Inject some protein into your next meal.
I'm a fairly adventurous eater. I chewed on reindeer meat when I was in Finland and I sampled the ultra-pungent lutefisk when I was in Sweden. Once, I innocently tried Rocky Mountain Oysters (pro-tip: they aren't oysters, they’re balls). But I stopped in my tracks when I heard about Paul Photenhauer's culinary endeavor: cooking with cum. Yes, cooking – with cum.
Photenhauer's first cookbook, The Natural Harvest, came out in 2009. A collection of semen-based recipes, it incorporates jizz the same way one might use sriracha. He followed up last year with Semenology: The Semen Bartender's Handbook, a volume of 21 cum-infused cocktails.
The culinary odyssey began when Photenhauer started to question why gay men were willing to swallow their partners’ semen but not their own. As a heterosexual woman, this isn’t a question I’ve ever had to grapple with. But for Photenhauer, it inspired an entire cookbook of semen-stirred cuisine, with recipes from tiramisu to chicken noodle soup enhanced with spooge.
“It’s not something you’d think would be amazing, but once we started experimenting, we found that it worked surprisingly well,” says Rickard Gagnér, the co-author to Semenology.
Part of me thought this was way too weird to try, but the other part of me said, “What the hell, why not?” So I recruited my boyfriend (who had never tasted semen before) and my roommate (who literally used to masturbate on his back and shoot cum into his own mouth) to join me for an evening of “cumfort food.”
Before we began, I consulted with Photenhauer and Rickard to get the scoop on semen. Since I was a semenology virgin — that is to say, someone who’s accustomed to swallowing mouthfuls of the stuff during blowjobs but not much else — Rickard offered a semen-sushi recipe that isn’t included in their cookbook.
Castro Street Roll
In the Japanese kitchen, wasabi highlights the delicate flavors of the raw fish. Similarly, a dab of wasabi can enhance the flavors nuances of semen, as in this recipe.
- 1 sheet of nori (dried seaweed)
- 1/2 cup prepared sushi rice
- 3 ½ inch strips of avocado
- 3 ¼ inch strips of cucumber
- 1 ejaculate (1-2 tsp) Semen
- A dab of Wasabi
Lay a sheet of nori onto your sushi mat and spread rice over the nori, leaving an inch or two on one side uncovered. Add a tiny amount of wasabi to the semen and mix well. Spread all of the semen wasabi mixture in a strip down the middle of the sheet, and top with avocado and cucumber. Roll sushi and slice into six pieces.
It came out beautifully.
After my boyfriend dutifully came into a cup, we whisked his “harvest” in with the wasabi. He was more than slightly disturbed to watch his semen turn green, but ultimately, the piquant wasabi masked the semen entirely.
When we moved onto the cocktails, things got a little more adventurous. My roommate opted for a Macho Mojito while Rickard recommended the “Jim and Tonic” for my boyfriend’s cum, since my boyfriend is an occasional smoker and evidently, "smoky semen” flavor is complemented by gin.
Jim & Tonic
- 2 oz gin
- 5 oz tonic water
- ½ tsp semen
First, whisk the semen and gin together in a bowl until completely dissolved. Then pour into a glass filled with ice and top with tonic water. Stir well.
The gin certainly masked the taste of the semen in my drink, but you could still see flecks of white floating around in the glass, which was rather alarming in an otherwise clear cocktail. My roommate’s Macho Mojito was another story.
Macho Mojito
- 1 oz spiced rum
- Mint leaves
- 1 tsbp sugar
- 1 tsp powdered sugar
- ½ oz lime juice
- 2 oz soda water
- Semen
- Lime wedges
Thoroughly blend lime juice and sugar. Add the mint leaves and gently bruise the leaves to release the flavors by mashing the mixture with a muddler. Then add the rum and stir to lift up the mint leaves from the bottom of the glass. Top the drink with whole ice cubes and soda water. Using a milk frother, gradually whisk small amounts of powdered sugar into melted semen until it reaches a creamy, airy consistency. Carefully spoon the sweet froth into the side of the glass so that it gracefully cascades down the glass.
After the mint had been muddled and the rum had been poured, my roommate had to froth his cum with sugar, causing his semen to thicken and foam while the room filled with the pungent aroma. (If you aren’t sure how semen can have a pungent odor, then you’ve clearly never frothed the stuff.) The resulting cream-like mixture topped his cocktail. It was literally a blob of prostate milk on the top of his drink.
He said he liked it, although the semen taste was very prominent.
As we sipped, we pondered whether we’d ever try it again. My boyfriend, the semen virgin, gave a firm no.
My roommate, on the other hand, was more into the idea. As a gay man, he felt more open to the evolving relationship with semen — say, incorporating semen into a special occasion with a candelit (cum) dinner to set the mood. It wasn’t the flavor but rather the sexual charge that made him interested in cooking it again, with a special someone.
As for me, I’m not sure that I’ll ever cook with semen again. It wasn’t bad at all — but then again, “it wasn’t so bad” is rarely a good reason to do anything involving cum.
