As every university student knows, desperation can breed innovation in the kitchen. It’s empty cupboards and thin wallets that we can thank for the litany of culinary inventions we have all tried. From Vegemite on pasta, tomato sauce on toast, grilled chicken ‘seasoned’ with packet soup mix, to the happy invention of yours truly – peanut butter and kimchi sandwiches – we’d call them frankenfoods, except some of them are actually delicious.

Rather than languishing in the deep freeze of gastro mishaps, weird flavour combinations are taking over our favourite food stuffs – and even our fine diners. We’re hankering for surprise and are yearning to be dared. It seems inevitable, then, that I’d need to dedicate an entire column to the odd things being put together in a bid to sate our proclivity to be seduced by shock.

Refusing to be limited by the question of “Does this work?”, food manufactures are on the bandwagon.

Spicing up anything from tacos to oysters to pho, hot sauce has been the cool kid in town for a while. Fired up, we adopted it as a pantry staple, replacing tomato sauce with the hot stuff as the dinner tables most desirable squirtable.

Sriracha, with its strutting rooster and green cap, is perhaps the most overused by the mash-up machine. It kicked into overdrive with the invention of Sriracha croutons for snacking, and chef and television host Adam Liaw was even spotted eating Sriracha popcorn on Instagram recently. His verdict? “Meh.” There’s Heinz Sriracha Tomato Ketchup, and now a pastry chef in Harlem, in the US, has invented a doughnut topped with sour cream, almond slivers and a decorative ring of Sriracha. It comes after the success of a raspberry Sriracha doughnut uptown in New York.

A New York bakery’s Cheetos macarons – half cheesy snack, half interminable sweet trend – was just another frightful spin on the classic French treat, teetering on the fine line between slightly wrong and just another frankenfood.

Adriano Zumbo, the Australian patisser and master of pushing the flavour boundaries on would-be classic, does pork, Earl Grey and lemon sausage rolls, a burnt-toast macaron, as well as chicken, pickled pineapple and chilli quiche among other internationally daring-but-delicious sweet and savouries. The recipes are in his latest book, The Zumbo Files.

Bacon jam, a gloopy, sweet and umami-rich conserve that you can spoon on toast, continues to fill the toe of our Christmas stockings. And Marmite ‘crisps’ still stave off the wolf as Brits wait for a seat in pubs all over England. It sounds over the top, and that’s usually the point.

But food mash-ups have a positive culinary windfall, as well. Chef Mario Batali is doing olive oil ice cream in New York to much acclaim, and thanks are still owed to whoever thought of melding Korean and Mexican gastronomies, thereby bringing the Korean taco the world.

In Sydney, chef Frederico Zanellato reveals what can happen when an Italian chef turns to the East for inspiration at LuMi Bar & Dining. What would typically be an unspeakable union of sweet, salt and all-wrong, is definitely not. A chawanmushi, for example, the typical Japanese egg custard, is done with Parmesan consommé instead of the traditional dashi stock, and it works.

At Acme in Sydney, chef Mitchel Orr does spaghetti with fish balls and kimchi on the menu that belies the restaurant’s position as one of the most popular in the city. This food has you singing the children’s nursery classic “one of these things is not like the others” between each delightful, wooing mouthful.

The success of this culinary gamling could turn inventors into all of us, but then we’d all arrive back at square one, plying Weet-bix with sardines from a can and calling it dinner. Better to leave it to the experts.