Caviar escargot

The French cuisine is notorious for trying out new and sometimes very questionable challenges to the human taste buds. Caviar is not a French invention, but besides the French fries, many dishes associated with the French cuisine are considered, at least by the broad public, to be disgusting at least. Nevertheless, frog legs and oysters have found their niche in the world of haute cuisine and unfortunately this led to a plenty of new inventions to be torpedoed our way. The latest idea, prompted by the worldwide ban on beluga caviar, seems to be "Caviar Escargot", which sounds nice but are in fact snail eggs.

It is true that people in dire situations would eat anything that will help them survive. For a while now, survival tactics are a vital part of the training of any elite military troops, which includes eating anything and everything that nature has to offer in order to make it through behind enemy lines. Eating snails is one of the best survival foods; they are rich on proteins, but harbor only one problem, when eaten raw, a parasite which lives in some species may cause meningitis.

Who actually came up with the idea of snail eggs as food is not known. A French company, De Jaeger, which specializes in Caviar and Escargots, produces the snail caviar, or caviar escargot, of a supposedly exquisite quality, that even Harrods imports and sells their delicacy. Its pricing is just as exclusive as the dish, thirty gram tin of the caviar escargot costs around seventy Euros, a 250g sized package will set you back for almost seven hundred Euros.

De Jaeger, who produces this caviar, informs on their web site just why this delicacy needs to cost that much. Their snails, of the kind Helix Aspera Maxima, live in specially crafted snail pens. Their environment is tempered and provided with designed vegetation and watering, which allows the snails to be raised in the open, where the vegetation and some kind of cereal complement are used as their food. Each snail would lay eggs in an approximate yearly amount of a hundred eggs, which totals four gram. Up to two hundred sixty snails lay per year a kilogram of the caviar escargot, which needs to be processed in order to be marketed.

De Jaeger uses a special salt art, they call it sel de Guerande, which is unrefined and of supposedly high quality, with an addition of rosemary essence. The caviar escargot is meant to be the perfect substitute for the beluga caviar, although the taste is completely different. Nevertheless, if the current recession did not touch you and you can afford to try out new things and adventures for your taste buds, just give it a go.

Linus Orakles
http://www.authorclub.info/