Great balls of fryer

Posted by Jacob on Oct. 1, 2008

Hi everybody, I’m Jacob Grier. Let’s talk about balls!

Oh dear, I’m sorry. I always do this. This is why I don’t get invited to parties. Let’s start over, ok?

I’m Jacob and I’m one of the new contributors here at Crispy on the Outside. Like Baylen, I’m a longtime barista, a food and drink lover, and a constant critic of nanny state measures that prevent us from eating, imbibing, and smoking the things we enjoy. I also have an odd fascination with Rocky Mountain oysters. The foodies among you probably know that “oyster” is a euphemism here — we’re really talking about deep fried bull testicles.

My curiosity about this Colorado delicacy was piqued by an article about Neuticles, the prosthetic testes developed for neutered dogs to keep them from feeling emasculated at the dog park. Buoyed by success with canines, inventor Gregg A. Miller later ventured into cats, horses, bulls, and even humans. It’s the bull ones that surprised me with their massive length of 5.75 inches (just $649 if you want a pair). Though I grew up in Texas and could smell the pasture from my high school tennis court, I didn’t have much familiarity with the back end of a bull. And at the risk of sounding immodest, I didn’t expect to be so outclassed.

One reason is that I’d once consumed Rocky Mountain oysters as a child and the orbs were much smaller than this. The other is evolutionary. As I wrote in one my most popular blog posts — one that for a long time put my site at the top of search results for queries like “huge testicles” and “men with bull balls” — size is not necessarily correlated with body mass:

It’s a principle of biology that you can tell a lot about a species’ mating habits by the size of its testes. If they are large relative to body mass, it’s a good bet that females of the species are promiscuous. Since they’re mating with multiple males, the evolutionary arms race favors males who can, if you’ll pardon the expression, make a larger deposit. Thus, they need larger testes. The opposite is true for the lesser-endowed animals. If males are assured of having monopoly access to their mates, then there’s no reason for them to waste resources on large testicles.

This explains the surprising fact that human men are significantly better endowed than their gorilla counterparts. A successful gorilla male wins exclusive access to a harem of females, resulting in practically zero need for seminal competition. Of course, the imbalance that this creates leads to considerable physical competition among the males, which is why gorillas exhibit such sexual dimorphism: males are much, much larger than females.

Before the guys in the audience get inflated egos from this discussion, I should mention that the smaller chimpanzee has us completely outclassed. Since chimps live in highly promiscuous social groups, sperm competition is quite intense. What does this tell us that we can bring up the next time we’re stuck at a boring cocktail party? That humans are by nature much more monogamous than our nearest living evolutionary cousins, but not completely monogamous.

I’d always assumed that bull mating behavior was similar to that of gorillas, with one dominant bull enjoying a harem of the most fetching cows. It turns out I was wrong. Though there’s not much information online about bull mating behavior, at the time I found one study reporting that there was a lot competition going on in those pastures by my high school:

One of the observations reported in the study is that though there is a hierarchy among the bulls, the dominant ones have to constantly chase off their younger challengers. Young bulls often initiate copulation with females only to be disturbed by the bigger elders, who follow a forceful strategy of, shall we say, cow-itus interruptus.

A second observation is that the dominant bulls often rely upon the lower ranking males to act as “heat detectors,” allowing the young bulls to identify receptive females before moving in themselves. This time saving strategy has its human parallel in the hiring process of Capitol Hill interns.

The net result of all of this jockeying for position is that there is no difference in the frequency of copulation between the dominant and low ranking males, even though there is a definite hierarchy when it comes to mating privileges.

So that solved the size mystery, but doesn’t explain the orbs of my childhood Rocky Mountain oyster experience. The restaurant where I first had them presented them in a very classy manner: six fried balls arranged in a circle around a bowl of cocktail sauce. The logic implied a clean three bulls’ worth of appetizer. Not so.

Being in Colorado at the moment, I decided this week to try for a more authentic experience at Buckhorn Exchange, a 115-year-old restaurant that boasts the city’s first liquor license and countless displays of taxidermy. Somehow I persuaded an adventurous friend to come with me. After much somewhat uneasy anticipation, the order arrived. There’s no artful presentation here and the true form of the oysters are revealed in all their glory:

The photo’s a little dark, but you can clearly see here that these are not remotely orbular. They’re thin slices of testicle, battered and fried. Stacking them on top of each other would reconstruct a large ball indeed. (We didn’t actually try this. We like to keep it classy while we eat our bull testes. Pinkies out!)

And how do they taste? Not bad, actually. Kind of like not very tender dark meat, not quite as chewy as calamari. They make a good bar snack paired with the cocktail, horseradish, and spicy mustard dipping sauces. The only problem is that there were just too many of them for us to handle. As they cool they get chewier and it’s harder to forget what you’re putting in your mouth. By the end we found ourselves competing for pieces that offered the most batter with the least ball. We left behind a solid serving of the biggest slices, unable to work our way through them.

In any case, I’ve now solved to my personal satisfaction the mystery of the five-inch bull balls and have sated my hunger for Rocky Mountain oysters for another decade. I’m glad I did. For foodies who are more ball than batter, it’s an adventure worth having at least once.

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