Gateway Bug

First Impressions

Nov 16

Well we cooked up the crickets last night. The first try didn't go quite as well as we hoped. We prepared them and using the Dry Roasted Crickets recipe here. The first step was to boil them for a couple minutes to clean them. After that we spread them out on a cookie sheet to roast them. At this point the smell was actually quite appetizing. Sarah described it as somewhat like fresh potatoes, which I think was fairly accurate. It went a long way toward calming our initial nervousness. The smell actually improved while they were roasting, and after an hour we had a batch of roasted crickets ready to eat. Boiled crickets ready for roasting

So from there we picked what looked like a couple of choice crickets, broke off the legs and antennae, and took the plunge. The flavor was actually fairly pleasant. I'd definitely agree with the people who describe them as somewhat nutty, but I don't know about people who say they taste like almonds. Didn't really seem like it to us. An unsure Sarah about to try her first bug

So we went through the rest of them, breaking off the legs/antennae and collecting them in a bowl. This step was a lot more work than we initially anticipated, but would probably go a lot faster with practice. From there we lightly oiled and salted them and sat down on the couch to eat them like popcorn. Dry Roasted Crickets

Unfortunately despite how well things went up to this point we actually didn't end up finishing them. They weren't bad per se, but the texture seemed to leave something to be desired. I think we would have done better to get larger crickets (we got medium sized), there was too much skin/exoskeleton to meat, or so it seemed to me. Next time we're going to give meal-worms a try. We're also definitely going to give crickets a go again, but we'll try to get larger ones next time, and probably honey-roast them or something.