Does anyone out there have any old family recipes for armadillos that they would like to share? Yes, I'm serious.This Sunday I'm hitting the road again and driving to Savannah, Georgia for another expedition to hunt pigs and armadillos. My last trip to Georgia yielded one armadillo, which was enough to get me curious about eating armadillos but I didn't have enough meat to do a whole lot of experimentation with. I want to be able to discuss armadillo recipes in my new book and actually know what I'm talking about so the only thing for it is to go back for more.
I'll be hunting with Georgia's own Baker Leavitt on land that he knows well. My father-in-law and illustrator for my beginner's guide to hunting deer, Robert Leo Smith, will be driving down with me. We will be met in Savannah by Kiera Butler of Mother Jones magazine. Kiera will be hunting for the first time in her life as part of her work on an article about learning to hunt invasive species for food.
So who out there has some tips for butchering and cooking armadillos? I've already done all of the homework on the leprosy issue and the short version of the story is that there isn't much to worry about, particularly among armadillos that far from the Gulf of Mexico. There's really no need for 500 people to send me emails about that. I know that in parts of Central America there is a strong rural tradition of using armadillos as food. This is the sort of cuisine that I am particularly interested in. If anyone has advice or recipes then please either send me an email at jack.landers@gmail.com or post something right here in the comments section.
[The photograph depicts my daughter, Ida, holding an armadillo hindquarter, complete with scales and claws.]
4 comments:
Jackson
I'd ask Hank Shaw from http://honest-food.net/
if I were wanting to know, which bizarrely enough I now am, even though I don't have any armadillos.
SBW
I've found this recipe online (in Spanish) from a Nicaraguan website. Seems to be the same preparation of the armadillo I had in Costa Rica. In Central America we call it "cusuco" (as well as Armadillo).
Ingredients (they don't specify quantities)
1 Armadillo
Annato (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annatto)
Garlic
Plantain (banana) vinegar
salt
onions
Green pepper (non spicy bell pepper)
Ripe tomatoes
Cook the armadillo in water (not a lot of water though), with garlic, salt and green peppers until the meat gets soft and there is not too much water left.
Put oil in a frying pan, add a touch of annato --to give the meat a nice orange-yellowish color. Add chopped onions, tomatoes and cook until the onions are somewhat translucent. Add a dash of the vinegar. Break up the meat until it is shredded and add it to the mix. Add some or all of the remaining armadillo stock, cook for 10 min. more and "buen provecho"! Eat with a good corn tortilla like a little taco, like the indians used to do in Precolumbian Mesoamerica
Hey if you get them, post them please. The suckers are all over my land in East Texas
Hi. I'm from Uruguay, here armadillos are protected by law, so hunting them is illegal. Even though, when I was a child we used to eat them roasted, with smashed potatoes or applesauce (applesauce goes fine with a roasted armadillo). You just have to boil the armadillo previously, to soften the meat (maybe with spices, as said Jorge in a previous comment), and then put it in the oven, just like a chicken.
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