Snail season started
On the slime trail to a delicacy – a visit to a snail farm in France
Michaël Meyer breeds snails on his farm.
© Philipp von Ditfurth / Picture Alliance
In Germany snails are a niche product, but in France they are traded as a delicacy. Michaël Meyer breeds the animals. A visit to his farm.
On mild summer nights you can hear them eating, the flocks of snails in Michaël Meyer’s enclosure. “Krk, krk, krk”, that’s what it sounds like when tens of thousands of animals feast on greens and grain, reports the breeder from Ebersheim. But now it is autumn – and with it snail harvest time on the Alsatian farm and elsewhere in France.
There is still a lot of manual work to be done before the slimy animals become the delicacy that is celebrated by gourmets. And at least some of the many intermediate steps should take some getting used to for those who are not in the know: What is the animal’s “love arrow” all about, for example? And what happens to her slime?
Hundreds of thousands of snails
The snails in the all around fenced enclosure wait under inclined wooden boards. The cool temperatures make them lazy and they don’t really want to eat anymore, as Meyer, 36 years old, says. He recognizes that they are fully grown and therefore “ripe” from a small protrusion at the entrance to the snail shell.
In total, Meyer released more than 300,000 baby snails in his four enclosures in May. He hopes that the largest 57,000 of them have survived the cool, humid summer and the attacks of rats and that he can now harvest. Meyer’s spotted garden snails still have a few days in the fresh air in this facility. Then they are collected and crammed together in a cooled room with fans. Here they should dry out a little, “empty” themselves and fall into a kind of hibernation.
This fate has already overtaken a few tens of thousands of their conspecifics from another enclosure. They wait on long shelves in their houses, it smells sweet and damp of the snail droppings that cover the floor like sawdust.
Only a fraction comes from France
In Germany, snails are a niche product: According to the Federal Agency for Agriculture and Food, only just under 140 tonnes, processed and unprocessed, were imported last year; there are no figures on the amount consumed.
For comparison: According to estimates by the National Assembly from 2013, 25,000 to 30,000 tons of snails (live weight) are consumed annually in France. But only a fraction comes from domestic breeders like Meyer. The rest is imported – for example from Poland and the Ukraine, as Meyer says. These snails are cheaper, but they are not of the same quality.
“Love arrow”, slime, innards: all of that has to go
Next step after drying: The snails are thrown into boiling water, where they immediately perish. After a few minutes they are taken out again, Meyer and his employees pull the bodies out of the house. The entrails are removed with a quick movement of the hand before the degumming begins: the breeder places the snail bodies in a large bowl and turns on the food processor. The stirring separates the body and slime, says Meyer. Then you just have to rinse off the whitish foamed slime well with lukewarm water.
Before the snails can be sold, there are still various steps to be taken. A 20-minute bath in 98 degree water to kill bacteria. Very important: the hours of simmering in vegetable stock and wine to give the snails, which are actually almost neutral-tasting, aroma. Then the removal of the “love arrow”, which plays a role in the reproduction of the hybrid creatures. “If it stays in, it crunches while eating, as if you were biting a grain of sand,” says Meyer.
Last but not least, the prepared animals (“In the end only the muscle remains”) come back into a snail shell and are covered with a special herb butter. It should boil over a little later in the oven and can then be consumed with bread. Frozen and in packs of twelve, Meyer sells the delicacy to restaurants and private customers for EUR 7.60 – rarely, but every now and then also to Germans, as the farmer says.
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