wonder how the pest situation would be if I cooked outside a lot.

Not to take a detour on this thread, love a wok set up outside (that smokes and smells up the house, although not as much as indian food) with a burner that can really crank out the BTU? Anyone have a good burner they recommend. I'm thinking of just using the burner you get with a turkey fryer.

I've got one of these Camp Chef cookers for brewing, but it sounds like that might be the sort of thing you want. I love it.

There's nothing I won't cook because of the smell, but fish and cabbage are foods that linger in the air long enough that I don't make them frequently. Reheating leftover fish is pretty bad, so I try to make small portions so as not to have leftovers. When I lived in a university dormitory in England as a student, there was a lot of curry cooked in the kitchen near my room. It got to me at first, but I got used to it and now the smell of curry doesn't bother me. It even makes me nostalgic, I suppose.

The absolute stinkiest our house gets, though, is when our cat gets her favorite canned food: California Naturals Salmon and Sweet Potato. She devours this stuff. It's her absolute favorite food and it reeks to high heaven. When I just stocked up on some more and was taking to the women at the pet store, they commented on how it's notoriously stinky and some people won't buy it because they don't want their house to smell. I guess it's obvious who rules our house .

Yep, the new kitchen has the mandatory wind tunnel of brushed chrome, and the HVAC system has the Aprilaire 5000 Whole House Air Cleaner to get anything that doesn't go out the hood (and into the 'hood).

Home made demi-glace = a weekend in the house of beef.

A trying experience for my former-vegetarian missus, but well worth the olfactory onslaught for me!