Cooking with cicadas: MoBot turns ‘crunchy sky raisins’ into tender morsels (2024)

CHESTERFIELD — Give a man some cicadas, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to cook with cicadas, and — well, it can at least come in handy every 13 years, when trillions of the insects emerge from the ground across the St. Louis region and beyond, as they have this month.

For some, the long-awaited emergence of the bugs comes just in time for dinner. Such is the case for Tad Yankoski, an entomologist with the Missouri Botanical Garden who hosted a small educational event Monday as an apron-clad bug chef, showcasing culinary uses of the cicadas now omnipresent in parts of the region.

Before an array of cameras and reporters, Yankoski made two cicada-based dishes. The first was cicada scampi, served in bruschetta form. He followed that up with some cicada tempura, served in a special sauce.

Both were delicious, tender and — if eaten blindly — would not have raised any suspicions of cicada consumption.

“They’re pretty tasty,” he said, wrapping up the batch of scampi. “These are surprisingly tender and juicy.”

The botanical garden is holding public demonstration sessions Friday at 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. at its Sophia M. Sachs Butterfly House in Chesterfield. Seating is limited, and because of high demand and food regulation rules, samples of the cooked cicadas won’t be available — but other insect-based snacks and cicada recipes will be.

In nature, the “crunchy sky raisins” represent a protein source that experts say will reverberate throughout the food chain and lead to a baby boom for the wide-ranging predators that are gorging themselves on the bugs.

But examples of cicada consumption by humans are fewer and farther between.

“The biggest thing to overcome is the 6 inches between your two ears,” said Yankoski, explaining that, to many people, the first bite is the toughest sell — at least in the U.S.

“For many people around the world, this isn’t ‘eating bugs’ — it’s ‘eating dinner,’” said Yankoski, describing other cultures that don’t harbor the same taboo. And he added that, pound for pound, cicadas offer slightly more protein than pork or chicken.

And the fresher, the better, he says, as it’s best to collect them as close as possible to their emergence, especially before the bugs’ new exoskeletons harden and before they take on a less-pleasant and more tannin-heavy flavor in their adult stage.

The wings also get unpleasant with time, Yankoski warned.

“They get stuck in your teeth and things like that,” he said.

But some resistance also comes from red tape and regulations that restrict the ability to serve the insects to the public — at least in traditional business settings.

“Restaurant owners can’t just go outside and harvest a bunch of cicadas and start cooking them up to serve to the public,” said Sara Dayley, a spokeswoman for the St. Louis County Department of Health, in an email. “In general, food products used in food establishments must come from an approved source.”

Dayley said that means food must be acceptable based on “conformity with principles, practices, and generally recognized standards that protect public health” — a definition that evidently doesn’t extend to creatures that crawl out of the soil every 13 years.

But legal definitions and regulatory restrictions haven’t stopped cicadas from appearing on plates and in recipes in some places, whether at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s cooking event or elsewhere, including private dinner parties.

Sparky’s, an ice cream shop in Columbia, Missouri, sold a limited amount of cicada ice cream during the brood’s last emergence in 2011 — attracting not only business but a stampede of media attention and headlines around the globe.

But after the flavor’s wildly successful launch, Sparky’s soon had to pull the plug on it, thanks to local regulators.

“Your backyard is not an authorized source for food ingredients,” said Tony Layson, the general manager at Sparky’s who also worked at the shop during the last round of cicada mania.

Yet even after cicada ice cream was erased from its offerings, business at Sparky’s was never the same. The limited run marked a positive “turning point” for the shop and a lasting boost in foot traffic, he said.

“‘These are our weirdos, we want to support them,’” said Layson, describing the perceived response of the community. “That little bug, I don’t want to say it made the shop, but it definitely helped it. ... We’ll never besmirch the name of the cicada.”

Besides changing the trajectory of the business, the cicada ice cream left another legacy.

“The owner jokingly put a sign on the door 13 years ago, saying, ‘Come back in 2024,’” said Layson.

And right on cue, people — and reporters — have emerged, asking if the flavor would return along with the bugs.

But despite some selling points, some consumers and chefs just aren’t interested in eating cicadas.

“We might fish with them, but I don’t think we’ll put them on the menu,” said Kevin Willmann, the chef at Farmhaus, in St. Louis’ Lindenwood Park neighborhood. “We’ll stick with crawfish for now. That’s as close as we’ll get to a bug.”