Not bad! Certainly not buggy. The entire critter crackled in my mouth like a piece of earthy popcorn. I caught a subtle nuttiness underneath the crunch, almost reminiscent of a roasted chickpea. By the fourth or fifth chew I was almost starting to like it, until I swallowed and realized that a teeny-tiny leg was lingering on my tongue. The toothpick went into the trash, along with the other cicada... Nowhere was that shellfish flavor more evident than in the oven-roasted cicada, though I was quickly distracted from that thought by the realization that the bug had exploded in my mouth like a Gusher. My tongue awash in bug guts, I reconsidered all the choices I’d made in my life that had brought me to that moment. It turns out that cooking technique is everything. The roasted cicadas hadn’t been blasted with enough heat to properly dry up the squish. Other attendees I consulted agreed with me: the crunchier, the better. When deciding what cooking methods to highlight at Cicadafest, Tas told me, they had consulted foragers before embarking on a series of test runs. Tas and the other volunteers had learned to harvest the cicadas at dusk on the very same day that they’d emerged from their shells, ensuring that their adult exoskeletons (and massive wings) wouldn’t develop. Loading them into the freezer right away served the dual purpose of preserving them and killing them gently. When it came time to play in the kitchen, sautéed cicadas were quickly ruled out for being “too buggy,” and a shrimp-boil-inspired experiment was abandoned following disastrous results. “My brother decided to try boiling them with beer and Old Bay,” Tas explained. “He put one in his mouth and spat it right out all over the place.”