One of the restaurants in Cape Town (South Africa) has significantly updated the menu. And if before they served quite traditional dishes, now in the list of offered delicacies you can find completely extravagant dishes.

In particular, now in this institution called The Insect Experience you can order ice cream from grasshopper milk, as well as chickpeas with black fly larvae, a paste of mopane worms with dried flour worms, or a cold dessert from black fly larvae, which previously fried to a delicious crunch.

It is important to note that the unusual ingredients for the new dishes of the Cape Town restaurant are supplied by South African farmers. They specially grow worms, grasshoppers, flies and other insects and their larvae, and also collect future delicacies from their own beds with vegetables.

Worm mopane

Then the farmers bring the “raw materials” to the restaurant, where the experienced chef Mario Barnard cleverly turns insidious garden pests into enchanting delicacies. Most often, the insect experience cooks mopane worms in the kitchen.

It is noteworthy that these are not exactly worms, but caterpillars of the peacock-eye butterfly, which lives on mopane trees. According to the cook, before starting to prepare various goodies from these worms, the caterpillar needs to be processed.

The insides of green color are squeezed out of her, then they are cut in half lengthwise, and then it becomes like a split pea pod. Then the worm is boiled in salt water and then dried in the sun. Further, the worms can be smoked or fried with onions until the crunch, since the worms of mopane do not have a pronounced taste.

Peacock butterfly

As for black flies, farmers collect their larvae to create future delicacies in beds with potatoes and celery - these pests love to spoil tubers. To make the larvae more fattened, South African landowners treat them to the pulp of tomatoes.