Maddy and I got some grasshoppers recently from Grub in the UK. We're super-excited to be branching out into another species, because we've never had grasshoppers before. This is what they look like in the package:

They aren't any bigger than the grasshoppers we've seen jumping around all our lives, but when you know you're going to eat them, they look pretty big! So there's a little bit of intimidation there, still, and we'll be putting up our experiments with them, and our experience trying them for the first time, pretty soon.

But!

These bad boys are freeze dried, which is awesome. If you're not sure what freeze-drying is, it's when something gets frozen, then then reducing the surrounding air pressure (by using a vacuum, ideally) such that the frozen water sublimates directly from the solid ice phase to the gas phase, leaving the frozen item wonderfully dry and shelf-stable. So they can stay out in room temperature, basically for years. It's a good way to keep food stored for a long time, and is better than canning at retaining the nutrients in the food.

But the food is all dry and brittle, because apparently the water in your cells is what gives you strength. And these grasshoppers were obviously freeze-dried raw, so eating them as-is would be crumbly and taste like raw grasshoppers.

So: Rehydration!

Rehydrating freeze-dried food is super easy: you just drop it into some water, let it sit for a minute, and hey presto, the food sucks up the water, somehow and magically becomes regular and flexible again. It's pretty much a Festivus miracle.

Now, because we've got a fancy new video camera, we decided to make a how to video for rehydrating freeze-dried insects, even though I just described the process in one sentence. Because we're iconoclasts! And, as I say, we have a camera. So enjoy!