Life & Style | Food
Tastes like chicken
How adventurous are you when it comes to meat? would you eat snake, worms, croc or grubs? Andy van Smeerdijk did and lived to tell the tale...
- By Andy van Smeerdijk, features editor
- Published: 00:08 July 2, 2008
- For many, mopane worms are a one-time experience.
- Image Credit:
How adventurous are you when it comes to meat? would you eat snake, worms, croc or grubs? Andy van Smeerdijk did and lived to tell the tale...
About 30 Filipinos gathered around me as I raised the fork to my mouth. Leaning forward, most of them grinned, some nodded knowingly while a few held hands over their mouths. Chew, chew. Swallow. Then I smiled. "Nice. Tender. Tastes like veal actually."
The crowd erupted. It was like sliding into home base at the World Series. Cheering, applause, back slapping... one man even handed me a can of San Miguel. "So what is it?" I asked my friend Carlos, my eyes narrowing. "I'll tell you tomorrow."
The taste wasn't even remotely like chicken, which may come as a surprise. Until that moment I'd subscribed to the belief that all unfamiliar meats invariably tasted like poultry. This was the first time a new exotic meat had broken the mould. A gastronomic milestone.
A year prior to this in Bali, I'd excitedly ordered some stir-fried frogs legs, all plump and fresh from the rice paddies. To my dismay, they tasted like KFC's finest, with a hint of fish. Similarly, at home in Australia, I treated my housemates to stewed rabbit one evening, with the same disappointment.
But after my palate-changing experience, the world was my oyster. After one exotic meat, I hungered for more. While in the Philippines I tried pig's stomach in palm vinegar, which reminded me of Greek-style marinated crabmeat.
Then came buffalo nose crackling sautéed with ginger and garlic... delicious and definitely beefy.
Lastly was balut - fertilised chicken eggs that are steamed then eaten by cracking the shell and downing the contents. ("Good for going all night," said Carlos.) It tasted like crunchy chicken liver.
Sampling everything that crossed my path, I ate my way through southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent and eventually Africa. While on a train in Myanmar I tackled grasshoppers on skewers - crunchy, prawn-like parcels that proved quite reasonable.
I passed on the monkey curry in Thailand and likewise the fried spider in Cambodia. Yes, spider. (If you don't believe this, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cZmAbc2gN8 and see for yourself.)
Then came King Cobra, a restaurant in Jakarta where you choose the snake you'd like for dinner. After selecting your snake, it's dispatched, gutted and prepared for main course.
It arrived sliced in a strong soy-based sauce, so its taste was actually lost on me.
"Snake is very good for mister. Makes him strong," said our waiter, clearly a bit of a serpent himself. These days, King Cobra has five franchises where you can wash down your snake satay with cobra blood. Not the sort of red I'd opt for.
Game fro more
Africa proved a bushfood bonanza. Nairobi's aptly-named Carnivore restaurant is the most famous game meat venue on the continent with blood practically dripping out the entrance.
Here there are all manner of antelopes on the menu: wildebeest, topi, gazelle, oryx and impala as well as the real surprise package - ostrich: looks like chicken (well, sort of), tastes like beef.
In Namibia's capital, Windhoek, Joe's Beerhouse is another institution. Joe's Game Knuckle is so enormous it makes you feel like Fred Flintstone ordering brontosaurus ribs.
Joe owes his superb steaks to hanging the carcasses in cool storage for at least a couple of weeks. The result? Tender eland, kudu and zebra steaks, not to mention succulent warthog - which amazingly tastes like beef.
Game meat is big in Africa and much of it is farmed, not hunted. In Zimbabwe, I got my first taste of a predator - the crocodile. "Better him than you," quipped the waiter.
It turned out that croc has a delicate flavour: there's a hint of fowl play but also a touch of fishiness. I first tried it smoked then later in a curry, which completely overpowered the croc meat's subtle flavour.
In most cultures eating omnivores and carnivores is taboo, yet there are parts of Africa - particularly West Africa - where eating primates is tolerated. A friend of mine in Botswana, a former hunter, claimed the big cats have perfectly good meat.
"Lion meat is much better than beef. It also passes the spirit of the lion into you," he'd say. "Even hyena meat, it's okay. You can live on it."
Indeed, there are some things that are only worth tasting once. As Mick Dundee in Crocodile Dundee would have it: "Well, you can live on it, but it taste like sh**."
For many, mopane worms are a one-time experience. The larvae of a moth species, they feed upon the leaves of the mopane tree, a common species in southern Africa.
Come the December rains and there are millions of them throughout the woodlands. Feasted upon by birds and animals, people also collect the worms as a food source... yes, they eat them.
In the past, dried mopane worms were the ultimate road trip munchies: high in fat and protein and easy to transport, the perfect food for nomads and pastoralists. Too bad about the taste.
In all honesty, dried mopane worm tastes like wood. The first time I tried one I actually thought it was a piece of stray bark. Discarding it, I sampled another. It was the same: crisp, dry, a little fatty. It took quite a few drinks before I was willing to try another.
Even at home, I've become more adventurous. I've regularly dined on kangaroo steak - a strong-tasting meat best done medium-rare on the barbecue. Then there are emu sausages. A bird, yes. Like chicken, no. There's a good reason some meats go into sausages - emu meat, like other sausage fodder, is a bit average.
Why chicken tastes like chicken
If you don't include hoofed animals, I'd say that most of the exotic meat I've eaten tastes like chicken. But for now, let's ignore my random reminiscing - there are people far more qualified than me who've analysed this topic at great length.
One such is person Joe Stanton, from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, who believes that the taste of chicken predated the chicken itself.
In an article in the wonderfully named Annals of Improbable Research, Stanton examined the possibility of the evolutionary development of taste - whether this common chicken-like taste evolved separately or whether it stemmed from common ancestors.
He writes, "Crabs taste like lobsters because they both evolved from the same group of crabby-lobstery-tasting crustaceans."
Stanton, who enjoys exotic meat (turtle's a favourite), sampled a wide selection of animal meats including horse, iguana, muskrat and two-toed amphiuma, an eel-like salamander. Asides from the ostrich, he concluded bird meat tastes like chicken. Even swans.
"However, 'chicken-like' flavor did not originate among the birds," he writes.
"It arose earlier in evolutionary history. Among both amphibians and land-based (jargon: terrestrial) animals, some degree of 'chicken-like' flavor developed and has persisted among all the tetrapods."
So what of the beef-like deer, zebra, oryx and co? Stanton argues that these are in the minority.
"In fact, among the vast and varied four-legged community, there are only minor exceptions, such as the evolution of 'beef-like' and 'pork-like' flavor among mammals."
There were some notable exceptions from the survey. While cat was reported to taste like chicken and "chances are" Tyrannosaurus Rex tasted likewise, dog meat was overlooked.
And that's where my own unintentional piece of research comes in. My Filipino pal Carlos confided in me that the veal-like meat I'd sampled in fact was "aso".
"You know, like Snoopy," he added.
No I didn't feel proud of myself, but I probably would've eaten it even if I had known what it was as I don't like offending other cultures. In the past, I've drawn the line at spiders, primates and giraffes (it's the eyelashes); anything endangered or humanlike is a no go.
Whether it's an irrational judgment call or rooted in instinct, I'm not sure. But hopefully we all draw the line somewhere, right?
- For ostrich meat, try the Butcher Shop and Grill, Mall of the Emirates 04-3471167.
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