While living in Shanghai I was introduced to a wondrous texture in an animal I had never eaten………….. A Bullfrog! I have eaten frog many many times in my life, but his relative the Bullfrog does not even come close to the same. The good and bad point about using bullfrogs in Asia is that they come live, and in order to use them you have to kill them. Normally this should not be a problem for a Chef, but my first time 3 years ago I felt a little ill as I used to keep frogs as pets. Now its not difficult but still a little disturbing, without being too graphic, you need to separate the head from the body with scissors. While in Singapore last week our host hotel ordered some live Bullfrogs so I could prepare and eat them again, plus I taught them how to prepare them, in the 2 pictures above you will see the wet version is a French/Chinese fusion and the second is Wok fried, its not a restaurant dish but very good to eat.

The meat doesn’t really taste like much at all, the real beauty of the bullfrog is in the texture. It has small fillets that separate (like fish) with a very gelatinous texture in between, it needs to be cooked fast and very carefully as it it goes too far then you loose the gelatin. With the weakness being lack of flavour you need to compensate with a very strong sauce or aromatics in the cooking process.

For anyone travelling or living in Asia it is a definite must eat!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 11:29 and is filed under Trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.