When you buy your groceries, do you consider the environmental impacts of what you put in your trolley? One of the reasons my husband stopped eating meat was because of the environmental impacts. It takes a lot of water and petrol to produce beef (in addition to the methane release). I was a vegetarian until I was about 33, when I tried the Whole30 to quit sugar and reduce inflammation due to lactose and wheat consumption (haha, yeah right). Prior to this, not having meat in the house wasn’t a problem, but now I eat meat on a daily basis. I figured I have 30 years of vegetarian credit built up and I rarely eat beef nowadays. I am always keen though to try out new protein products, especially if they taste like chocolate.
A friend of mine, who I met in Jordan during the Wadi Rum Ultra, recently introduced me to BioBug. It is 100% Acheta domestica grasshoppers that are ground up into a powder. Produced in Indonesia, Biobug claims to the much more sustainable when compared against beef production:
- Cricket production use 95x less land than beef production
- Cricket powder provides 69g protein/100g vs 40g/100g premium beef
- Crickets use 2000x less water to provide the same yield of protein
- Crickets emit 375x less green house gasses (so do they fart?)
But how does it taste?
James and I both tried adding Biobug to our breakfast. James shook some into his overnight oats while I added 5g to 40g porridge and 10g chia seeds with hot water. It tasted a bit dry and earthy for me, so I added a sprinkle of cinnamon, which helped improve the taste. James adds approximately twice as much (double dash he says) maple syrup to his overnight oats than normal when he adds Biobug to mask the earthy taste (he tends to prefer savoury tastes while I like sweet). I also wanted to try baking with it, so I turned to my favourite banana bread recipe and replaced 25% of the flour with Biobug, as the company suggests. I also added a bit more cinnamon and vanilla extract to keep the bread sweet.
Better Homes and Gardens banana bread with Biobug
1/3 cup Biobug cricket powder
1 1/4 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 egg
3 bananas (I freeze brown bananas to used in banana bread. You need to thaw first)
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)
1 teaspoon lemon juice
- Grease bottom and sides of a loaf pan and set aside.
- Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.
- Mix Biobug, flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt together in a medium bowl and set aside.
- Combine egg, bananas, sugar, vegetable oil, vanilla and lemon juice together.
- Fold in dry ingredients. You can also add 1/4 cup of chopped walnuts, chocolate chips, or fresh blueberries if you want to jazz up your bread a bit.
- Spoon batter into prepared pan and cook for 50-55 minutes. I usually start with 30 minutes and test with a cake tester (long metal stick as a toothpick substitute). If the top starts to brown before the cake is baked, you can put foil on the top.
- Let cool for 5-10 minutes before flipping out of the pan.
For this experiment, I split the batter to make two mini-loaves in case the end result wasn’t great. To one of the loaves, I added in 1/4 cup chocolate chips. We found the bread was darker than usual and it tasted very similar to the original recipe. It was just as moist (I was worried the cricket powder would dry out the batter) and even without chocolate chips was good (guess which loaf we finished first). I think the vanilla extract might not be necessary so have made that optional above. Next, I am going to make Snickerdoodle cookies with Biobug as those cookies have lots of spices which will also mask the Biobug earthy taste.
If you have any other recipe suggestions for which I should try adding Biobug (basically anything with flour), please leave a comment below and let me know.
Please excuse my horrible photos. We were mid-DIY project in the kitchen. Turns out, that is not the best time to take photos for your blog!
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