Rene Redzepi: Nordic Food Lab Buzzing With Beehive Recipes. Last week we told you about the Nordic Food Lab's plans for brewing beer from bee larvae. The Copenhagen-based lab has now released a set of recipes for cooking with the whole beehive, from beeswax to propolis. Eager to make beeswax ice cream, honey crisps or honey kombucha sauce? Just follow the instructions on the Nordic Food Lab's blog. The recipes look amazing but do keep in mind you'll have to familiarize yourself with some rare ingredients beforehand. Some of these intriguing recipes were recently prepared in London for the 2013 Pestival, a food festival dedicated to edible critters.
The Nordic Food Lab's fascination with bees is part of a long-term experiment focused on edible insects, which the United Nations has deemed as a viable alternative to feed our increasing world population. The research lab is a project started by René Redzepi from Noma, currently number two on The World's 50 Best Restaurants list sponsored by S.Pellegrino and Acqua Panna. Dutch start eating insects. Fearing animal scarcity, Dutch scientists in the Netherlands are experimenting with different insects that could replace animal meat as a source of protein in our daily diets.
Eating insects like mealworms, grasshoppers and Buffalo worms is becoming enormously popular in the Netherlands and may even be named the latest culinary trend. If you do not like the whole idea of insects on your plate, then you better get used to eating insects soon. Chances are that your food already contains insects. “The question really should be: ‘Why do we not eat insects?’” Said Marcel Dicke, the chief of entomology at the Netherland’s Wageningen University, adding that the average person already unknowingly eats more than a pound of bug particles in jams, breads and other processed foods each year.
Several Dutch chocolate manufacturers are seriously thinking about adding Freeze-Dried Mealworms to their recipe. Raising insects is environmentally friendly. More at The Dutch Daily News. Dutch Try to Change ‘Ick’ to ‘Yum’ for Insect Dishes. Time For A 'Bug Mac'? The Dutch Aim To Make Insects More Palatable : The Salt. Hide captionAn African blesbok samosa with insect crumble — complete with mealworms and buffalo worms — at the Specktakel restaurant in the Netherlands. Teri Schultz for NPR An African blesbok samosa with insect crumble — complete with mealworms and buffalo worms — at the Specktakel restaurant in the Netherlands.
Diners who merely flit over the menu at the Specktakel restaurant in the Netherlands are sometimes shocked when their plate arrives. "They just read the first two things in the sentence, and then they think they've got the bobotie pie with pumpkin mash, raisins and watercress," says owner Mark Cashoek. "And the last word is actually the insect crumble. " Insect crumble? Evidently, the hundreds of people who swarmed to Cashoek's Specktakel restaurant in Haarlem, Netherlands, last month to partake in two special bug buffets, both of which sold out. Den Hartogh is not above sampling as he cooks. "Just eat it," he says. The dishes receive rave reviews throughout the packed restaurant. Wageningen UR. Food / It's time to eat insects for the good of the planet, say experts. "The European consumer has some difficulties in crunching a whole insect", says Professor Arnold Van Huis, capturing in one dry sentence the gamut of faint distaste to full-on revulsion that many Europeans feel about the idea of snacking on their local grasshopper.
Potential squeamishness aside though, the Dutch academic believes insects are the sustainable, healthy and environment friendly foods of the future. "There are so many benefits to the eating of insects compared to conventional livestock, and, nutritionally, insects are exactly the same as conventional meat", he tells EUobserver.
Insects contain more protein per mouthful than beef, are low in fat, high in vitamin B and rearing them causes much less damage to the environment than cows, sheep and pigs. At the moment, the issue of whether we can sustain the European population on insects remains academic, or, at the very least, one for the culinary adventurous. There are about 1,800 edible insects in the world. Bug Nuggets - Daniel Fromson. Nishant Choksi The dining-room table was set with roses and silver candlesticks. At one end, near a grandfather clock, sat two plates of mealworm fried rice. “So, a small lunch,” said my host, Marian Peters. “Freshly prepared.” The inch-long larvae, flavored with garlic and soy sauce, reminded me in texture of delicate, nutty seedpods.
“Mealworm is one of my favorites at the moment,” Peters told me, speaking of the larvae of the darkling beetle (Tenebrio molitor Linnaeus). Based near Amsterdam, Peters’s company, Bugs Originals, has put freeze-dried locusts and mealworms on the shelves at the 24 outlets of Sligro, the Dutch food wholesaler. The company’s goal is to get consumers to embrace bugs as an eco-friendly alternative to conventional meat.
Van Huis’s ideas are not unique: scientists have made similar proposals since the 1970s, when fears of global famine surged. Van Huis told me that purified insect protein is “the ultimate possibility,” but that isolating it remains difficult. Bugs for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. Susan Cosier Published: 10/04/2011 Mealworm fried rice and insect nuggets could be a mouth-watering alternative to meat—or so say the founders of Bugs Originals, a company located outside of Amsterdam. Already sold at 24 Dutch food wholesalers, freeze dried locusts and mealworms are better for the environment. “Crickets, for example, convert feed to body mass about twice as efficiently as pigs and five times as efficiently as cattle.
The company, owned by Marian Peters, hails from the nation known for the highest concentration of food scientists in the world. “The United Nations noticed: van Huis spent three months last year helping the UN Food and Agriculture Organization develop a policy to promote edible insects. Although bugs aren’t very popular treats or toppings here in the U.S., that might change. “Many types of insects appear on menus today. Bugs.