|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In 2012, Alexa Sol was in Guadalajara looking for furniture and decor for her soon-to-open restaurant Quinto Sol in Redwood City. She had gone to a bar and ordered a cocktail with an absolutely delicious salt rim. She ordered two more before asking the bartender what was in the salt.
“And he was like, ‘It’s ground-up grasshopper with chili,’” she recalled.
She was shocked. It was her first time eating insects, and much to her surprise, she loved it.
“It almost added a woody, umami taste to the salt,” she said. “It kind of had the texture of pork floss because of all the little legs.”
A staple of Indigenous Oaxacan cooking and a delicacy found in fine-dining restaurants in Mexico City, insects are rarely seen on Peninsula menus. While many Americans may feel skirmish at the thought of eating insects, bugs are a sustainable protein source that are quite delicious and versatile, explained Monica Martinez, founder of San Mateo-based edible insect company Don Bugito.
Martinez started Don Bugito 15 years ago, not as a business but as a design project based around addressing a food shortage, particularly a protein shortage, as the global population continues to grow. She began developing farming systems to raise mealworms and crickets for human consumption but recognized that there was no demand for edible insects in the United States.
So she partnered with San Francisco nonprofit La Cocina to help her get into the food space (Martinez’s background is in industrial design) and launch her business Don Bugito.
“It’s a play on words saying, ‘The big little guy,’” she said. “The big little guy that will change the world. That was the idea.”
Creating a menu inspired by her Mexican heritage, Martinez launched Don Bugito as a food truck at the San Francisco Street Food Festival in 2011. On the menu was wax moth larvae tacos, toffee mealworm-topped vanilla ice cream and cricket tostadas.
“To my surprise, we sold out,” she said.
In 2017, Don Bugito opened its farm in Oakland, raising crickets and mealworms in a more holistic way by respecting the life cycle of the insects and not using hormones to grow them faster. Unlike many other proteins, farming insects doesn’t require land or the destruction of forests, Martinez said.
“We use shipping containers to grow our insects, so they can be removed, put, placed in pretty much any environment,” she said. “The amount of food intake is so little for the amount of protein that they turn into, in comparison to other proteins.”
But the pandemic hit the company hard, and it had to close its cricket operations in 2022. Now, Don Bugito works with a Lithuanian company for its crickets and continues to farm its own mealworms out of Oakland.
Martinez said that in her experience, the biggest challenge to growing consumer demand for edible insects in the United States hasn’t been the mindset of the consumer; it’s the mindset of the buyer.
“There was one time we got into Albertsons and Safeway,” she said. “But the tricky part there was to talk to every buyer for every individual Safeway store. And if the buyer doesn’t think or doesn’t have an open mind about insects, they’re not gonna bring that product onto the shelves.”
After the pandemic, Don Bugito shifted focus from trying to get into supermarkets to local retailers and museums. The company even has an annual Halloween collaboration with Salt & Straw that’s returning this fall. Creepy Crawly Critters is a matcha ice cream speckled with Don Bugito’s toffee-brittle mealworms and chocolate-covered crickets.
Don Bugito’s bestseller is its chile-lime crickets, a crunchy snack made of toasted cricket and organic pumpkin seeds and seasoned with tomato paste, lime juice, chile pepper and salt. But for a first-time insect eater, Martinez recommends trying the chocolate-covered crickets because they just look like pieces of chocolate. For another sweet treat, the toffee-brittle mealworms are a more sustainable version of almond brittle (almond production uses a lot of water). New products in the works include salsa verde crickets and mole-flavered crickets.
Martinez thinks the United States is at least a decade away from accepting insects as a mainstream ingredient, but she’s confident it’ll happen eventually.
“You know how rare and weird and disgusting raw fish was for Americans like 20 years ago?” she said. “Now you can find sushi places in every corner and neighborhood.”
As for her goal of opening the United States market for edible insects, she feels Don Bugito has achieved its objective. The Harmonized System in international trade now recognizes edible insects and insect meals with its own unique code, and there’s growing demand for Don Bugito’s products, she said. Martinez’s next initiative is to make farming insects more accessible so she can lower prices and hopefully get her products in more restaurants.
While restaurants offering insects are few and far between along the Peninsula, in Menlo Park, chef Carlos Villegas is using grasshoppers (chapulines) as an optional crunchy topping on the guacamole at Alisios, a contemporary Mexican restaurant that opened at Springline in June. He toasts wild Oaxacan grasshoppers (which are bigger and crunchier than Pueblan farm-raised grasshoppers, he noted) with chili, lime and agave to create a flavor-packed topping.
“It’s like an insect chicharron kind of thing, like crispy, but also has its unique flavor,” Villegas said. “Chapulines give it texture and give it umami flavor instead of adding extra salt. It balances some dishes. For example, if you have a dish that’s too acidic, you add (chapulines) and it just takes away the acid or the bitterness on the plate.”
The menu at Alisios is inspired by the flavors Villegas grew up with in Mexico, so even though he hadn’t seen insects being used at any other nearby restaurants, he wanted to bring a new experience for his guests.
He purposely uses the chapulines as an optional topping versus a chapuline taco or tlayuda to not overwhelm guests or make it the focal point of Alisios. He plans to continue experimenting with edible insects like chicotanas (ants) and is excited to share the flavors of his childhood.
Elsewhere along the Peninsula, guests can try mezcal with sal de chapuline (grasshopper salt) at Quinto Sol, or sal de gusano (agave worm salt) at Quinto Sol, Vive Sol, Palo Alto Sol and Sun of Wolf. Patrons who order a shot of mezcal are given orange slices and sal de chapuline or sal de gusano. Quinto Sol’s sal de chapuline is made in house by macerating Oaxacan grasshoppers with salt, lime, chile seco and garlic.
“People don’t even know that they’re eating it until somebody asks me,” Alexa Sol laughed. “I’m doing the same thing that the bartender did to me.”
Don Bugito, Instagram: @donbugito.
Quinto Sol, 2201 Broadway, Redwood City; 650-365-5765, Instagram: @quintosol_rwc. Open Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday from 5-9 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 5-9:30 p.m.
Alisios, 550 Oak Grove Ave., Suite E, Menlo Park; 650-399-3799, Instagram: @alisiosmexicancocina. Open Monday to Thursday from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Friday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Dig into food news. Follow the Peninsula Foodist on Instagram and subscribe to the newsletter to get insights on the latest openings and closings, learn what the Foodist is excited about eating, read exclusive interviews and keep up on the trends affecting local restaurants.
