Guess what just turned up in my office? A selection of snacks from these people.
A small bag of Thai curry crickets, a packet of cheesy worm snacks (oven-baked, not fried!), a box of chocolate-covered ants (not featured on the website, for some reason), and a bottle of vodka with a scorpion in it.
I loved the warning on the vodka bottle: “Caution: Scorpion may contain sharp parts. Take care when eating.”
I haven’t tried any of this stuff… yet. The chocolate ants are calling me, though. The only thing that puts me off is, these are biiig ants. Small ones, I’d chomp down in a flash.
They might be a certain species of ant that has dedicated members of the colony gorge themselves. Eventually their abdomens swell up and turn translucent with a honey-like substance. They’re eaten when food gets scarce.
Can’t remember what kind of ant it is, but I believe they’re sometimes eaten in Mexico/Central/South Amerca sans chocolate.
What you have in mind are honeypot ants. Those suckers really aren’t that easy to harvest, actually. It takes a backhoe to get at the colonies. I’ve heard they taste wonderful, though I’ve never tried them. There’s a recipe for a honeypot ant dessert in David Gordon’s book, The Eat a Bug Cookbook. There’s also a cookbook called Entertaining with Insects that you might want to check out for more epicurean entomophagy.
I have eaten live ants. Specifically, I’ve tried some of the species most often seen hanging around new leaves and shoots on a plant called greenbriar. (Greenbriar is a plant typically found in forests in the eastern US. New greenbriar leaves and shoots are really wonderful and buttery–better than regular lettuce for salads, etc. Sometimes there are very sweet regions of the plant right near where a new leaf grows out of the stem. Areas of new growth on the plant are often patrolled by ants, and the sweeter the plant is, the more ants there are hanging around. I think that the plant is providing the ants with sugar, and the ants are controlling the populations of insects that would like to chow down on plant tissue. But I digress…) Some ants are really delicious–very tangy, almost lemony. Some, probably with a lower formic acid content, are kinda icky. The thing to remember when eating a live ant, though, is that you really ought to crush its head before putting it in your mouth. If you don’t, the ants might bite the inside of your mouth. And, trust me–that can really hurt.
I could see using ants as a sort of condiment. A tuna steak coated in ants and grilled could be really lovely. The ants would add texture and a great lemony taste to the fish–kind of like a crunchy Bernaise.
My favorite mini-livestock item, though, is the luscious waxworm. They’re really quite yummy. Live, they taste like slightly milky grape-nuts. When you sautee them (and you have to do it lightly if you want to keep them intact), they taste like slightly nut-flavored shrimp. It’s a really lovely, nuanced flavor.
Sometimes you’ll see recipes for mealworms and such as novelty items. I’m not that big a fan of mealworms, since they really don’t have a lot of flavor to them. They’re good for texture, though. There are several recipes out there for mealworm oatmeal cookies. The thing is, you can’t really tell mealworm oatmeal cookies from regular old insect-free oatmeal cookies. I haven’t tried David Gordon’s recipe for tempura mealworms, so I can’t say if that brings out any flavor any better than the few mealworm concoctions I’ve tasted.
Curry crickets: gently crunchy, turn to powder in the mouth. Quite inoffensive. Need more spice.
Cheesy oven-baked worms: best of the lot. Nice and cheesy, and they do have a popcorn-like tang. Very insubstantial though - they are so dried out as to be almost hollow.
Chocolate-coated ants: ick! Seriously, ick. Not too bad at first (although the chocolate tasted like cooking chocolate) but these have a minging aftertaste that just will not go away. Almost perfumed, but overwhelmingly yucky. Put it this way, I was chowing down more crickets to try and take away the taste. Also, the legs get caught in your teeth.
Oh, right–I forgot to mention chapulines, another hexapod delicacy.
Chapulines are a traditional food from Mexico. They’re roasted grasshoppers. I think they’re really yummy. When I can get them, I add them to marinara sauces and such instead of little dried shrimp or anchovies. They’re delicious straight from the bag, too, but they’re very salty, so I can’t eat many of them at once. There’s a restaurant here that’ll sell them to you in little sandwich bags when the grasshoppers are in season.
If you like dried shrimp, I strongly suggest that you try some chapulines if you get the chance.