A cicada invasion in your kitchen?
Bugs are high protein, gluten-free and low-fat
NEW YORK — Cicadas are poised to infest whole swaths of American backyards this summer. Maybe it’s time they invaded your kitchen.
Swarms of the red-eyed bugs, who are reemerging after 17 years below ground, offer a chance for home cooks to turn the tables and make them into snacks.
Full of protein, gluten-free, low-fat and low-carb, cicadas were used as a food source by Native Americans and are still eaten by humans in many countries.
“We really have to get over our dislike of insects, which is really strong and deep-seated in most people in our culture,” said David George Gordon, author of “Eat-a-bug Cookbook” and known as the Bug Chef.
“You could make stir fry. You can mix them into dough to make bread — make banana bread, let’s say. You can batter them and deep fry them, which I think would be my favorite way,” he said.
This year’s group is called Brood X, and they can be seen in 15 Eastern states from Indiana to Georgia to New York. Their cacophonous mating song can drown out the noise of passing jets.
When the soil warms up enough, cicadas emerge from the ground, where they’ve been sucking moisture from tree roots for the past 13 or 17 years, depending on species.
They shed their exoskeletons, attach themselves to branches, mate and lay eggs before dying off in about six weeks.
Gordon advises home cooks to gather the cicadas when they’re nymphs, while they are still soft and chewy, like soft shell crab.
Gordon describes the taste of cicadas as akin to asparagus. University of Maryland entomologist Mike Raupp goes further: “They have a buttery texture, a delicious, nutty flavor, probably from the tannins, from the roots of the trees on which they fed,” Raupp said.
Gordon pointed to the rise of foodie culture and thrill-seeking eaters like chef Andrew Zimmern, but especially to a 2013 report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization as a turning point in interest in edible insects. The report estimated that insect-eating is practiced regularly by at least 2 billion people around the world, and that dozens of species have been documented as edible, including cicadas.