Foraging for and cooking insects

I spend my summers cooking for a 101 year old seasonal art school located on 115 acres of pristine wilderness on a peninsula just north of Saugatuck, MI. While the curriculum is decidedly arts programming heavy, we occasionally offer a course in the sciences. This year, to my delight, we offered an "insectology" course (I was a big dork for everything creepy crawly as a kid, especially weird bugs). The instructor approached me at the onset of their two week class to get a sense if I would be interested in collaborating in an exercise in entomophagy- the consumption of insects. Well, of course I was!

Grasshoppers seemed to be an obvious choice for our collaboration- abundant, proven to be edible, and relatively easy to collect. Also, I’ve had expe­ri­ence eat­ing these bugs– about seven years ago in a dimly lit can­tina in Oax­aca I was scarf­ing down lit­tle piles of var­i­ous salty snack foods as part of a botana plate. I eagerly devoured a mys­te­ri­ous lit­tle tan­gle of some shred­ded salty stuff which I only real­ized was insects after inquir­ing of my server– cha­pu­lines it was! The shred­ded vari­ety, eaten in low light­ing proved to be the per­fect gate­way. At the mar­ket they offer sev­eral sizes of cha­pu­lines start­ing with the shreds and work­ing up in size. By the end of the week I was gid­dily scarf­ing down the biggest hop­pers I could get my hands on. And I always hoped that one day I might pre­pare them myself. But where to get so many grasshop­pers? Employ a team of ama­teur ento­mol­o­gists work­ing on said 115 acres of wilder­ness, obviously. It took them a little over a week to collect about 60 specimen, about 3 cups. I'm sure they were focused firstly on their studies, though this yield was not exactly an abundant return.



I did a lit­tle research and read cer­tain info regard­ing clean­ing the grasshop­pers, and most sources men­tioned remov­ing the wings and legs. I clearly remem­ber eat­ing cha­pu­lines with legs intact, so that step seemed unnec­es­sary. After inspect­ing the prod­uct though, the wing cov­er­ings and wings seemed tough and fibrous, so I put the class to task of pick­ing off the wings.



I infused a few cups of olive oil with gar­lic which I used to deep fry the hop­pers. It was rather remark­able how quickly they turned to the toasty brown color I remem­bered from Oax­aca, almost as soon as the hit the hot oil. It seemed as though they should cook through a bit, so I gave them a few min­utes.



I removed them from the oil with a slot­ted spoon and blot­ted off excess oil. Sea­son­ing was as sim­ple as a dust­ing of my buddy Dave’s habanero salt and a squeeze of lime.




The results were deli­cious! They fried up very crisp and had a toasty rich­ness and savory note rem­i­nis­cent of eat­ing shell on crus­taceans (which makes per­fect sense, right? arthro­pods they’re all). You may notice the vari­ety of sizes. The larger spec­i­mens had more fla­vor diver­sity with a slightly bit­ter after­taste and some had just a hint of grit, not unlike a shrimp with mud vain intact. These big­ger guys proved more chal­leng­ing for some of the kids in the class that were new to eat­ing bugs. That said, I was impressed by the almost 100% will­ing­ness of the students to eat the hoppers. On one hand, in this con­text, there was an eager­ness amongst the group to eat the bugs as their duty as participants in the class, but I also can’t help but won­der if cul­tur­ally we are ready to over­come our prej­u­dices over creepy crawly things. Eat­ing grasshop­pers seems like an obvi­ous and deli­cious ingre­di­ent and pro­tein source. The hard­est moment is look­ing the crit­ters in their lit­tle beady eyes, but if they are pre­pared well, the moment their savory crunch hits our plea­sure recep­tors, we can real­ize that hey, this is more than just a nov­elty, this is actu­ally food that is enjoy­able to eat. Now only if I had a crew of 12 art stu­dents armed with bug nets scour­ing the woods for me day in, day out.



Anybody else out there cooking bugs?

Well I can not say it looks appetizing and I would not eat them myself. I detest grasshoppers or any bug for that matter except bees but I would not eat them other than the honey.

In response to your other question you know darn well if you are reading this forum that Cathy 2 and David Hammond have eaten bugs and maybe others. You you are among (buggy eating) friends here.