GILROY
– My mission was simple: Seek out the most outrageous Garlic
Festival grub and let a photographer take a picture of me trying to
stomach it.
GILROY – My mission was simple: Seek out the most outrageous Garlic Festival grub and let a photographer take a picture of me trying to stomach it.
My boss, Executive Editor Mark Derry, mentioned garlic ice cream, frog legs and rattlesnake as possible adventurous dishes – all amateur eats that might excite some of these Silicon Valley tofu types, but nothing more than down-home cooking to a Colorado boy like myself.
I’m looking for something truly exotic. Something more than vanilla ice cream with garlic powder.
What I find is kangaroo and alligator tails.
When I first see the Cajun Crawfish booth sign advertising kangaroo on the Ranch Side of the park, I think it must be a joke.
“Aren’t kangaroos endangered?” I ask Chris Riley, The Dispatch photographer assigned to capture my experiment on film.
Riley disputes my claim, hinting that I’m looking for an excuse to abandon the kangaroo taste test.
He’s right.
I’ve already talked a big game about eating both alligator tail and kangaroo, but the more I think about biting into the flesh of the adorable, bouncing marsupial I’ve seen so many times on the Discovery Channel, my stomach begins to get tighter than a kangaroo pouch.
Regardless of my stomach’s objections, I’m in too deep. It’s time to eat my words.
When I order my game, I’m happy to see the alligator tail is deep fried, looking similar to chicken fingers at any fast-food restaurant. Unfortunately, the kangaroo has no such coating, and looks like, well, pieces of meat cut from a dead kangaroo.
The owner of the exotic food stand where I purchase the marsupial and the amphibious reptile, real-life Cajun Tommy Smith of Baton Rough, La., would tell me later that both the kangaroo and gator were marinated in a garlic-based Italian dressing and brushed with meat tenderizer. The tenderizer is supposed to make the meats taste like chicken.
“But it doesn’t always do the trick,” Smith said.
True.
The kangaroo is exported from Australia, where the wild animals are hunted for meat and fur and usually shipped to America, Smith said. The alligator tails come from Louisiana, where authorities hold a lottery for an annual one-day hunt of the swamp creatures.
Smith said he will sell 50 pounds of kangaroo and 100 pounds of gator tail at the Garlic Festival.
“I get a lot of questions about the kangaroos and gators,” he said. “Californians aren’t used to this stuff.”
A registered California resident, I, too, want to ask more questions before I bite into the skewers.
But standing in front of a gator head with two skewers full of wild-game meat and a zoom lens focused on my mouth, I’m ready to make Riley’s day.
Throwing a piece of each meat into my mouth at the same time, I immediately know something is wrong.
Some of the flavors are initially pleasing, but the other, louder flavors won’t leave my mouth.
One of the meats is good, one is bad, but which was which?
I take another bite of the alligator: Not bad. Definitely tastes like chicken. There’s a nice spice to the deep-fried crispiness.
Now to the kangaroo: It compares to chicken liver, but even stringier in texture. The light sauce on the dark meat – yes, kangaroo is dark meat – didn’t taste like anything except kangaroo juice.
I give a fake smile to Riley, trying to trick him into having a piece, but he’s too wise. Chief Photographer James Mohs also declines to try either piece of meat, leaving me pawn the rest of my kangaroo skewer off on a nearby couple.
The meat is cold by now, but they both enjoy it.
I guess that’s the point of the Garlic Festival – everyone has different tastes.
Now I know mine don’t include marsupials.
