Eating Cicadas
Cooking up Brood X Cicadas and Annual Cicadas
By Koaw - May, 2021
I had never been inclined to taste cicadas until one of my Patreon Patrons, Sarah, sent me a link to some wonderful recipes. (You can find that recipe .pdf here.)
Do note that some people may have food allergies to cicadas so you should consult your doctor before consuming them.
The video shows you how I found nymph-stage (non-adult) cicadas for cooking. The best phases to eat cicadas are when they are nymphs and tenerals, or the versions that have freshly emerged from their last molt and have yet to harden into adults. To find the teneral version of cicadas you’ll need to wait until the ground is around a temperature of 63-64 F. Then you’ll want to get up early in the morning (3-5 AM) and collect them. Get those in the freezer or cook them right away before they harden up into their true adult form.
The adults are still edible just less satisfying and may also have a fungus at that stage that makes them taste funky.
This Brood X pharaoh cicada came out one year early (2020) instead with the big boom expected in N. Virginia in 2021.
The swamp cicada is an annual cicada meaning the adults come out every year. This is a commonly encountered species.
For the chocolate-covered cicadas, of which, are absolutely delicious, I quickly learned the difficulty in melting chocolate (something that should seem so simple!)
The nymphs are about as big as the first digit on your finger. Identifying cicadas down to the species-level while they are in nymph form is very, very difficult and often impractical without DNA testing.