Vancouver chef serves cricket cuisine
Mia Stainsby
Vancouver Sun
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Crickets: coming to a plate near you.
CREDIT: Bill Keay/Vancouver Sun
Crickets: coming to a plate near you.
Photo gallery: Food worth chirping about
VANCOUVER - Vij's restaurant, Vancouver's pride and gastronomic joy, is moving into a brave new world. Next week, it will start to serve insects in some of its dishes.
Meeru Dhalwala, the chef and co-owner with husband Vikram Vij, has decided to introduce insects as a green cuisine. She wrote about her plan in a recent piece in The Vancouver Sun.
She argued that insects can provide an environmentally positive, healthy protein and an occasional alternative to meat, if only we could tackle the yuck factor.
Green cuisine or not, cooking with insects is a bold move for a restaurant known for its sophisticated food and regarded as a top-ranking go-to spot for the famous and the foodies. Vij's will certainly be the only high-end restaurant in North America I know of that cooks with insects.
Dhalwala hopes to thwart North America's instinctive disgust towards ingesting insects the way a mom disguises broccoli in her child's food.
In the first baby step, she will start serving crickets by roasting them and grinding them into cricket flour. Then she'll make a spicy paratha, an Indian flatbread, with the flour. After that, she's thinking of moving on to grasshoppers. Tiny ones, mind you. She's thinking of roasting them with lemon and cayenne.
Crickets and grasshoppers are arthropods, the same class as prawns and lobsters, she points out. "If you're allergic to prawns and lobsters, there's a slight chance you might be allergic to crickets and grasshoppers."
Earlier this week, ABC-TV's Nightline producers happened upon her arresting piece and called her up. Camera and crew arrived from the Seattle bureau and trailed her as she went about making cricket flour and then, some spicy paratha. She says the cricket lends a mild grassiness to the bread that she compares to fresh fenugreek (in India, a very good thing).
Nightline's story looks at "how one of the top fine dining restaurants in North America takes on the challenge of serving something as offensive as bugs on the menu," she says. The reporter ate two parathas on-camera and said they were delicious.
"I'm not proposing we quit eating meat, but simply adding insects into our diet," says Dhalwala. "I have a complete yuck fear factor too, and I thought, who better to do something with this than me? I know my food. Maybe I can figure out a way to serve healthy cricket dishes that taste great and don't offend."
At Simon Fraser University, Jeff Joy, a PhD student in the evolutionary biology of insects, responded enthusiastically to the news of insects on the menu.
"Yeah!," Joy said. "Insects are fantastic for human consumption. In a lot of the world, insects are important to diets and supply protein people otherwise wouldn't get. I can't think of any reason it would be unsafe to eat, especially if it had chocolate on it. I'm definitely going to go and try it out." He's eaten grasshoppers (chocolate-covered) and enjoyed it.
Dhalwala says 2,000 crickets would make enough paratha for 12 people. (They sell for $12 a serving.) "Crickets are so good for you," she says. "They're actually healthier for us than meat. They have three times more iron than beef, way more calcium, is low in fat and is super-low in cholesterol and aren't raised with antibiotics."
And their delicate little feet tread much more lightly on the environment.
"Quote me on this," she says. "To get a steak to the table requires thousands of litres of water. For a portion size of crickets, you don't need anywhere near the same amount of water and rain forests don't get chopped down for cattle to graze."
Quoting from an article she read on insects as food, she says, "Eating an insect is like riding a bicycle. Eating a cow is like driving an SUV."
Dhalwala says her crickets are farm-raised in Washington state, near Abbotsford. "It's almost local. They're grown on pure, clean vegetable feed and they're not getting pesticides. It's completely verified that it's okay for human consumption." (They are normally grown for pet stores.)
The response from intrepid testers has been 100-per-cent positive. "They expected something more visual like [cricket] eyeballs. They were almost disappointed," she says. Putting cultural eating habits in perspective, she says people would be put off chicken if it were served whole with its feathers on. But de-feathered and cut up, there's no issue.
Vancouver, she says, is the only market where she'd try something as daring as insects on the menu. Husband Vikram Vij totally supports her on this, she says. "He loved it. He said as long as I do it with a lot of dignity and we don't humiliate ourselves, he's totally supportive. He's super-proud to be serving these now."
ABC does not yet have a broadcast date for the piece on Dhalwala's cricket paratha.
mstainsby@png.canwest.com
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