For
Bun Lai, cicadas are mesmerizing
to eat, their sweet, bitter flavor reminiscent of walnuts, chestnuts and adzuki
beans, and their gently crunchy exterior giving way to creaminess, like a soft
shell crab.
اضافة اعلان
Every technique for cooking them
“brings out different tones and shades,” he said.
Lai, 47, is the chef of Miya’s
Sushi, his family’s sustainable sushi restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut.
This summer, he is turning his attention to insects.
As Brood X cicadas emerge by the
billions in coming months, he will host a series of cicada-centric dinners at
his farm in nearby Woodbridge, where he recently shifted part of the
restaurant’s operations so he could do outdoor events and cook closer to
nature.
Besides being delicious, cicadas
align with his mission to encourage diners to eat in an environmentally
conscious way. They’re also a part of Lai’s heritage.
During his early childhood in
Kyushu, Japan, his summertime memories included “climbing up trees, following
the song of the cicada” to catch one, he said. In that country, cicadas symbolize
summer and rebirth.
His mother, Yoshiko Lai, who
founded
Miya’s Sushi in 1982 and grew up in the Kyushu countryside, said that
eating bee larvae was commonplace when she was a child.
Cicadas are consumed in many
countries, from Mexico to Thailand to the Congo. They are rich in protein, less
expensive than many meats, land efficient and because they emerge in outsize
numbers, eating them does not tend to harm their existence. Bun Lai’s hope with
these dinners is to pay homage to the global prevalence of cicada consumption
while normalizing insect eating in the United States, where the practice is
often stigmatized.
“On three different continents,
people love to eat insects,” he said. Indigenous people the world over have
consumed the cicada. “They didn’t eat it because it was starvation food,” he
added, but because it tasted good.
Lai plans to serve his cicadas in
their whole form — raw, roasted, smoked, or boiled — primarily because that is
how cultures like his own have enjoyed them.
Because locating cicadas can be
difficult — they tend to cluster in specific locations rather than spread out —
Lai’s dinners (five or six, in total) will be planned at the last minute. He
recently tried three times to harvest cicadas in Washington DC, an epicenter of
Brood X, succeeding only on his final attempt, when he and two friends, Galina
Parfenova and Yordanka Evgenieva, picked thousands of cicadas off trees in
Tysons, Virginia.
On a recent Monday at the farm,
Lai had strung a bunch of cicadas like a popcorn garland to gently smoke over a
fire, a technique he learned from Congolese cuisine. These cicadas would go in
salad — he compared them to bacon bits.
In another bowl, there was mame
gohan, a Japanese rice dish with peas, where Lai had substituted peas for
cicadas to imbue a nutty flavor during steaming. He rolled the rice into boiled
leaves of swamp rhubarb and cut them into maki that were pleasantly bitter. He
poured a deeply savory broth of kelp and oyster mushrooms over a small bowl of
raw cicadas, adding a spoonful of red miso to make a cicada miso soup. Finally,
he shaped sushi rice into a pizza and showered it with mozzarella and Parmesan.
Just before it was done baking, he covered the top with cicadas, which provided
a pepperoni-like crunch.
Lai isn’t the only chef putting
cicadas on the menu. Sean Sherman, who will open Owamni by The Sioux Chef in
Minneapolis in June, has been studying cicadas as an Indigenous food source.
When he is able to find cicadas, he will turn them into preparations like a
crunchy topping akin to pepitas made by caramelizing the bugs in maple syrup,
or a sauce with cicadas, chiles, and agave. At El Rey in Philadelphia, the chef
Dionicio Jimenez, who grew up eating insects in Puebla, Mexico, has served
cicada salsa, or blended the bugs into potato soup to add creamy, nutty flavor.
Home cooks can prepare cicadas,
too — Lai suggested roasting them, or sautéing them in olive oil. The safest
bet is to harvest cicadas in parks, he added, where there is less risk of lead
contamination in the ground. They’ve spent years underground, so harvest them
in an area free from pesticides.
While cicadas are a sustainable
food, Lai is also interested in focusing on invasive insect species, like
locusts. The cicadas are a gateway, he said. He’s capitalizing on Brood X’s
moment in the sun to expand people’s minds about eating more biologically
diverse foods.
Yoshiko Lai, 77, who still cooks
at the restaurant, said that when she opened Miya’s Sushi she was told that
Americans would not eat raw fish. Now, sushi is ubiquitous. She believes the
same is true for insects. Like sushi in the 1980s, they are a centuries-old
food tradition that invites derision in the United States.
“I had confidence” back then, she
said, that American eating habits would change. And now, so does Bun Lai.
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