I love to travel, eating my way around the globe and always trying the local delicacy, no matter how “weird” it may seem. I’ve eaten zebra skewers in Tanzania, kangaroo in Australia, things I couldn’t even identify in Vietnam…you get the point.
I also love to try whatever is fresh and local from the farmers’ market, experimenting with new recipes and vegetables like kohlrabi and Indian yellow cucumbers.
So when I visited the Fayetteville farmers market this summer in Arkansas, I decided to get some lamb chops for dinner. Unfortunately, the lamb seller informed me that he’s already sold out of every single cut of meat…with the exception of lamb oysters.
Lamb oysters? What are lamb…ooooohhhhh…”oysters.” And yet the old woman next to me swore how delicious they were. She’d tried them at a dinner party and her guests all loved it until she told them what it was. So somehow I walked away from the market that day with a pair of lamb testicles in my bag and no idea how to cook them.
lamb testicles, ready for action
Testicles are a delicacy in many cultures, thought to improve male virility, and even used as an aphrodisiac. If cultures the world over ate them, surely I could figure something out!
I found a recipe online for your basic rocky mountain oyster recipe and got to it.
When you take them out of the plastic packaging, they’re unmistakable. You are cooking balls and you know it.
The first thing to know when cooking balls is that you need to remove the sac, which is no easy feat, but greatly helped by doing one of two things: peel while frozen, or better yet, use a good knife to slice into pieces and then peel the sac off each individual piece.
What you’re left with looks something like this.
sliced testicles
To make rocky mountain oysters, you then bread the pieces of testicle and fry them. That’s it! I used a double dip method of flour-milk-flour and fried in canola oil.
The finished product was fairly anticlimactic. My friends and I tried them and found them fairly tasteless, with a texture somewhere between scallops and firm tofu. With a little dipping sauce you could almost forget you were eating lamb testicles.
Not something I feel the need to make again, but a fun experiment nonetheless.
The funniest part? I returned to the market the next weekend to tell the farmer how it went and he informs me that he’s never tried them! Go figure.
