Cicadas are a nutritional boon to birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians — and yes, even humans. The insects contain a high amount of protein, fiber and minerals.
“Anything you can make with shrimp you can make with cicadas,” said Nicole Pruess, invertebrate keeper at the Sophia M. Sachs Butterfly House, who ate her first cicada dish last week. “We fried them up with butter, garlic, white wine, lemon juice and a little bit of fresh parsley. I thought it was going to be crunchy, but it was actually very tender and savory.”
With the St. Louis region estimated to have 1 million to 1.5 million periodical cicadas per acre for the next few weeks — and nymphs continuing to crawl out of the ground — there is still time to take advantage of this once-every-13 years culinary event.
Tad Yankoski, senior entomologist at the Butterfly House, joined St. Louis on the Air to share tips and tricks for catching, preparing and cooking cicadas.
1. Collect cicadas in the nymph stage, before they shed their exoskeleton
“Most of the periodical cicadas come out of the ground around 8 or 9 o'clock at night, so that's a great time to collect them, as they're starting to adventure up the tree where they would usually grab a hold and malt. You can also collect them in the afternoon after a rain shower.”
2. You don’t need many tools
“I go out with a flashlight and a paper bag. I collect them off of the trees and put them in the bag. It's also a great way to meet your neighbors.”
3. Prep some freezer space
“We put them in the freezer to put them to sleep and humanely euthanize them.”
4. Wash them as you would produce
“They are coming out of the ground, and sometimes they're covered in soil or debris. Regardless of how we're going to prepare them, we rinse them really well under strong running water.”
5. Look for healthy cicadas
“If you know there’s an area where they were spreading a lot of pesticides, you might want to avoid that area. We tell people to make sure the cicadas appear healthy, and that basically means that they're crawling and acting like a normal cicada — that they're not on the ground twitching or anything like that.” (Also, while less than 5% of cicadas are infected with Massospora cicadina or “zombie fungus,” Yankoski said that it’s best to avoid the adult cicadas that have a lot of white spores on their back. “But even then, evidence suggests it's probably harmless.”)
6. Soften them up
“We boil them for about two minutes — that gets the last bit of debris and dirt off of them, and it sterilizes their outside just in case there's any bacteria or stuff like that from the soil.”
7. Flavor as desired
Yankoski has sautéed cicadas in butter and garlic. He’s also made deep-fried tempura cicadas and coated them in a bang bang sauce. He calls it, “Scream scream cicada.”
8. Missed the nymph stage? You can still cook the adults, but they’ll taste different
“I have eaten adult cicadas who had been feeding from trees,” Yankoski said, “and you definitely get an oaky kind of taste from that. The nymphs are much more mild — they're going to take on the taste of [what you cook them in].”
While 2 billion people around the world eat insects regularly, cicada scampi might not be for everyone. If the benefits of eating insects intrigue you but you still feel aversion to the idea, Yankoski suggests starting with crickets.
“We joke that crickets are the gateway bug,” he said. “You can grind it up, bake it into cookies, and you hardly know it's there. Once you're used to eating it, you realize it's just tasty. And then maybe you'll try it again.”
Sarah Schlafly is the CEO of Mighty Cricket, a St. Louis-based food production company that sells cricket flour.
“Our chocolate, vanilla protein powders — most people throw in a smoothie. We also sell plain cricket flour that's easy to bake into muffins, pancakes [and] waffles. Sometimes I just stir it in a hummus or sprinkle on top of some guacamole.”
She believes there will soon be an inflection point where eating insects takes off in the U.S.
“We've seen this happen with other foods. Lobster used to be fed to prisoners and was considered poor man's food. The sushi roll used to be considered ‘gross’ — eating raw fish and seaweed,” Schlafly said. “Bugs are going to be that next thing. Maybe today we’re squeamish about it, and maybe [in] 10 years, maybe [in] 15 years, it's going to be very normalized.”
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Ulaa Kuziez, Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Roshae Hemmings is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
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