We did it.
Last weekend, we cooked up our snails and ate them.
And they were good.

Yes, I did feel slightly bad for eating them and yes it was fairly disgusting but I would probably do it again especially as their death serves some sort of purpose rather than simply stopping them eating all Jo’s flowers.

As previously posted, we waited until their poo had turned orange as we only fed them carrots and water then we stopped feeding them about 24 hours before cooking time. I got a medium pan of water going on a rolling boil with a large kettle full of water ready to go as well. I washed them all with cold water and made sure that they all shrunk into their shells so were alive. I then dropped them into the water and kept it boiling for a good 15 minutes. I had to change the water about 3 times over. The first pan full turned bright green with a frothy scum on the top about an inch thick. The second pan was slightly less green with only a small amount of scum and the last pan had a bogeyish tinge to it but nothing else. After 15 minutes of cooking I drained the pan into a colander and doused with lots of cold water before using a thin meat skewer to take them out of their shells and dropped them onto some sea salt to help take off some of the slime that was still on them (or so I hoped!).

Next I chopped up far more cloves of garlic than I should have and added this to a small omelette pan we have with a large knob of butter. When the house stunk of garlic I dropped the snails into the pan and sautéed until I’d effectively cooked off the small amount of slime that was still coming off the little buggers. Note that I didn’t try to chop off the snail’s hybrid pancreas–liver thingy nor did I chop them up. I figured that I eat whelks, winkles, mussels etc. as is so I would do the same with these.

Whilst all this was going on I made a lovely, simple mushroom risotto to go with the snails and so poured in the cooked snails, garlic and butter into the risotto pan at the same time as the parmigiana. According to Jo it was very delicious albeit very garlicky.

Finally, here are some links that I found helpful during my research with the first 3 links being very helpful:

• Cooking with Richard: English Snails 4 – Snails with pancetta, sage, lemon and rocket
• SFGate: Eating Your Garden Snails
• YouTube.com: Gordon Ramsay – Picking and cooking snails
• mattbites.com: A Snail’s Pace
• Blogjam.com: Garden Snail Risotto
• eHow: How to Cook Snails
• guardian.co.uk: Shell shock
• BBC Food: Heston Blumenthal – Snail Porridge

Jo has starting collecting loads of snails from our garden and rather than killing them immediately, she suggested that we cook them as Gordon Ramsey suggested on the F Word a series or so ago. So we now have several jam jars full of them with carrots inside and in a week or two when their poo turns orange they are ready to be eaten! Yummy! Found this delightful article on eating your own snails which confirms much of what we suspected. Also found an entry over at Cooking With Richard (the new entry on my regular read blogroll) which is equally helpful. More will be posted when I have it.