Alligator

Creole stewed alligator on rice, and salad with cucumbers and pickled garlic. Wine: Spier Pinotage Vintage Selection 2016.

I haven’t had alligator since I lived in Florida (over a decade ago), and I had never cooked it myself. This was delicious, and in a style I’ve not had it. (I’ve had battered and fried alligator with barbecue sauce—a classic and wonderful—several times and a sort of alligator piccata once that was rather good.)

I anticipate some will ask: it really does taste a lot like chicken, but its texture is more like steak. In some preparations, it can have hints of fish or frogs legs (it had this in the piccata treatment). It is also very low in fat and spectacularly high in protein (about twice the protein by weight as steak).