This past weekend The Explorers Club held their annual ball, which kicks off every year with a signature exotics cuisine hour. The man behind the unusual dishes served during this hour is Gene Rurka, the chairman of the exotics committee—and this year he served up a menu that included everything from Rattlesnake Sliders to Chipotle BBQ Beaver to Camel Meat Loaf, Sweet chili Pickled Eyeballs, Hoisin Glazed kangaroo and Insect Canapes. We talked to Rurka this morning, who admitted, "It's a little bit more than your steak and potatoes. It's not for everybody."
According to Rurka, the evening's crowd-pleasers included "ostrich, we had ostrich done a number of ways. That was a highlight. The alligator recipes I think were a hit. The insects of course, they're always a hit. We did not have enough tarantulas, cockroaches, worm salad." We asked what a cockroach tastes like, which Rurka described in detail, noting they contain "a crunch with a sweet creamy flavor."
"Well, you know you can make anything taste like anything. People say, 'I had a chocolate covered cricket.' Well chances are you never tasted the cricket—a cricket has no flavor. [With a cockroach] you're going to feel a crunch in your mouth, and that crunch will be very similar to what you would get with a soft shell crab or anything that has a crusty outside. It's like trying to get through the sugar glaze on a creme brulee. So that's the first thing your teeth are going to feel.
Once you get inside... they have a juiceiness to them. We had an infusion, I used a New York State ice wine. Not just wine, but an ice wine with a high sugar content, a dessert wine. To that I added New York State maple syrup, and orange juice, and let it sit for about six hours. And when you bite into it, it gave you a totally different flavor. It made the thorax, where all the meat is, and the abdominal area... it's like a lobster tail... juicy and savory. And you have the internal organs, they're already marinated to some degree. We did heat them to make sure they're sterile and clean."
Rurka doesn't forget about the vegetarians—this year's non-meat highlights were pickled crosnes and orchids. Rurka says, "We tried to do more with flowers, this year our orchids went... I should have purchased probably 1,000 or 2,000 orchids. The orchids and the dipping sauce went like hotcakes. It's just delicious."
Next week he'll start working on the 2014 menu—"You have one of the finest kitchens in the world, with some of the most fabulous innovative distinguished chefs in the world, working on one hour for you. We work all year putting together these things." And not everything is found in exotic places, Rurka has "been spending a lot more time at the Fulton Market in the Bronx. Every Thursday morning I go in with a buyer or two, and they've been teaching me what to look for in good fish. So we try to find something unusual there. This year we used ribbon fish and cod heads for cod tongue, and some conch for stuffing. Things we can afford but that still keep it interesting." So what's in store for next year? "We do have a couple of things on the drawing board which I have been working on for I guess the last six years. I'd like to do a little bit more on invasive species. Which you may call non-indigenous species."
