Sunday 25 October 2009

Adopt a snail















Adopt a snail is the latest slogan to appear on our stalls. Jim Hunter of Aylesford, a master wood craftsman, has produced some beautiful snails for us to sell. We have three versions. The top one is sycamore with the pattern of a shell burnt into it. The middle one is plain pale sycamore and the lower one is made in oak. Jim has used the grain of the wood to represent the shell in these two.
We are looking forward very much to appearing at West Malling Farmer's Market www.westmallingfarmersmarket.co.uk on the fourth Sunday of each month starting in November. We will be serving hot snails in garlic butter as well as selling snail canapes and smoked snails for you to take away and eat at home. The wooden snails will be on sale there but can also be ordered by phone or email and sent by post.
Live snails are currently available from Derek the butcher at the Goods Shed Butchery in Canterbury. He has them for sale on Saturdays and they can be ordered at any time.






Monday 31 August 2009

Rachel's Deli

On Saturday I was at Rachel's Deli (http://www.rachelsdeli.co.uk) to give customers the opportunity to taste my smoked snails. It was a lovely warm day and groups of people drifted in and out on their way to and from the Secret Garden Restaurant, Ibbidi Bobbidi Boo gift shop and all the other outlets.

If you haven't yet discovered Mersham Le Hatch Business Village (http://www.mershamlehatch.com/) then I can recommend a trip. Near Ashford and the M20/A20 it is in a courtyard of attractive outbuildings formerly part of Lord Brabourne's estate. This is a group of shops that definitely deserves a closer look.

Rachel is now stocking my smoked snails and garlic butter canapes in the freezer, both perfect for dinner parties and special occasions at home. A lot of the fresh meats and vegetables stocked are organic and sourced locally but there is also a good range of charcuterie, wine and cheeses from across Europe. The tomatoes are so fresh they are still growing in pots outside the window.

Wednesday 26 August 2009

Allotment Escargots

Snails have made a nutritious contribution to the human diet for 17,000 years. If you are concerned about the environment then you should consider using this natural resource from your garden or allotment.

This book is for you if you are interested in:
· collecting free food from the wild,
· growing your own fruit and vegetables
· buying locally produced food,
· reducing food miles
· lowering your carbon emissions
· eating well

Find out how to:
· rear local snails for your own consumption
· keep the snails in and everything else out
· decide what to plant for your family and your snails
· collect, prepare and eat your snails
…and lots more.

Published by H&RH Escargots © 2009 Price £5

Saturday 15 August 2009

Writing the Book

Coming out and saying I'm writing a book feels like a big step even though I've been writing for years: making my living as a writer indeed for some time. but whenever I talk to people about the snail business they ask when the book's coming out. 'There's got to be a book in it', they say... and maybe there is.

I went to a book launch last night for Katherine May's first novel Burning Out published by Snowbooks: http://www.snowbooks.com/author_May.html. You can see all about Katherine and her books on: http://www.katherinemay.co.uk/, see Katherine reading an extract on Youtube and watch her next book slowly develop by following each day's first and last lines on www.twitter.com/mustardpepper. I haven't read the book yet but I am certain it is going to be well written and a joy to read as Katherine's work always is. I am grateful for the invitation to the event because it spurred me on to make as much use of August as I can while other work is on the back burner.

I met Katherine first through Medway Mermaids the writers' group she set up: http://www.medwaymermaids.btik.com/. I joined because I wanted to move sideways from non fiction academic work to experiment with writing fiction. I felt I wanted the support of other new writers to help me make that shift. With the members I experimented with all sorts of writing: scripts, poetry and historical fiction and learnt a lot especially about 'show' instead of 'tell'. We're always happy to see new members so if you are reading this and looking for support with your writing please make contact.

From the beginning of the snail business I kept a daily journal, partly so I could look back and see what worked and what didn't, as there was a lot of experimenting involved in their care. I've now started re-writing some of the early pieces I wrote, to try and weave it into a coherent shape. It seems to be settling into chunks that correspond with months of the year and events in the East Kent countryside. This, so far amorphous mass of writing, has the provisional title: Of Molluscs and Me, but I don't think I'm ready yet to share it with the wider world. Maybe there will come a time when I want to post extracts up on the net but not yet.

Friday 7 August 2009

On Sale Here

The snails will be making an appearance at two events in August this year.

The first event is in Goodnestone Park on Sunday 9th August from 12 till 5 at the Food Fair for the Best of Kent weekend. You will be able to buy hot snails in garlic butter ready to eat and snails to eat at home, bottled in garlic butter or smoked.

for details see: http://www.ct3events.com/Produce--and--Craft-Fayre.php

The second event the snails will be attending is the Annual Barn Produce Show in Littlebourne Barn on Bank Holiday Monday 31 August.

If you haven't been to the historic barn it is definitely worth a visit just to see the inside: http://www.littlebournebarn.co.uk/

The event is an opportunity for local gardeners and allotment holders to show their biggest pumpkins and straightest runner beans. They will also be showing chickens and other livestock, so the snails are appearing under this category. They won't be winning any prizes, but only because the show committee have no criteria by which to judge them. Nevertheless they will be there to smile for the cameras.

Tuesday 30 June 2009

Cooking Kentish Snails with Kentish Cider


Alcohol is an essential ingredient in cooking my locally grown edible snails and here is how to use the local brew Rough Old Wife www.rougholdwife.com/. The flavour will beat anything you've tasted on holiday.
In true Mrs Beaton style: first catch your snails and let them dry off so that they go into temporary aestivation.

Make your cooking stock with the following ingredients:
1oo ml cider
1 litre water
1 crushed clove garlic, chopped shallot, chopped carrot,
sea salt and black pepper
1 clove, 1 bay leaf, small sprinkling of cinnamon and nutmeg,
chopped parsley and thyme (could be dried or fresh)
1 whole bird’s eye chilli (don’t break it up or the stock could be too hot)

(One litre of stock would cook a kilo of snails.)

Make a 10% brine preferably with sea salt

Bring a large pan of water to rapid boil and add salt. Drop the sleeping snails into the boiling water and bring back to the boil for five minutes. Plunge them into cold water after blanching so that you can handle the shells to remove the snail using a fork. Twist the snail with the shape of the shell to remove it.

Drop the de-shelled snails into hot brine and boil for thirty minutes to remove slime.

Rinse well.

Drop snails into the hot stock, bring back to the boil and simmer for about one and a half hours. I use a slow cooker for this part of the process so that I can be sure they will simmer and won’t boil dry. At the end of the cooking process turn off the heat and leave cooked snails in the hot stock while you prepare the garlic butter.

For the garlic butter:
Per 250 gm pack unsalted English butter (taken out of the fridge well ahead of time) which should do 5 or 6 dozen snails, depending on how much you like garlic butter.
20gm chopped garlic
40 gm chopped shallot
Freshly picked parsley – enough to colour it green
Add cider to taste but try 70 ml
The herbs, garlic and shallot are most easily chopped in a food processor with the cider unless you are a skilled chef. Then mix well with the butter.

Drain the snails well and reheat with the cider butter in a hot oven in an oven proof dish until the butter bubbles. Served with crusty bread and a side salad.

Tuesday 16 June 2009

Here's looking at you.

I've written before about Regine Petersen, but just to remind you, she is studying for an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in London. A few months ago she took photos of our snails for a project connected with her MA. Now she has entered these wonderful photos of their antennae into the Google photography competition. I hope you agree with me that they look great against the dark background. Here is the link so you can vote:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/photographyprize/vote.html#theme28

Let's see if we can win!

Sunday 14 June 2009

So you want to be a snail farmer

Let me tell you a story. When we wanted to go into snail farming we spent months fruitlessly searching for information just like you may be doing now. We found some old stuff on the net and looked up the academic texts though they didn’t help much. We also went to visit a man who farms African snails. That was useful because it helped us decide we didn’t want to go down that route. African snails have to be kept warmer than European ones and we were thinking about the cost of heating and the effect on the environment. They do seem to lay eggs more freely and live longer but we didn’t know that then. So one question to ask yourself is: what kind of snails do you want to farm? The answer will be linked to where you are going to put them and where your market will be: who is going to buy them from you and what are they looking for?

In my desperate search for information I kept ringing one snail farmer I found through a tourism website but only got the answer phone. He never returned my calls but around Christmas time I struck lucky and caught him at home. Perhaps he had been indulging in a little Christmas cheer because he was willing to talk and quite encouraging about the proposed venture promising that if we got started he would buy our produce at 4p a snail. Even before we worked out the costs 4p each didn’t sound like very much but I didn’t say so. He spoke at length in general terms but was very vague about the details. He told me he used to offer training for would be snail farmers but wasn’t doing it any more.

Then I found another farmer who was offering a day’s consultancy for £300 and I booked myself onto the course. There was another couple there at the same time and we sat together for a whole day in his grubby sitting room watching a large cockroach crawl up the wall behind his head while he chain smoked. He mentioned casually after a while that he didn’t actually have any snails at that time but didn’t explain why. I've since wondered why I didn't ask the obvious question. He gave us a book apparently recording all the details of the rearing process but it said all sorts of questionable things like: snails get used to being fed at the same time each day. He talked expansively about the opportunities. He generalised a lot when it came to costs which I thought was suspicious at the time but in fact I’ve had trouble pinning down the exact costs too. He said there was room in the market for another 50 farms the same size as his. He also claimed to have sold 32,000 snails in his first month of trading. I have since wondered if this was pure fantasy or just an exaggeration. We certainly should bear in mind that his farm was up for sale and he left the country not long afterwards.

If you want my take on the business then I’ll tell you a few home truths – no exaggerations I promise.

Snail farming is labour intensive. I have seen a mechanised system which washed the snails automatically at intervals but the farmer who bought it said it wasn’t reliable, used a lot of water and was too expensive to run.

Animals never do what they are supposed to do, whether it is growing to the size you want or mating and laying eggs.

You may have to spend a lot of time cooking. When we started we were more interested in looking after the animals than anything else. We assumed our USP (Unique Selling Point)was that we could supply live snails to restaurants: they can buy imported frozen or tinned snails more cheaply but they can’t very easily buy live ones which, for the discerning chef, make a much better quality meal. What we found was that very few chefs have the time or the inclination to deal with live snails if we will take them out of the shells and freeze them for them. We have to sell a proportion direct to the public and, in these days of ready meals, they definitely need to be ready to eat. That all means I spend a lot more time in the kitchen than I really expected. I wondered if I might be able to find a caterer who would do that part for me but so far I haven’t managed to find anyone.

Marketing takes hours and hours and miles of travel and talking persuasively to lots of people … and having to take comments like: ”Oh no! I wouldn’t have anything like that on my menu!”

The restaurant trade is very volatile – most chefs don’t stay in the same place for long, pubs close, restaurants change their buying policy … and that was before the credit crunch!

We’ve had a lot of publicity in local and national press, on TV and radio and it has never brought in a single enquiry resulting in a sale of snails for food. What it does bring in is enquiries from people wanting to set up snail farms.

You are not going to make your fortune from snail farming. All small businesses take time to start making money so you need to be able to support yourself financially until it does and even then you may still need other sources of income to live comfortably. Perhaps you should think of it as part of a portfolio career or one aspect of a mixed farming or other enterprise.

If after all I’ve said, you still want to go ahead with finding out more detail about snail rearing so that you can then decide whether to take it up either as a hobby or a business then I will help you. But in the interests of the viability of my business, I will have to charge you for my knowledge.

Sunday 24 May 2009

May and all those Bank Holiday weekends

The Times Food Lovers Guide has been in my hand for weeks so I could show the article to everyone I met. It made a good story and the pictures are striking though my friends tell me I don't really look like that: Tom Pilston is a well know documentary photographer. (http://www.tompilston.com/)

Two enquiries came from this publicity: one was a school wanting to keep snails as pets and a couple came from journalists. So I did a recorded interview for Gulf Radio Services that will be broadcast to ex-pats working in the Gulf. They sent me a DVD of the programme which was good. I wonder if any sales will come of it.

I’ve been studying customer behaviour over the holiday weekends. I noticed that snail eaters seem to get up late. Perhaps they’ve been fine dining the night before. All I have to worry about then is the kind of hangover that doesn’t take kindly to the smell of hot garlic butter. I tried persuading a few gardeners that eating snails was a way of getting their own back. These were the early morning shoppers intent on buying food for a cooked meal at midday. My best customers were less focused in their shopping habits. They wandered from shelf to shelf, sniffing the cheese to see if it was ripe, talking about their preparations for the evening to come and discussing the relative merits of different brands of extra virgin olive oil. They tasted the snails with concentration on the task in hand, commented on the texture and flavour, comparing them to those they had tasted on hot holidays in the Dordogne. After due consideration, they took home jars of smoked snails and garlic butter packs to share with friends. Some even phoned their friends to come over and try them.

One tasting took place in the middle of a pet animal show. The market place was full of well groomed obedient dogs greeting each silently with a rear end sniff, in the way dogs do. There was a wire pen full of guinea pigs and rabbits with plenty of warm furry bodies for children to stroke. The café was packed and people wandered round the shop looking at all the delicious goods as though they were a museum collection. Garlic butter scented the air and I watched as the smell raised their noses as they walked through the door to see if it brought a smile of recognition. They were interested in the snail farm as animal lovers might be, fed the cooked snails to their children and wished me luck with the venture.

The best tastings were at Lower Hardres Farm shop off Stone Street and Delf Farm shop at Sandwich where I had to drive back home after the first hour and a half to collect more stock because we had sold out.

My snail canapes in garlic and herb butter also featured on the menu at a well known local restaurant for a chef’s birthday party. So my fingers are crossed that this may bring in results.

The snails are well into egg laying now after an anxious few months in case they didn’t lay. But the shelves are filling with trays of tiny baby snails and most of last Autumn’s crop are ready to cook.

In June we will be at the Godinton Park farm open day on Sunday 7th (http://www.godinton-house-gardens.co.uk/) and the following weekend Friday and Saturday 12th and 13th June we have a stall at the Wealden Times Midsummer Fair at Brick House Farm near Tenterden: (http://www.wealdentimes.co.uk/events/wt86_midsummerfair.asp) Both of these occasions will provide opportunities to taste and buy smoked snails.

I've started offering snail events to primary schools to fit with the National Curriculum Key Stages 1 and 2 so watch this space: http://snailview.blogspot.com/

Thursday 23 April 2009


April 2009

It’s already April and where did the time go? March blew away in a whirlwind of activity and smiling for the cameras.

Look out for us in the Times Food Lovers Guide and Kent Focus magazine at the end of April. It was Michael Wale who came to meet the snails and find out about the farm for a feature in the Times newspaper. His passion is allotments so he was very much in tune with small scale operations like ours. Read more about him here: (http://www.50connect.co.uk/features_and_regulars/green_issues_with_michael_wale)

We are still recovering from the surprise of being featured on the local news by Meridian and BBC South East and then selected by both channels for their reprise of highlights of the year’s news at Christmas.

The snails were centre stage for the cameras again in March when we were contacted by Regine Petersen a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art in London. Regine wanted snails to feature in a project for her MA in Photography. (www.reginepetersen.de/) By the time she had spent a week photographing them from every angle she couldn’t bear to part with them and asked if she could keep them as pets.

The new season’s snails are ready for sale and all I have to do now is find buyers. Going round knocking on kitchen doors with snails in my hand has become a familiar activity. Just like last year, there have been many changes since the previous visit: chefs move on, premises change hands or close down. Writing a newsletter proved a useful way to concentrate the mind on what we have to sell. Now that we have permission to sell cooked food to shops and restaurants we can create a wider range of products to try out on old and new customers.

In the beginning our Unique Selling Point was live snails for the discerning chef and we offered frozen uncooked snails for those who preferred them that way. We have now branched out so that we can offer snails cooked simply in court bouillon and either bottled in brine or frozen. The Forager based nearby at Chartham (www.forager.org.uk/) takes orders for live snails and it is a good way for restaurants some distance away to buy just a few. If a chef wants a hundred or more it is worth paying for a carrier and we’ve found APC (East Kent) reliable.

Escargots a la Bourguignon, in presentation shells stuffed with garlic and herb butter, is the familiar way so many holiday makers have tried them. Because these are imported more cheaply than we can produce them we made a decision early on not to go down that route. However, there seems to be a demand so we are producing them this year. The butter is English and the herbs picked freshly for us by Walmestone Growers just a few miles away so they will taste much better of course. (http://www.producedinkent.co.uk/)

Alongside the usual garlic butter version we’ve been developing canapés for dinner parties, adding local cheeses such as Ashmore (www.thecheesemakersofcanterbury.co.uk/.) or local mushrooms. Packaging is one of the biggest challenges because we want them to look irresistible, like chocolates, and that is going to be hard to achieve.

The production of canapés followed on from a very successful day trip to Boulogne at the invitation of Emmanuel Brasseur (www.lescargotiere.com). L'escargotiere du Choquel is just a few miles from Boulogne in the countryside. We learnt such a lot from this one visit and our generous host invited us to go back whenever we want to. The canapés are served in edible shells made of wafer, like ice cream wafer which I have never seen for sale in England. As presentation shells of any kind would have to be imported, we have had to make an exception to our local only rule… but Boulogne is closer than London for us!

Mani’s snails hibernate in the winter unlike ours and had just been woken up to start egg production for the new season. I particularly liked the outside pen, like a big fruit cage, where the youngsters spend most of the summer, protected from predators by a friendly ferret. He does help himself to the occasional snail but more than makes up for such misdemeanours by keeping them safe from everything else. Visiting during the spring lay had great advantages for us because we had a serious problem last year with our adult snails refusing to lay. What do you do when your breeders which should have been full of the joys of Spring stuff themselves full of food then roll over and go back to sleep? Well Mani was able to tell us that the secret is all in the temperature, so this year ours are laying again too.

We launched our new recipe for smoked snails at Hadlow lambing event In March where they were voted delicious. Last year we had a lot of support from local food smokers such as Parkside Trout Farm but now that we have total control of the process we’ve been able to cure the cooked snails with sea salt and brown sugar which enhances the flavour considerably and adds to the shelf life. The recipe we are using is supposed to preserve them for a whole year but it will be a long time before we can print that claim on the label.

Over the next few weeks you can taste the produce at some of our local outlets Macknade’s, (www.macknade.com/events.html) on 25 April and
Kent Farm Gate Foods at Lower Hardres Farm shop on 2 May. Other new customers include Mamafeelgoods, www.mamafeelgoods.co.uk/ at Bekesbourne, Delf Farm shop (www.discoversandwich.co.uk/shops.htm ) at Sandwich and Perry Court Farm shop on the outskirts of Ashford

Wheelers Oyster Bar will be stocking local snails again this summer from May bank holiday weekend onwards, we’re very pleased to report. Mark and Delia have been very supportive of our business since we first started selling about eighteen months ago now.
(www.whitstable-shellfish.co.uk/wheelers.html) and from time to time they will be on the menu at the restaurant at the Goods Shed and the award winning Mulberry Tree at Boughton Monchelsea. So it’s back to the kitchen!