King Kong Crickets

I’m not going to lie. I struggled with this one. Let’s just say these little dudes are… an acquired taste.

Even though my tastes are generally pretty adventurous, even I do have my limits, apparently. And one of my limits is eating massive fried crickets.

I generally pride myself on eating pretty much whatever. My family lived on an island in Alaska for a while when I was little, and they ended up eating some pretty unusual things. I grew up hearing stories about boiled skunk cabbage and pig testicle sandwiches. So many family conversations devolved into a sort of contest of who had consumed the weirdest stuff in the most bizarre way: plucking raw salmon eggs straight out of the creek for a snack, or eating sludgy gray duck blood soup, for example.

So I consider it part of my heritage to eat all kinds of stuff. This is fortunate, since my husband’s tastes in food would be, well… challenging to a lot of people. I’ve eaten giant water bugs, dipped my sticky rice in a dip made with cow bile, eaten cooked cubes of pig blood, and even developed a sort of affection for fried silk worms.

So, when my husband decided he was going to cook up some frozen crickets that he found at the market, I pretty much thought I was up to the challenge. Oddly enough, though, I WAS NOT. First, these particular specimens were insanely large. They had heads the size of marbles and drumsticks only slightly smaller than chicken wings. Okay, I do exaggerate a bit, but trust me, they were monstrosities. I’m pretty sure the translation of the label was something along the lines of “King Kong Crickets,” if that gives you any idea of just how big they were.

The second challenge for me was that they put out a sort of unusual smell while they were cooking. If you ever wondered what cricket guts would smell like as they are warming up, well, just don’t. It’s not great. This is why Britney Spears named her designer fragrances things like “Curious” and “Believe,” and not “Curious About the Smell of Cricket Death” or “I Believe a Cricket Died Here Recently.”

But we seasoned them up just like we usually do with our silkworms: kaffir lime leaf, chilis, garlic, lemon grass, and salt once they were pretty crispy. The aromatics did A LOT to combat the ewy bug guts smell, and in the end, after eyeing them suspiciously for a while, I managed to choke a couple of them down. To be honest, the “drumstick” part actually tasted sort of like fried chicken skin, and the more I nibbled, the more the flavor started to grow on me. Perhaps as an accompaniment to a BeerLao or seven, they would taste magnificent.

The verdict: I would definitely try these again, because I do like to push the boundaries of my comfort zone, and my first experience with them made me feel like a total wimp. But I would look for smaller ones, as I think they would crisp up better, and not look so damn horrifying with their huge alien eyes staring out at me. I’m wondering how the Mexican-style chapulines compare, and already thinking about where I might be able to get some around here… But for now, I’ll probably just stick to chicken.

Note: Previously I had labeled these “grasshoppers” but they were actually crickets. I’ve updated the post accordingly.