Illustration for a "Snail Caviar" Article

Illustration for a "Snail Caviar" Magazine Article (click to enlarge)

Illustration for an article about Snail Caviar. See excerpt below:

Caviar and champagne are bywords for the festive season in France, while a dozen “escargots” – or snails – cooked in garlic and parsley butter and served in or out of their grey-brown spiralled shells, are a much-loved staple writes Jordane Bertrand.

But a couple of snail farmers from Soissons, in the Picardie region northeast of Paris, found a way to roll two delicacies into one: their snail caviar, called “De Jaeger”, hit the shelves in October 2007. The French started eating snail eggs on a small scale in the 1980s, but the pasteurized product failed to catch on. Dominique and Sylvie Pierru ditched their old jobs in 2004 – he as a construction worker, she running a fine food market stall – to set up their snail farm, and start work on a recipe for caviar.

The next three years were spent perfecting a way to harvest the eggs of their 50,000 gastropods, reared on an open-air diet of herbs and cereals, and to tenderize them without altering the taste. The result: small, cream-coloured pearls that burst on the palate to reveal what the producers describe as “subtle autumn flavours with woody notes.”

“I once tasted the old caviar d’escargot and I found it dull,” said Laurent Couegnas, the head chef and owner of the Escargot Montorgeuil restaurant in Paris, which is one of a few places to serve the delicacy. “But when Dominique let me taste his product, it was something different, very interesting, slightly salty,” he said.

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