Adventures In Eating Silkworm Pupae

Disclaimer: When I’m stressed or nervous, a stream of very colorful language tends to come vomiting out of my upper orifice. I would categorize this post as NSFW (Not Safe For Work) because there are things in this post that are, at best, wildly inappropriate and I won’t be responsible for people’s reactions should they choose to read on. You have been warned.

Many thanks to: My childhood nanny for planting the seed of curiosity. @maisonmelimelo (IG) for keeping me accountable and coming over to experiment with me, and for keeping me calm in the face of overwhelming horror. (Her account of this escapade will be linked here when it’s up.) My husband for the only time he’s brave is when I’m freaking out, since he has some sort of weird competitive streak in him, and for pretending eating them didn’t bother him.

I’m prefacing this post with blaming the motivation behind embarking on this particular quest of raising and eating silkworm pupae on my childhood nanny (who had come back to live with my parents and help take care of my aging grandfather). To be honest, I could’ve gone my entire life without eating them and been a whole and happy human being. I’d contented myself to just raising them as a fun cultural project with my children (the process of which you can read about here) but in talking about it with her (my oldest loinfruit affectionately calls her Po-Po), she mentioned how much she missed eating them.

I stressed there would be no (fucking) way I’d ever put them near my digestive system, but Po-Po implored me to find some for her because it was a delicious (insert skeptical face here) nostalgic childhood snack. She, like my maternal grandmother, came from the Chinese province of Nan-Jing (Nanking), which is famous for their silk production. The byproducts of which are sold, lightly fried and salted, by street vendors and eaten by the residents. As she’s someone who adamantly refuses to touch anything considered “exotic” such as sushi or the the other food group known as “chicken nuggets”, I was surprised she not only ate them, but she craved them.

“My mother,” Po-Po explained, “Told us they were peanuts.”

Lying to your kids aside (which we’ve all done), was it really that good that kids would eat it without a second thought?

So half of the next batch I hatched (about 800 – 900) went to her, and I kept the rest for myself, thoughtfully raising them on a steady supply of mulberry leaves that are abundant on Long Island. I toyed with the idea of eating them here and there, occasionally Googling for other people’s experience, with limited success of what they actually tasted like.

My thoughts drifted back to my only gastric experience with them, years ago, when my mom and my younger sister brought home a can of already seasoned and processed silkworm pupae from the Korean grocery store, and the subsequent gagging we all experienced when we opened it.

There was no getting around it–it smelled like ass and probably would have tasted like it too, had we been brave enough to try. Let’s just say “apprehensive” doesn’t adequately cover how I felt about possibly eating them.

In my endeavors came a golden light of guidance–a friend that I made over the internet that I came to enjoy the company of in real life promised she’d try them with me when the time came. As she’s not a serial killer intent on skinning me to make leather furniture, rather, a culinary genius firmly rooted in the wild-to-table movement, foraging and making amazing concoctions, I looked to her for advice. It was exciting, because hey, I have a partner in crime. On the other hand, this meant that I had someone holding me accountable to eventually ingesting them.

I can definitely say I did not think this through.

I was concerned when she came back from her research with a thoughtful, “Literally no one has done this from fresh.”

That made sense, since they’re a byproduct of the silk industry rather than the desired result. Whatever came out would have long been both boiled and preserved on the trip to the their final destination to someone’s plate, which means the flavor and texture would have been compromised.

As the silkworms got bigger and fatter, they began to trail silk behind them until one day they all began to spin. The actual process of beginning to spin means they had to dump everything in their digestive system and it neither looked nor smelled appetizing. In fact, it was downright awful to walk past them every day and remove the cocoons that were firm enough to handle. I would hold my breath because it smelled like rotting mulberry leaves that had once, un-ironically, been through the back end of a caterpillar. I dutifully collected the snow white silk cocoons and shook them every so often to ascertain whether or not they pupated yet–if they rattled, they were ready, having shrugged off their caterpillar skin.

The night before the climax to this story, with the help of some vodka, I cut a cocoon open to show another friend who also expressed solidarity in eating them–she was with me for my proverbial last meal. After a single look, her response was “Oh hell no, I thought they were gonna be small. Those are gonna pop in your mouth.”

Well, fuck. Thanks for that mental image. Indeed, they were about the size of a segment of my index finger. My courage dropped like a stone and by noon the next day, I was seriously reconsidering. But I had 400 of these things sitting in a box in a corner and my morbid curiosity got the better of me.

I messaged The Brave One, “Pulled one out of the cocoon. Big and plump…”

She was over within the hour, while I had spent the time waiting for her shelling about 40 of them (We decided to speed things up because I had somewhere to be a little later in the day).

First things first: I’m glad instead of boiling them in the cocoon and then extracting them, I just went straight for the extraction pre-boil because there were several that had died and rotted before completely pupating, for whatever reason. There’s nothing more horrifying than opening up a cocoon to a liquifying caterpillar. I only thank my habit born of deep survival instincts that I held my breath every time I cut one open. Imagine had we boiled them all together in the cocoons first? The rotted juice would have mixed with the un-rotted ones.

I might mention that alive wasn’t much better: Every so often they shiver and gyrate their ends in a particularly grotesque fashion, and I tried my best not to touch them–just dumped them straight from the cocoon into the bowl. Mounting horror gripped me as I watched them move in a writhing mass in my tableware.

When she arrived, I was a ball of anxiety and must’ve been as green as my lawn. I had broken out into a sweat and was cursing up a storm.

“I’ve eaten a shitload of weird things. Live drunken shrimp, lobster sashimi, all sorts of organ meat, I’ve even eaten goddamn dick, but I’m fucking terrified right now.” I whispered, mortified.

“Come on,” she says, pragmatic “We can do this.”

“But I accidentally squished one earlier and it was… juicy.”

Taking charge despite the fact that I was freaking out, she pulled down a pot and began to boil some water. I paced the kitchen and rubbed my face. “I don’t condone this. This is not okay.”

She laughed, and dumped the bowl of squirming pupae into the rolling hot water. Wordlessly, I reached into my drawers and handed her a net used for hotpot, and braved a peek on the stove.

“Huh. They look sort of like ravioli.” and she agreed at the nuggets bobbing at the water’s surface. My cute daughter, who had earlier taken an interest in them, had remarked that they looked like tiny little bread, but now it looked more like pasta to me. I resisted the urge to gag. I probably won’t be eating fork rolled gnocchi for a while.

Taking a tentative whiff of the water they had been boiled in, it smelled very faintly buggy–but reminded me very mildly of the octopus I had boiled with Other Friend the night before.

Once they were fished out and set to the side, we had to figure out what to do with them. In her infinite wisdom, she determined they would probably be more palatable if they were crunchy on the outside and heavily spiced, instead of just boiled in seasoned water. So pan frying them became our goal.

Because I’m such a pussy, we put just a few of each boiled pupae in small bowls and seasoned them as thus: A gochujang/soy sauce/smoked maple syrup/sesame oil marinade, a flour/salt/five spice dredge, a cumin/chili/onion/salt/butter mix, and a berebere/cardamom/butter/salt fry.

Over high heat and some vegetable oil, she sauteed them until they were sufficiently crispy, but due to the fact that my pan got really hot, the spices sometimes burned and I had to re-season them later.

A few (short) minutes later and we had four small bowls of variously flavored, crispy, silkworm pupae, and it was the moment of truth.

“I can’t do this.” I argued while watching her poke at them. At one point I turned around and stared into my sink. This was my life now. I was going to forever live on the border of hysterics, staring down the proverbial barrel. I pulled out two cups and filled them with water, cursing the fact that I have to remain sober since there’s another engagement I’m due to in just a few hours.

She picked one of the five spiced ones up, stared at it for a moment, shrugged philosophically, and popped it into her mouth. I quickly did too because if I didn’t do this now, I was never going to be able to do it.

I closed my eyes tight, took a deep breath, and sank my teeth into it and chewed.

…

Hrm.

Okay… Surprisingly, it wasn’t as disgusting as I thought it would be. In fact, as we shared a mutual look of haunted understanding, we began to remark on how it is literally like eating the claw of a sauteed soft-shelled crab. The outside is a paper thin, somewhat crispy shell, and it turns out that the inside… protein… coagulate into a paste once heated, which created the texture similar to crab roe/tamale mixed with meat. The flavor was mildly nutty, and to me, it did taste very lightly like crab, but otherwise bland. Her far more sensitive palate told her it was as if a crab subsisted on a diet of portabella mushrooms. They surprisingly did not taste like mulberry leaves. I probably would have thrown up otherwise because I was done being around that particular plant for a while.

We quickly tried each of the flavors in succession, and the cumin one was by far my favorite (if one could have a favorite in this situation.) This was easy! So long as I didn’t think about it too much. If I thought about it, I ended up getting freaked out and somewhat nauseous.

Now, I can’t guarantee that the canned ones will taste so innocuous, but should you come into contact with fresh, they weren’t that bad at all. We did come to a couple of conclusions:

1. No one in their right mind would raise these just for food, sans my nanny who craved them due to childhood nostalgia. They were literally eating 3 – 5 pounds of mulberry leaves a day, and for me to raise what finally amounted to about a pound of silkworm pupae, it didn’t make sense to use them for food unless you were also using them for their original purpose, which is, of course, silk since it reduces waste. I won’t be raising them for food any time in the near future, unless someone is particularly interested in eating them (and would pay me for the energy I’d expend collecting all those goddamn leaves.) The food conversion ratio just isn’t worth it.
2. I can totally understand why the canned ones caused people to be completely put off. I could see how, after being sunk in seasoned juices for a period of time, the buggy flavor would increase, and the insides, instead of being firm paste, would also dissolve into juice. If the smell of the canned one had been any indication, it wasn’t going to be pleasant.
3. They are a good source of protein, and when fresh, take on mostly the flavor of whatever seasonings you choose. Like egg whites/yolk or crab, once cooked, the liquid solidifies into a paste much like chickpea puree.
4. If you’re going to batter and fry them, a flour dredge isn’t going to work because their shells are so slippery that the batter will slide off in the oil. I imagine a tempura batter after a cornstarch dusting will help with that issue.
5. Boiling them first is a must, since if you put them live into the hot oil, they would likely cause the oil to jump due to their liquid insides. It’s safer to boil first.
6. What’s weird to someone is a delicacy or a staple to someone else. While I may have found the concept of eating bugs horrifying (despite the other things I’m willing to eat), it is very well a normal part of another person’s culture. It’s amazing what mental barriers are created during the course of growing up, especially about what our brains categorize as food.
7. Finally, no amount of plating is going to make them look appetizing. They are what they are and there will be no dressing them up.

I hope you enjoyed reading this particular post (hopefully much more than my process of being able to write it.) As you were probably here for one of two reasons (a. morbid curiosity or b. you have some and want to know what to do with them), I hope this post answered your questions. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any other questions or concerns.

Seven hours later, I’m still alive no worse for wear, so at the very least we know it isn’t fatal and won’t make you violently ill (so long as you’re not close to a panic attack, anyway).