“The name of the ingredient may be a turnoff, but it’s really delicious, especially with game meat,” says Alain Limon as he smiles and spreads cricket-flavoured fusilli on a drying rack, reports CTV News Canada.
His boss, Stephanie Richard began her pasta business in 2012, and soon, Limon will have an additional employee working with him because, thanks to the addition of insect flour to her creations, the business has taken off. “The insect is the protein of the future,” Richard says. “It’s protein of high quality that is well digested by the body.”
And Richards is right on the mark in making a protein-rich product using insects because, in 2013, the united Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) noted that there was a “huge potential” for insects as food, not only for people but livestock as well.
In the introduction to the FAO paper, it was pointed out that insect-eating is practiced regularly by at least 2 billion people in developing countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania.
It is also interesting to point out that some European cheeses also contain insects or use insects. There is the French cheese called Mimolette. This cheese is made from cow’s milk and the gray crust of the aged cheese is the result of cheese mites intentionally introduced to add flavor by their action on the surface of the cheese.
Another popular European cheese is the Sardinian casu marzu. This cheese is a traditional Sardinian cheese made with sheep’s milk. The most notable thing about this cheese is that it contains live insect larva (maggots). This cheese is known to leave an aftertaste that can last up to six hours.
Richard’s uses pulverized crickets and grasshoppers for her unique kind of pasta, sometimes mixing the two and sometimes mixing ground cepes to the cricket flour. Cepes (Boletus edulis) are edible mushrooms. “There’s a kind of nutty taste thanks to the cepes, making it taste more like whole wheat pasta,” Richard says.
Richards says she is has been working on a stuffed pasta recipe using the Mimolette cheese from Northern France. At a little over six euros ($6.60) for a 250 gram (about half a pound) package, insect flour pasta is more expensive than regular pasta, but they are a good replacement for a protein with vegetarians or for those who just like crickets.
