Sunday, September 25, 2011

Fried insects review

Protein food in Bangkok.

Around the Sukhumvit area, you will definitely bump into stalls selling these fried insects. In general, they are crunchy and taste really salty with some flavoring of curry leaves. More of a texture thing I'd say. They pretty much taste the same.

They say that you'd only find these insects stalls in red-light district areas. Mmmm must be the protein.

00 Insect Stall




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01 Insect Platter
Bought back a mix of every insect there for 50 Baht. For a small bag of a specific insect cost 20 Baht here.

02 Crickets
Crickets.

These critters are easy to eat. Soft body, not much crunchiness and easy to eat. Couldn't really taste a distinctive taste.

03 Water beetle
Water beetle (I think so)

Well, the lady selling it said they were cockroaches. I don't think so.

These were the biggest insect being fried out there. Pretty intimidating I must admit.

03 Water beetle 2
Underside of the Water beetle.

This bugger is really tough. Soft but tough as hell. I couldn't chew through it at all. Took me a while to figure out how to eat this thing. Managed to rip its body off, and could push out stuff from its abdomen. I thought it was flesh. Later realise then they were round, so it could be eggs.

Soft and chewy. A pretty unique texture. Hope they are dead and won't breed inside me.

10 Water beetle crunching
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr. It just won't tear.

11 Water Beetle eggs
Eggs squeezed out of the abdomen.

04 Some bug
Dunno-what-the-heck beetle.

This one I gave up. The exoskeleton was really really hard as if biting into a rock. Almost lost a tooth there and had some funky taste. Ripped off the head, tried sucking on them but there wasn't much fluid either.

This, I gave up.

05 Grasshoppers
Grasshoppers.

Really crunchy and salty. Definitely goes well with beer. Doesn't have a unique taste either.

06 Frogs
Frogs.

Same frogs I use for bait while fishing snakeheads (haruan).

Now I know why the fish loves this as bait. They taste like chicken. Slightly chewy, but at least for frogs, its meat you are chewing on..

09 Frog muching

07 Caterpillar
Caterpillar?

Crunchy and salty. See. Told you most of them were just salty. This one can be easily consumed.

08 Grubs
Grubs.

My favourite of the lot. Texture wise, I'd say it's like fish roe. It's like eating a lot of mini dots. No wonder it's a delicacy in many places.

Too bad they were really small. Would have been awesome if they were the size of the water beetle.

7 comments:

joy said...

yuck yuck yuck yuck and yuck

Angry Panda said...

mmmmm mmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmm

Sir Hoe said...

its like watching man vs wild

Angry Panda said...

Haha Nah, its just like Bizarre Food.

cluelessfreak said...

any after effect?

Angry Panda said...

Thirsty. It was really salty.

D said...

Brings back memories... and makes me hungry too hahaha