What’s the Deal with Cricket Flour? Five Things You Need to Know.

  Posted on December 23, 2014  by insectrecipes  No comments

It seems to have come out of nowhere. A few years ago, edible insects meant chocolate-covered mealworms sold as novelty items. Suddenly, news reports talk about suburban moms using cricket flour to bake cookies? What’s going on? What is cricket flour, anyway? Is it a fad, or is it the future of food? Here are five things you need to know about cricket flour.

1. If you’re using 100% cricket flour, be careful how you substitute. Cricket flour can mean different things to different marketers. For instance, one company sells 100g bags of 100% cricket flour at Amazon.com for $9.99 each. This product isn’t actually a flour – it’s ground up crickets. You can’t substitute ground crickets for all of the flour in a normal recipe. Instead, bakers use them as a supplement, adding them to a normal recipe in order to increase protein and vitamin contents. Many experienced bakers say that you can replace no more than 1/3 of the flour in a recipe with cricket flour. You may have to experiment to find your ideal ratio of cricket flour to wheat flour.
2. There is a company that sells blended cricket and cassava as “cricket flour.” Bitty Foods sells a cricket and cassava blend and calls it cricket flour. This product acts more like ‘normal’ flour, and it’s wheat free, so it’s become popular with bakers who need to avoid gluten. The company also shares recipes that use its products. This version of cricket flour is the one taking the suburbs by storm.
3. It is possible to make your own ground cricket at home. In a recent interview on National Public Radio, the inventors of the Exo energy bar explained how they first created their recipe. They actually roasted their own crickets in an apartment oven and ground them up in the blender. If you want to add cricket flour to your diet but live on a tight budget, consider homemade cricket flour.
4. You can raise crickets at home. Third Millennium Farming sells complete ‘cricket reactors’, cricket reactor kits, and cricket reactor plans. These breeding systems allow an amateur to raise about 1,000 crickets a month. These crickets will produce about 100 g of 100% cricket flour. More experienced breeders can use the system to raise many more crickets. The cricket reactors are designed to be sanitary and to prevent escapes. If you try cricket flour and decide that you’d like to add it to your diet, cricket breeding is a logical next step.
5. Cricket flour is not a distraction. Some insect-lovers fear that cricket flour is simply a fad and a distraction from real microlivestock. However, the flour may help make insects a more accepted part of the American diet. Proponents of cricket flour compare it to a mom grinding up vegetables and hiding them in other foods. By introducing vegetables in a friendly context, she helps her children overcome the ‘ick factor’ and turns them into lifelong veggie lovers. In the same way, if cricket flour helps Americans to accept insects as a protein source, it may pave the way for other edible insects.

Have you tried cricket flour? What did you like about it? What drawbacks does it have?

Image Source: Takeaway on Wikimedia Commons.