A bowl of hot soup tastes great, especially on a cold winters day. It’s filling, nutritious and delicious. Everyone has their own favourite, whether it is tomato or beef and vegetable, but there are some soups out there that could make your stomach turn.

We have compiled a list of the world’s most extreme soups. These broths are full of odd, awful and exceptional ingredients. They have everything from beer fed beef to bird spit. The first on our list may be mouth watering but the price is eye watering.

Vietnamese Pho

Many people have had pho soup. It tastes great and comes at a reasonable price, or at least it did. A California restaurant created a £3,473 bowl of this Vietnamese staple. While the money for the soup goes to charity, that does not mean this is not a special meal. Ingredients for the soup include:

• A5 Wagyu beef (this is beef with excellent marbling that gets beer in its feed.)
• White Alba Truffles (which are the most valuable truffles on the market)
• Foie gras broth
• Hand-raised been sprouts
• Noodles that are actually made from a very rare blue lobster

While this is the most expensive bowl of soup sold, it was only for a single charity auction.

Buddha Jumps Over The Wall

The most expensive soup available on a menu is served in London’s upscale Mayfair neighbourhood. Guinness World Records certified that the £108 bowl of “Buddha Jumps Over the Wall soup” is the most expensive on any menu in the world. The ingredients for this soup are more than just expensive, they are rare and include:

• Abalone ( This is the meat of a sea snail. People harvesting it have to watch out for great white sharks)
• Japanese flower mushroom (this is one of the highest grade Shiitake mushrooms available)
• Sea cucumber
• Dried scallops
• Chicken
• Huan ham (this ham comes only from the hind legs of certain pigs, takes months to prepare and can only be produced at certain times of year.)
• Pork
• Ginsing

The next soup on our list has a big price tag but it might require an iron stomach.

Birds Nest

Birds nest soup is exactly what it sounds like. It is a soup made from a birds nest, specifically the nest of the Swiftlet. This soup is expensive for two very good reasons. First, collection of Swiftlet nests is regulated so supply is limited. Second, the birds build their nests high on the sides of caves. This means nest collectors must risk life and limb over vertigo inducing drops to collect even a few of the tiny nests.
Each nest is made almost entirely of the dry spit of the Swiftlet. A single bowl of the soup can cost £68 and one kilogram of nests is worth about £1,375. To make the soup, you boil the birds nest until it becomes soft like a jelly. The ingredients include:

• Birds nest
• Eggs
• Chicken broth
• Rice wine
• Pepper

If you are not interested in eating a birds nest, why not try some fish. Our next soup is considered an aphrodisiac.

Shirako (Cod Sperm)

This soup is made from the milt sack of the cod fish. For anyone not acquainted with the ins and outs of fish anatomy, the milt sack is the container of sperm inside a male fish. The sack is cooked until it breaks down into a custard like consistency so it basically makes its own soup. If you are thinking of sampling this delicacy you will need:

• Milt sacks
• Spices

The Oldest Soup

Ok so you can’t actually eat this soup because it is 2,400 years old. Chinese archaeologists discovered a bowl of soup in an ancient tomb. The soup contained various animal bones and scientists are working to understand what ingredients the soup is comprised of. While we might not know much about it yet, it is nice to know that even thousands of years ago, our ancestors were enjoying a hot bowl of soup.