By Janet Raloff
Read the main feature story on insects here.
Would you fancy grasshopper gumbo? Perhaps mushroom hors d’oeuvres topped with
a batter-dipped and lightly fried dragonfly—in season, of course—drizzled with
a sauce of Dijon mustard, soy and butter?
These are among recipes that self-taught insect chef Zack Lemann has whipped up
as possible menu items for Bug Appétit. This restaurant offering bugged dining
will be a permanent feature of the Audubon Nature Institute’s Insectarium.
Celebrating insects and other arthropods, the 23,000-square-foot museum will
open June 13 in New Orleans.
“For the tentative gourmand,” Lemann says he might produce chocolate-covered
bugs or cookies garnished with toasted crickets. More daring diners might opt
for red beans and “yikes,” he suspects, which is rice seeded with poached wax
worms that “are rice-colored and rice-shaped, but quite a bit bigger.” In many
instances, people will see the bug but not really taste it. Certainly, he says,
“we won’t try to hide the bugs.”
Curious diners who can’t make it to New Orleans
can sample insect-laced cuisine at events such as CornellUniversity’s fall Insectapalooza, the
North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’ autumn BugFest or PurdueUniversity’s
spring Bug Bowl.
Or, cooks can experiment at home using insects normally destined to become food
for pets like reptiles. Lemann contends that nutty-flavored crickets, in
particular, can be substituted in any recipe that calls for small chopped pieces
of fruit, vegetables, meat or nuts.
