Why The Mandalorian Doesn’t Know How to Cook Krayt Dragon Meat

In The Mandalorian season 2 premiere, Din Djarin a.k.a. The Mandalorian a.k.a. “Mando” pulls off perhaps his biggest feat of badassery yet. With the help of some Tusken Raiders and a devastatingly handsome Timothy Olyphant as Tatooine marshal Cobb Vanth, Mando takes down an enormous and fearsome krayt dragon.

This means the Raiders get the valuable dragon pearl, Mando gets Boba Fett’s Mandalorian armor back from Vanth, and most importantly: the people of Mos Pelgo and Mos Eisley get some yummy krayt dragon meat. But then, in episode 2 “The Passenger,” something goes horribly awry. 

As Mando arrives back in Mos Eisley, Peli Motto (Amy Sedaris) is thrilled at the prospect of cooking up the krayt dragon as long as it doesn’t have any maggots. She doesn’t like maggots. What she does like apparently is improperly cooking highly-prized meat. For in the very next scene, The Mandalorian commits the greatest sin of its 10 episode run: it butchers the preparation of the krayt dragon feast. 

The preferred Tatooine preparation of krayt dragon meat appears to be roasting it rotisserie style. There’s just one big problem with the way The Mandalorian handles things: the droid manipulating the big hunk of meat is just lazily rotating it in front of one makeshift burner made out of an engine, creating a wildly uneven cooking surface.

The krayt dragon is a tough creature and presumably its meat is just as tough. Lazily holding it out in front of what appears to be fire from a ship’s exhaust just isn’t going to cut it. There’s a reason nobody cooks big meat cubes over a campfire like a marshmallow. Not only that, but if the ships in the Star Wars universe run on a fuel similar to gasoline, that meat is going to taste like pure chemicals.

Rotisserie style also isn’t a good choice for a krayt dragon-like meat in the first place. As Peli Motto walks past the droid, she calls out that she wants her portion medium rare. This means that the meat has properties more akin to beef than to chicken or pork as no one is going to want to make the latter two rare. If krayt dragon is like beef, then there’s no way the droid is going to be able to cook the big hunk of meat all the way through properly with just that one fire source. It would be like holding a 200-ounce piece of meat in front of a fireplace. You’ll unforgivably burn the outside while the insides take on the properties of a cold red rock. Perhaps a slow-cooked barbecue method to make a krayt dragon brisket would have been appropriate but that would require a pit of some sort and many more sources of fire.

What Peli Motto and her helpful droid should be doing is cutting that krayt meat into smaller filets. Based on the appearance of the hunk over the flame, the muscle of the dragon is incredibly lean. Cutting the piece up into smaller filets would take no time at all and there would be little need for fat-trimming. Even with a generous cut of 14-16 ounce filets, that meat would likely be enough to provide one delicious krayt steak (seasoned with only salt and pepper, hopefully – no other exotic Tatooine spices) to everyone in the village.

But if the cooks insisted on turning the meat into one big dish for the community and barbecue wasn’t an option for some reason, then there is one more route for them to take: use one of the many lasers available to chop that brick of meat into cubes, toss it in a pot with some seasonings and bantha stock, and in the immortal words of Carl Weathers (who just so happens to play Greef Karga on The Mandalorian) “Baby, you’ve got yourself a stew going.” 

The point here is that the people of Mos Pelgo and Mos Eisley have plenty of ways to properly prepare krayt dragon meat… and for some reason they elected to use the little heard of “have a droid hold it in front of a flame for a bit” option.  The Mandalorian may have saved the city from the krayt dragon for now, but soon enough all of its citizens will be dead anyway from the germs hiding in undercooked dragon meat.