Maryland Chocolate Shop Selling Chocolate Dipped Cicadas

Cicadas are flying off the shelves at a Maryland chocolate shop that is dipping the insects in chocolate to make sweet and crunchy treats.

Sarah Dwyer, of Chouquette Chocolates, started coating cicadas in chocolate and selling them when Brood X started singing in 2021. Now her chocolate shop, which spends most of the year selling romantic and timely chocolates, has a five-day backlog for cicada orders.

"When you combine the chocolate, the cinnamon and the nuttiness of the bugs, it really gives you that holiday feeling of when you're walking around a big city and they're roasting nuts on the sidewalk, that cinnamon smell, it's really what it tastes like," Dwyer said.

Dwyer and her employees gather the cicadas from trees behind their chocolaterie. The bugs are so numerous they land right on the employees. The cicadas are placed in a paper bag and put into the freezer. The cold temperatures put the animals to sleep before they die. Dwyer then boils the cicadas to clean them and crisps them in an air fryer.

Once the cicadas have been fried, Dwyer sprinkles them with either cinnamon or Old Bay and they are ready to be covered in chocolate.

"I did go to pastry school in Paris to learn my dipping technique. I'm pretty sure no one thought I would be using it on cicadas," she said.

For Dwyer, the cicadas that are emerging in droves after 17 years underground aren't just a way to cash in on a bugging-out craze. It's her chance to get more familiar with one type of protein she thinks will be a lot more popular, if not needed, by the next time these insects start to sing again.

"There's not enough protein to go around, and I think, I really do think that in 2038, people will not think twice about eating a bug at all," Dwyer said.