MoBOT’s Cicada Cooking Demo Shows the Joys of Eating Insects

We arrived just in time: The canapes were coming out. “Chef” Tad Yankoski had finished with his saute pan and was setting out little toasts. “These cook up a lot like shrimp,” he said, tenderly stirring a bunch of cicada nymphs.

Yankoski, senior entomologist at Sophia M. Sachs Butterfly House in Chesterfield, is a hearty proponent of entomophagy — the practice of eating insects. He said not only do 2 billion people worldwide eat bugs every day, but many insects — certainly cicadas — have as much protein content as chicken, pork and eggs.

At yesterday’s press event, Yankoski was demonstrating how cicadas can be used in the kitchen, besides mouse bait, cooking up a few treats for the assembled gaggle. It wasn’t his first rodeo. He has some solid culinary “entomophagerial” experience under his belt. In the same way one might talk about the versatility of chicken thighs (i.e. enthusiastically), he talked a bit about cicada kebabs, cicada toffee and chocolate chirp cookies made with crickets and seemed to speak rather dreamily of the first bug he ever ate. “It was caramelized. Tender and juicy, not hard and crunchy. I was surprised.”

Yankoski was having to raise his voice; the trees above us hissed like angry boomslangs. “They sound pissed off,” said one invitee. He meant that the cicadas, seething in the trunks and leaves and possibly someone’s hair, were aware of the heartless spectacle down below. It was unlikely: Yankoski more or less said cicadas have about five neurons in their heads. They aren’t the brightest bulbs in the sycamores.

And nor are they much fun at a shooting party. “Periodical cicadas don’t defend themselves,” Yankoski said. “They don’t run and hide.” There’s no thrill of the hunt when it comes to these puppies. And, really, there is no hunt. Not when we’re kicking through 60 billion of them like they’re autumn leaves, it’s our fifth time around Forest Park and we haven’t made a dent — and especially this time around, when we have two broods of periodical cicadas (XIII and XIX) to contend with. The last time this happened Thomas Jefferson was president.

So Yankoski, who had moved on from mini toasts to prepping some tempura batter (corn starch, egg and cake flour), said, yes, there would be plenty of bugs to go around. He had more nymphs bubbling like gnocchi on a camping stove. (Also like gnocchi, they take two to three minutes to cook). Then, while the nymphs fizzled in a little deep fryer, he made the dipping sauce.

“What I’m aiming for is: ' It’s not that horrible,' ” Yankoski said. I had a battered insect on the end of a toothpick. My teeth were shrinking back, recoiling from the task at mouth . I was trying to think sensibly about things like context and perspective, and how it made no earthly sense that this felt far freakier to me than eating chicken when I’d had chickens as pets!

“In what aisle do I find these at Schnucks?” said one man who was reaching in for his third tempura’d nugget. “Because these taste just like Panda Express.” He was right, but I think it was all about the sauce.