Photo and blog post by John HoffNorth Minneapolis is home to numerous ethnic groups and, therefore, numerous ethnic food stores. And, while the jaw-droppingly affordable store known as So-Low isn't an ethnic food store, per se, they do have an incredible selection of ethnic food items. Anybody who reads this blog for very long knows I can't resist any kind of strange food, and I will go out of my way to try things I haven't tried before. So it was I got my hands on some African snails from So-Low. This happened a few months ago, but I am going through some of my old pictures and, well, I found the snail images like a pocket of suppressed memory. The horror, the horror...
My girlfriend Megan Goodmundson was a good sport about cooking the slimy beasties, after trying to marinate them. I tried to find some good and SIMPLE recipes on the internet, but I didn't have much luck. Most of the recipes I found involved putting the snails in a pressure cooker, which we didn't have available, as well as crazy talk about soaking the snails in alum. (Whatever THAT might be!)
Well, we figured we could just skewer the snails and throw them on a grill.
Wrong. So wrong.
I am not sure what shoe leather tastes like, but I am confident those grilled snails tasted pretty close.
This goes to show not every exotic food experiment goes right, not even with a cook as good as Megan Goodmundson.
But without a periodic spectacular failure, success wouldn't be as sweet.
My girlfriend Megan Goodmundson was a good sport about cooking the slimy beasties, after trying to marinate them. I tried to find some good and SIMPLE recipes on the internet, but I didn't have much luck. Most of the recipes I found involved putting the snails in a pressure cooker, which we didn't have available, as well as crazy talk about soaking the snails in alum. (Whatever THAT might be!)
Well, we figured we could just skewer the snails and throw them on a grill.
Wrong. So wrong.
I am not sure what shoe leather tastes like, but I am confident those grilled snails tasted pretty close.
This goes to show not every exotic food experiment goes right, not even with a cook as good as Megan Goodmundson.
But without a periodic spectacular failure, success wouldn't be as sweet.
Cut off everything except the pseudopod, then the snails have to be pounded with a meat hammer...A LOT! Give a light rub with either vinegar or lemon. You will be in a for a real treat!
ReplyDeleteDid I mention the snails need to be pounded with a meat hammer a LOT!
rob
OK Rob, so after the trimming and the pounding, and the marinating in lemon juice (which I did), how do you cook them?
ReplyDelete