The Serbian chef who helped found the World Testicle Cooking Festival has compiled his hobby into an interactive digital cookbook, the Reuters news service reported Tuesday.
Ljubomir Erovic has launched The Testicle Cookbook: Cooking With Balls, with a sample version available for previewing and the full version available for £5.99 (about C$11.65) online.
The book compiles recipes using lamb, goat, bull, calf, boar, turkey and ostrich testicles, including goulash, pizza, stews and an omelet. Recipes include testicles fried, battered, breaded, barbecued or cooked in wine. The book also offers video clips on how to peel testicles for cooking, whether freshly cut or thawed from frozen.
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“Testicles have been a delicacy in Serbia and elsewhere for as long as anyone can remember,” Erovic told Reuters reporter Ljilja Cvekic. “The world had to be offered good balls.”
Erovic, 35, a former professional musician, works weekends as a chef when guests in his home area south of Belgrade seek out his cooking, supplementing his day job as a medical and dental equipment repairman.
Reuters’ Cvekic described a recent dinner Erovic prepared at a small cottage belonging to a friend, for which he prepared sheep testicles in bechamel sauce and testicle goulash and also entertained by playing guitar and telling stories to guests.
The testicles, Cvekic wrote, were sliced and cooked together with liver, intestines and kidneys, a grass which Erovic “refused to name,” fresh red grapes and dry white wine. The dish “was rich in taste, compact in structure but softer than kidneys with a flavor that recalled venison.”
The central Serbian region hosts a testicle-eating festival each May, Reuters said, in which chefs come from as far away as Australia to cook dishes with testicles from around 15 different types of animals, also including horses and even kangaroos.
No animals need to be killed to enjoy testicles, Erovic noted in the Reuters article, adding for the non-farming audience that male livestock are often castrated anyway.
Booking Erovic to cook a dinner requires plenty of advance notice, he warned. “It’s not easy to collect enough material for a meal.”
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