# Cambodian Cuisine: How to Cook and Eat a Tarantula > We reveal Cambodia's boldest dish: how a tarantula is prepared, what it tastes like and why it's compared to crab. Would you dare to try it? - URL: https://langandtrip.com.ua/en/article/pryhotuvaty-ta-zyisty-tarantula/ - Language: en - Published: 2023-05-14 - Categories: Culture, Leisure, Restaurants, Tours, Cambodia, Food & Drinks --- The giant tarantula dangling from my mouth may well be dead, but it still terrifies me. To be fair, it doesn't actually taste bad: it's a lot like crab. But once you factor in that, according to scientists, taste is largely shaped by how food looks and smells, it's hardly surprising that I'd already made up my mind the moment I laid eyes on this hairy little monster. It's revolting. It doesn't matter that I fried the tarantula myself, in the traditional style, guided by a seasoned spider chef in the northwestern Cambodian city of Siem Reap. The aroma and flavor of garlic simply can't override the nightmarish look of my snack. ## A Cuisine Born of Necessity In some parts of Asia, cooked insects are sold in busy tourist districts to travelers chasing a quirky photo op: they pose while munching a beetle or a cricket, and the shot becomes an Instagram souvenir of their adventure. But more often than not, most locals don't actually enjoy eating these insects. It's simply a gimmick to make money off tourists. With tarantulas in Cambodia, it's a different story. These arachnids are such a delicacy that large specimens can sell for as much as $1 apiece, a huge sum in a country where the minimum wage is around $6 a day. Cooking teacher Ouch Ratana makes his living selling fried tarantulas on the streets of Siem Reap. He assures me, through English-speaking guide Yin Laky, that Cambodians genuinely love eating spiders. "On some days I can sell dozens," he says, opening a plastic bag stuffed to the brim with tarantulas. "They're delicious, the perfect snack with a cold beer or rice wine. But they're very expensive, so people only eat them on special occasions, maybe a birthday, and everyone gets one or two." If some of the world's delicacies, like caviar or truffles, are almost exclusively the food of the rich and powerful, tarantulas entered the Cambodian diet out of necessity. Yin explains that during the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge, the radical communist movement that governed Cambodia in the 1970s, poverty and hunger grew so severe that people ate any living creature they could catch. Some of those creatures turned out to be surprisingly tasty, tarantulas, scorpions, silkworms and crickets among them, so they stayed on the Cambodian menu even after the famine ended. ## How to Cook a Hairy Spider ![Fried tarantulas prepared Cambodian style](/storage/image/prev/Kambodga-1-tarantyl-1024x1024.jpg) The tarantulas Ouch sells mostly come from Kampong Cham, a province more than 200 kilometers southeast of Siem Reap, where men spend entire days combing the countryside in search of tarantula nests. Once they find a nest, they kill the spiders inside by prodding the burrow with a stick or flooding it with hot water. Most of these spiders end up at a food stall, just like the one Ouch runs. Visitors to Ouch's cooking school also learn to prepare silkworms and crickets. The class can be booked through Backstreet Academy, a tour company that connects travelers with local hosts across 11 Asian countries, giving them access to one-of-a-kind experiences. One-of-a-kind is certainly the best way to describe my time with Ouch, who works in a wood-fired kitchen inside an open tin shack on the outskirts of Siem Reap. First, I pick out three especially plump tarantulas, wincing as I reach my hand into a bag packed with these eight-legged monsters. Then I dip them into a bowl of milky liquid, a mix of sugar, salt, a little seasoning, chicken and water. Once the spiders are well soaked, I pick them up with my hands and place them in the frying basket. He stresses that they should stay in the bubbling oil of the stall for no more than 45 seconds. "That's how they come out crispy on the outside and soft on the inside," he tells me. I keep hoping the oil will scald them so thoroughly that they'll look a little more appetizing. No such luck. When I lift the basket, the tarantulas look no different, apart from a few singed hairs. Ouch holds one out to me, gesturing for me to eat it, and I try not to flinch. He and Yin are so pleased with the freshly fried tarantulas that I don't dare spoil the mood. After holding the tarantula up to my face, I decide its legs, thin and crunchy, look the least off-putting. Yin somehow senses that I'm looking for the easy way out. "Eat the body first, it's the best part, it has more flavor, the legs aren't as good," he says. Seconds later my teeth crush the abdomen, and the tarantula's insides spill into my mouth. "Crab, crab, crab, crab, it tastes like crab," I repeat to myself. If only I hadn't looked at the spider first. How to book: The tarantula cooking masterclass in central Siem Reap runs seven days a week from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. It costs $22, and each lesson takes about 90 minutes.