Snails for food

S

sasha

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Feb 28, 2006
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Well im sure that most of you noticed that if you got a garden you got lots of snails in it... Here comes the scary part of me thinking.. Would they taste good??? Lately with the veg getting bigger i see more snails. looking at building something to keep them and then cook in some oil with lots of garlic. Found alot of very good recipes.. Did anyone of tried them in a dish yet???

sasha
 
I've eaten escargot. I'll try anything once, and it was DELICIOUS!

I would imagine they are a particular type that are raised for eating, and not just picked out of the garden. But, along those lines, I remember reading somewhere that if you are going to eat your garden snails, you put them in a tub with some cornmeal for a couple of days to clean out their system.

I also remember my grandmother putting out jar lids full of beer in her vegtable garden. The snails would crawl in overnight, get drunk, and drown. They would swell up from the beer soak and almost pop out of their shells.

So if it were me, I would let the snails clean out in cornmeal and then toss them in a jar of beer overnight in the refrigerator. Pull those beer bloated bodies out of their shells and saute them with a little garlic and pepper. Good grief, that sounds good! I wish we had garden snails around here.

Oh, a final note. Some types of water snails are poisonous. So don't eat those.
 
In places like Italy and France they raise snails for food commercially.You can buy canned snails. Fed on grape leaves IIRC. They are actually somewhat bland and really need something to give them a bit of pizzaz like garlic etc.
What is that you're eating ?? Snails ! Oh gross !
 
I ate a snail once, a little burnt...:o

They're not bad, nothin special really. One part was especially nice though when I bit something crunchy, I'm not sure if it was a charred piece or a bit of shell that I missed, but that was... interesting.:barf:

I'd eat them again though (if I had to), just wouldn't cook em quite as long lol.
 
Snails in general are the vectors for A LOT of different parasites in both man and animals so make sure that they are cooked very very well if and when you do decide to eat the wild ones.... i don't see any problem with eating the cultivated ones though......:D
 
Hey, I just did this last fall. I collected 20 or so, had some friends at work grab another 20 from their garden and cultivated them on corn meal for a month or so, then cooked them up and ate them. Way too much work for the smaller ones, if I were to do it regularly, I'd make sure to only get the biggest ones. They tasted just fine, like escargot from a restaurant.
 
Did this a few years ago. Only did the cornmeal for a few days. Sauteed in butter and garlic. They tasted great, but were real easy to overcook, at which point they became rubber.

Gordon
 
Snail eggs are rally nice to eat as well. It is best to stick to terrestrial snails, quite a few of the aquatic ones harbor parasites from what I have read.
 
There was a great article in American Survival Guide , back in the day. Yea those snails in your garden are the smaller cousin of the pricey Frnech ones , same thing just smaller.

Ya catch them , let them gorge of cornmeal for a week ( some people add a little milk on the last day ) , the longer you do it the cleaner the taste. Put in a strainer with it's pals , wash in cold water , put the whole wriggly mess in a pot of already boiling water 10-15 minutes ,When you and them are ready you pop em out of their shell , cut off the "entrail" ( some people leave it be ) , season and serve.
 
Aside from the fancy, and tasty, giant French escargot using tongs to hold them snails are a very common Italian dish. At least in the area around Rome they are prepared at home in the shells with a red sauce (reducing the tomato means a hour or more of cooking) and being finger tip size folks dig them out after cooking with a tooth pick.

There's a bunch of different ways to "prepare" them before cooking but from what I remember most were soaked in big galvanized wash tubs for a couple of days in salt water with bread and maybe some vinegar. I may have missed something in the translation about cleaning out their systems but the process was consistent with several families.

A friend that works for Alitalia had us to dinner for "lumache". It sounded (my translation) like the Fiumicino Alitalia offices are bordered by lawns and after a heavy rain would be crowded with employees gathering snails for dinner. I think you can keep them for a week or more until you've collected enough for a meal and then begin the soaking process.
 
As soon as i get something large enough to keep them im going to start collecting my new food.

Sasha
 
Cooking snails properly is somewhat complicated and can be a long process. There are many different ways to do it. If your Grandmother says this way is wrong may Grandmother would like a word with her.

Picking snails out of your garden won't get you a lot of them. They like to hibernate all Summer, so the easiest way is to wait till the first heavy rain in September or earlier depending on your climate. You'll find them hiding under rocks on stone walls. Just turn the rocks over and pick them off. A sack or two full of them in a day is not uncommon.

Now they need to 'fast', because some of the grasses they eat are poisonous to us. Hang them up in a sack like the sort they use for onions. Leave them there for 2 weeks. I have never fed them anything. Feed them cornmeal if you wish but don't blame me if they taste gritty.

Before you actually cook them they need to be cleaned. Let them soak in a pot of water overnight. The water will turn a slimy grey. Replace the water and bring it to a boil. Put the cover on because some will try to escape.
Now have another fresh pot of boiling water ready. When the current water turns bad put the snails in the other pot with the clean water. Continue cooking them until they come out of the shell.

Now you can either pull them out of the shell and fry with lots of garlic and oil or make a nice stew with red wine, tomatoes, olives, capers, mint and tomatoes. Pull them out with a toothpick like Ramm9 said above. The snail's body is in two parts. The lower part is a sort of intestine that some people find disgusting. You can pinch this part off inside the shell if you don't like it, but it is safe to eat.
 
Joel Stave said:
Does all this apply to slugs as well? They look like they're just snails without shells...
Click to expand...

I have no idea. We only ate one type of snail, the Helix Aspersa.
brown_garden_snail03.jpg


I know the Moroccans eat other species like these white ones, yet we always avoided picking them.
1.1234342320.1_snail-soup.jpg
 
tabeeb762 said:
Cooking snails properly is somewhat complicated and can be a long process. There are many different ways to do it. If your Grandmother says this way is wrong may Grandmother would like a word with her.

Picking snails out of your garden won't get you a lot of them. They like to hibernate all Summer, so the easiest way is to wait till the first heavy rain in September or earlier depending on your climate. You'll find them hiding under rocks on stone walls. Just turn the rocks over and pick them off. A sack or two full of them in a day is not uncommon.

Now they need to 'fast', because some of the grasses they eat are poisonous to us. Hang them up in a sack like the sort they use for onions. Leave them there for 2 weeks. I have never fed them anything. Feed them cornmeal if you wish but don't blame me if they taste gritty.

Before you actually cook them they need to be cleaned. Let them soak in a pot of water overnight. The water will turn a slimy grey. Replace the water and bring it to a boil. Put the cover on because some will try to escape.
Now have another fresh pot of boiling water ready. When the current water turns bad put the snails in the other pot with the clean water. Continue cooking them until they come out of the shell.

Now you can either pull them out of the shell and fry with lots of garlic and oil or make a nice stew with red wine, tomatoes, olives, capers, mint and tomatoes. Pull them out with a toothpick like Ramm9 said above. The snail's body is in two parts. The lower part is a sort of intestine that some people find disgusting. You can pinch this part off inside the shell if you don't like it, but it is safe to eat.
Click to expand...

Could you feed them basil and hope they taste like basil? Or is any plant at all bad? It would almost seem you could flavor them with specific foods?
 
Iboschi said:
Could you feed them basil and hope they taste like basil? Or is any plant at all bad? It would almost seem you could flavor them with specific foods?
Click to expand...

They don't really taste like anything by themselves. The flavor is all in how you cook them. If you fry in garlic and butter that's what they taste like.
 
You guys do know that the common brown garden snail in the USA was introduced either by the Italians or French over 100 years ago specifically as a food source?

There were released into our ecology as a "free" food source, and are now a plague to both commercial farmers and private gardeners.

Eat them all, I say.
 
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