Cricket Cheese Balls Are the Future

Omar Romero Quezada is one dapper chef.

When we meet 23-floors up at his Thai-Korean-Japanese mash-up restaurant KOJAWAN in London, he's wearing a thick woolen waistcoat and a jacket with a pigeon-grey pocket square peeking out at the breast. You get the impression he's the kind of guy who could pull off a monocle.

Not that he suffers from myopia when it comes to cooking.

A graduate of Rhodes Twenty Four, the Natwest tower restaurant of famed chef Gary Rhodes, Quezada's latest venture (a portmanteau of Korea, Japan and Taiwan if you were wondering about the name) offers a different spin on fusion food, mixing the cuisine of the three Asian countries with ingredients sourced from all over the world.

The dish I'm here to make is hot cricket bombs: a cheese ball for the future, made with insects.

Happily, there's none of the "Hey, we've got insects on the menu!" pomp that usually surrounds London restaurants using anything creepy-crawly in their dishes. In fact, KOJAWAN hasn't publicised the bar snack at all. The attitude here is more: "It's crickets. On the menu. Who gives?"

And that's because Quezada has been eating insects for as long as he can remember.

"I grew up in Mexico," he tells me as we change into our whites and head for the kitchen. "Insects are normal. They're not a gimmick."

What follows is a raconteur's account of a childhood spent munching on everything from escamoles (ant larvae plucked from lakes that taste like "the best scrambled egg you'll ever had") to jumiles (beetle-like bugs eaten alive in tacos with guacamole, so that they "stick there and don't run around") to chicatanas ants ("You just squeeze them and all the honey comes out.") By the time we're at the oven, I can see that Quezada means what he says: eating insects is not a gimmick, it's a way of life.

Quezada sets to work making a choux pastry needed for the cricket bombs, throwing in cricket flour alongside the usual variety. It's one of three cricket ingredients in the dish, alongside Thai crickets and a few larger Mexican ones for garnish. As he makes the pastry, the dead crickets wait in little Tupperware dishes, their small oblong bodies the colour of worn leather.

"In every mouthful, you have some cricket, a little leg, a little body," Quezada says, smiling. "But it's not just about the crickets themselves. It's about how you prep them, what flavours they add and what textures too."

For the balls, the cricket flour brings a strong base, the smaller corn-fed Thai crickets are added into the mix for some crunch, and the larger Mexican crickets add a grassy, citrusy zing.

It's no coincidence that Quezada has chosen crickets to star in KOJAWAN's first insect dish. He's chosen them because they're not as "out there" as other insects, although he is working on another dish with bamboo worms.

While Quezada clearly finds people's "horror" at eating insects a little frustrating ("If you like honey, you like the vomit of the bee, so why is everyone so shocked by crickets?"), he appreciates that they're not part of British dining DNA. Instead of going for a fast buck and a few cheap headlines, he's trying to introduce diners to the concept of entomophagy in a more familiar fashion, normalising the eating of crickets by adding them to the classic cheese ball.

Talking of which, after the crickets, some dashi powder, and green jalapeños, Quezada throws in a handful of Parmesan and chunks of cheddar cheese.

"Using cheddar with crickets shouldn't be weird," he says, as the yellow crumbs begin to ooze into the mix like cartoon sunshine. "It needs to be the new normal. We'll keep introducing insects because that's part of our ethos and it's part of my cuisine."

It's an ethos shared on the world stage. In a 2013 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Mexico's bug-inclusive diet is used as inspiration to argue for the eating of insects the world over, in order to combat food scarcity and encourage sustainability.

And although Quezada is aware of the benefits an insect diet could have for the global population (he tells me that a Mexican university is currently looking into cockroach flour as an alternative bread ingredient) he isn't preachy about bugs. Instead, he seems more enthusiastic about what he considers the "globalisation of ingredients"—one big fusion of the world, where combining a heritage item from Mexico (insects) with one from the UK (cheddar) isn't unusual. It's the norm.

We're now onto the final stretch. The balls are rolled out, coated in Panko breadcrumbs, and then deep-fried for two to three minutes until golden brown.

I take my seat in the restaurant and, with the east side of the capital as a backdrop and all manner of Japanese toys for company, I tuck in. I crunch into one of the Mexican garnish crickets and it immediately releases a mini wave of citrus. As for the balls, there's a study corn base but with each bite, the chunks of cheese and Thai crickets explode into life like a manga punch. I'm pretty much floored.

"It's dish I've tried to make approachable because it needs to be something that people can relate to if we are going to change people's perceptions [on eating insect]," says Quezada.

As I admire the R2-D2 spray paint print and bespoke Blade Runner-inspired tiles on KOJAWAN's far wall, I eat the final ball. It tastes good.

It tastes like the future.