World's Most Expensive Traditional Meals

Welcome to ShortList's very own version of Pimp My Food. All the dishes below started life as humble, everyday meals, until some crazy person came along and decided to up the ante - usually by adding truffles and edible gold toppings

Consuming all ten of our entrants would set you back an enormous £14,473, so what do you really want - a new car, or the ten priciest gastronomic experiences known to man? Walk away from the showroom, you know you've made the right decision.

Pizza

The Louis XIII

Cost: £7,914/$12,000

Appropriately enough, the world's most expensive pizza can be enjoyed in Agropoli, in Salermo, Italy. Toppings include three types of caviar, spiny lobster, Louis XIII Remy Martin cognac, together with Krug Clos Du Mesnil champagne, and is the creation of pizza maker Renato Viola (we'd like to say Cello to him). Such is the attention to detail that each grain of pink Australian salt from the Murray River is hand picked. Domino's eat your heart out.

Sandwich

The Von Essen Platinum Club Triple Decker

Cost: £131/$200

Who would have thought that the humble sandwich could be pimped out so successfully? Served at the Cliveden Hotel in Berkshire, UK and lovingly prepared by chef Daniel Galmiche, the Platinum Club Triple Decker boasts fillings of poulet de Bresse chicken, quails' eggs, white truffles and air-cured pata negra (Spanish ham). This was what the Earl of Sandwich really had in mind in the 18th Century when he first put some meat between two slices of bread.

Curry

The Samundari Khazana

Cost: £2,374/$3,600

Forget your usual Chicken Tikka Masala, this is the one to order next time you fancy a Ruby. London's Bombay Brasserie has created this astonishing curry, whose name translates as 'Seafood Treasure', which incorporates Devon crab, white truffle, caviar, sea snails, and an entire lobster covered in gold. That's a lobster covered in gold. The whole shebang costs around £2000 - to think we agonised about whether to get sag aloo or not last time we went to our local curryhouse.

Burger

The Douche

Cost: £439/$666

You wouldn't expect the world's most expensive burger to be available from a New York food truck. But it is. This self-titled creation (the van is called 666 Burger) is, ahem, devilishly good, and costs a hundred times as much as their usual $6.66 efforts. The owner Franz Aliquo beautifully describes it as "a f**king burger filled and topped with rich people s**t" and he is not wrong: ingredients include Kobe beef patty wrapped in gold leaf, caviar, foie gras, lobsterm truffles, aged gruyere cheese (melted with champagne steam) and Himalayan rock salt (we wouldn't accept anything else). The burger is apparently a satirical dig at other expensive burgers, but nonetheless it's available and edible, so in it goes. We eagerly await our invitation to sample one for our burger search (international edition).

Pie

The £1,000-a-slice

Cost: £1,000/$1,781 per slice

It's a far cry from Pukka Pies. In 2005 a Burnley pub, the Fence Gate Inn, created the most expensive pie ever made. The whole thing weighed in at £8,195, being split into eight slices for the guests who attended. The roll call of ridiculous ingredients included Japanese wagyu beef fillet (the cows from which it was taken are massaged throughout their lives), Chinese matsutake mushrooms, Winter Black truffles, French Bluefoot mushrooms, gravy made from 1982 Chateau Mouton Rothschild wine and - our old favourite - edible gold leaf topping the creation. Truly a pie-ce of heaven.

Pasta Sauce

The White Truffle Marinara

Cost: £659/$1,000

It may be beloved of students for its cheapness, but pasta can mix it with the big boys too. Specifically, it can do it by being smothered in what is essentially liquid money. San Francisco-based Dave's Gourmet has produced a White Truffle Marinara Sauce, containing vine-ripened tomatoes, white truffles and - naturalment - edible gold flakes which comes in a huge $1,000 a jar. Loyd Grossman eat your heart out.

Coq au Vin

Le Chambertin Grand Cru

Cost: £1,000/£1,516

A recent addition to this list comes the world's most expensive Coq au vin dish, courtesy of the good people at Coq d'Argent in London. The centrepiece is a Bresse chicken (the iconic French one, with blue fleet, white feather and red comb) which is left to marinate for 24 hours in Le Chambertin Grand Cru, Trapet 2009. Amazingly, truffles and gold aren't involved this time: it's basically a really good coq, in really good vin and you can't say fairer than that.

Bangers & Mash

The Bordeaux B&M

Cost: £75/$113

It's really coming to something when this dish looks like a bargain. But it is, to our knowledge, the most expensive bangers and mash in the world, so in it goes to the list. Created by chef Oliver Limousin, and served at the L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon restaurant in central London, the bangers come courtesy of pampered Iberico pig pork, which is braised in vintage Bordeaux and the mash is formed of a puréed potato bed incorporating 10g of black truffle. It would be kinda cool if the pig was responsible for finding the truffle, but we don't know if that's true. It would also be a little unfair on the pig to then immediately turn it into sausages. But we digress.

Cheese Board

The Frome Extravganza

Cost: £841/$1,275

This is pretty ridiculous. The world's most expensive cheese board was unveiled at at the Frome Cheese and Agricultural Show in Somerset in 2012, featuring ash-encrusted goats' cheese, £10-a-go Swedish crispbread, the Benedict monk-made Abbaye de Belloc (an unpasteurised sheep's cheese), Serbian donkey cheese (£795/kg), truffle-encrused brie and more besides. It's brie-ly expensive isn't it? We camembert-ly believe how much it costs. And so on.

Jacket Potato

Tuxedo Spud

Cost: £40/$60

The humble baked potato is oft-overlooked, but not any more, thanks to chef Ben Kingdon, of Torquay's Cary Arms. He has created the "Tuxedo Spud", with the flesh of the potato being mixed with creme fraiche, lemon, chives and spring onions, whilst the insides are then topped with caviar. The beautiful creation is then served with a glass of champagne. Pota-totally brilliant.