Briar DIY

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Briar DIY: Snails

Briar DIY: Foraging for snails

Will Brits come out of their shells and take advantage of our abundant native gastropods?

Can we interest you in some free-range English escargot? Credit: Kate Balding

Well-known for leaving holes in your newly planted bushes and easily traceable by the alien-like ectoplasm trail they leave behind them, snails are a staple of British gardens.

A popular delicacy amongst ground foragers, such as blackbirds, thrushes and the French, one must wonder why British noses are upturned by the thought of foraging for our native gastropods.

I decided to discover why snails aren’t a common dish on a British menu, by foraging and cooking the snails myself.

All snails in Britain are edible, they are in fact the same species that our European counterparts consume by the tonne. While all snails in Britain can be consumed, the small colourful ones aren’t worth the effort and the largest species, the Roman Snail are protected, leaving only the common garden snail. Luckily, as the name suggests, they are the easiest to find.

Preparation

A quick trip into your garden at dusk or after a downpour is the best time to collect a batch of escargots. Little effort is also required, after all they are not famed for their speed.

However, preparing them properly will take about the same amount of time it takes for the snail to travel across your garden. They should be collected from areas that are free from poisonous plants, slug pellets or toxic waste and, once captured, they will need to be kept in isolation for at least a week to rid them of any impurities they may be carrying.

Keep the snails in a breathable container, such as a wicker basket or plant pot with a snail-proof lid. A roofing slate or a makeshift wire-mesh roofing works just as well. Leave their new home in a shady place out of direct sunlight.

How to cook

Through my research of how to keep snails and prepare them I followed the advice of Gordon Ramsay, who foraged snails from his Wandsworth garden. He recommends leaving the snails without food for two days and washing them regularly. On the third day give them a carrot and leave for a couple of days. When their droppings have turned orange, you can be sure what is in their stomachs. Finally, wash the snails thoroughly and place them in a sealed container in the fridge. The cold will send them into a deep sleep causing them to retract into their shells.

When it comes to the pot, there are a variety of options used by different cultures, though some may sit better with you than others. In France, they opt for a salt bath before cooking, resulting in death by dehydration within a matter of minutes, and a puddle of frothy foam to clean up.

Since we have already put them in the fridge, there is no need for this. Make sure to give the snails a final wash before adding them to a pan of boiling water. Following Ramsey’s method, the snails must first be blanched for a couple of minutes. Remove from the water and let cool.

Nothing will prepare you for what a de-shelled snail looks like.

Then for the fiddley part, removing the snails from their shells. The easiest way is to use a long pointy object, such as a skewer to pierce the snail and pull it out its shell. This part of the process is the most difficult and distressing part of the process. I found myself having to crack the shells in some cases to get the snail out, and nothing will prepare you for what a de-shelled snail looks like.

Moving away from the classic garlic butter that is popular in France, I fried pancetta with some sage, then added the de-shelled snails to sauté, adding parsley, lemon and olive oil for flavour. Once cooked, add the snails along with the other ingredients atop a lightly dressed salad. I dressed my salad with balsamic vinegar.

After raising them for two weeks and then cooking the snails, you do form a connection to them, and I found my moral compass being tested as I dropped each of them one by one into a pan of boiling water, trying not to look.

Perhaps this is why they are not a popular British delicacy. It is an intimate process that you don’t normally have when cooking a meal at home.

Nonetheless, it is an easy and delicious meal that you would pay a premium for in a restaurant, with the main ingredient found in your back garden. Perhaps the easiest meat to forage, it is a surprise snail isn’t served on more British dinner tables. The process is slow, but they are snails after all.

By Rupert Birkett-Eyles / 12 June 2024

Briar DIY Recipes

Forage a full South Asian meal with me

Briar DIY: forage a full South Asian meal

Aysha Imtiaz spells out how to encapsulate the food traditions of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan and apply them to UK-foraged ingredients. We go through trial and error to chase that elusive, inventive spin so you don’t have to

This month’s “Forage a Full…” challenge is based on South Asian cuisine. Known for decadent feasts passed down from the royal courts of Mughal emperors, explosive flavours and eye-watering spices, South Asian cooking might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you’re faced with sprightly dandelions or wispy wisteria blooms.

Here, Briar’s team spells out how to encapsulate the food traditions of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan and apply them to UK-foraged ingredients. We go through trial and error to chase that elusive, inventive spin so you don’t have to.

Traditionally, local plant knowledge has been pivotal to sustaining robust food systems in the northern areas of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. While the more arid regions and sprawling megacities (think Bengaluru, Karachi and Dhaka) may rely more on cultivated crops and animal products, the confluence of mountain ranges in the Himalayas is a forager’s paradise… perhaps out of necessity more than demand.

Drawing from rural traditions and the indigenous wisdom of the northern Punjab regions and the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Himalaya mountains, these rich recipes are popular for staving off colds and celebrating festive occasions with your loved ones.

Appetiser: Pakoras

Vegetable fritters such as pakoras and bhajis offer a quick carb hit and energy boost. The base of gram flour and ‘holy trifecta’ of red chili powder, turmeric and salt readily embraces a wide variety of flavours and foraged greens. While spinach and coriander leaves are most commonly used in South Asia, essentially, what you need is any kind of green that can be chopped and mixed into the batter.

While trying our own version of nettle pakoras we found the peppery, rocket like taste of nettle to meld beautifully with the welcoming canvas, while a more citrusy green such as foraged wood sorrel may be too overpowering.

Depending on what time of year you’re making this, try watercress, borage, garlic mustard, dandelion leaves and chickweed. Take care to remove the stem and finely chop the leaves. As our correspondent found, the stems can turn very slimy, very fast.

Take it further: Use your foraged greens for a variety of South Asian fried delicacies, either folded into a mashed potato mixture for samosas or sprinkled over fried garbanzo bean chaat. Just watch out for the ratios and treat it as a garnish rather than the main event, and try to use the younger leaves, as pungent leaves can overwhelm the gram flour base.

Main: Saag

Saag is a term used to describe a sumptuous blend of cooked down greens tempered with mustard oil and garlic. It is a favourite in the winter months due to its inherently warming quality, as South Asian cuisine relies on an ancient system of assigning foods with innate warm or cold qualities. The reason saag works so well for foraged meals is because the greens are endlessly customisable – use spinach on its own, add vegetable tops, throw in foraged greens, toss in chopped broccoli or do all of it, all at the same time. The complexity of flavours, here, rather than overpowering the dish, adds to a multi-layered complexity.

Try dandelion leaves, primrose leaves, sea beet, young shoots of goosegrass, young Hawthorne leaves and even a small handful of boiled nettle. This is a perfect dish for when you have a merry little symphony of foraged greens.

Take it further: Use edible flowers to top the dish and add a delicate sweetness and beautiful pop of color against the verdant green canvas. Calendula, marigold, basil flowers and violets or pansies can elevate your saag, but avoid rose petals, carnations or wisteria as the sweetness may interfere with the deep, earthy notes of the dish.

Dessert: Vermicelli pudding

Nothing says togetherness better than this dessert, which is intricately associated with the festival of Eid. Vermicelli cooked in milk until it thickens and garnished with coconut and an assortment of nuts makes for a hearty dessert on its own, but adding foraged flower-infused sweetness can help impart a more summery taste.

Traditionally, vermicelli pudding is topped with expensive garnishes such as edible flattened silver leaf. However, using floral notes can bring this decidedly royal dish down to earth. Steep any sweet flowers you’ve foraged in cream overnight, we recommend using measurements from Briar’s recipe.

Take it further: Instead of making the foraged flowers a small side, it may be worth omitting coconut and dried fruit entirely for a lighter, more cholesterol-friendly version of the dish.

So, there you have it, a beginner’s guide for UK-based foragers to using their plentiful bounty and making South Asian cuisine. With such intricate layering of flavours and elaborate cooking techniques, the cuisine is actually more receptive to foraged ingredients than we had thought. Using local ingredients also helps impart a milder, lighter taste to suit diverse palates.

What’s next – squirrel biryani?

By Aysha Imtiaz / 29 May 2024

Briar DIY

What happens when you take kids foraging?

Briar DIY: what happens when you take kids foraging?

How receptive is the mini Briar-forager-to-be generation? I took my eight and six-year old kids foraging at Beckenham Place Park to find out

Dandelion picking is a firm favourite. Credit: Aysha Imtiaz

As with most things involving young children, Pinterest presents foraging as a dreamy blend of smiling cherubs, plentiful bounties and holistic development. It was this happy imagery that dominated our discourse when my husband and I decided to take our children – eight-year-old twin boys and a six-year-old daughter – foraging in the sprawling woodland of Beckenham Place Park.

Would an afternoon spent foraging rekindle a primal connection with nature, we wondered, and sow seeds of self-sufficiency? Would it be only the beginning of a lasting family tradition of fully-foraged Friday night dinners? There’s a special sort of joy in venturing out into the wilderness and being one with the land, in tune with the seasonal cadences of nature.

Then, there’s reality.

Armed with a jute sack, craft scissors and lots of decidedly unforaged snacks of cookies and juice, we set off for our journey. Here are five unexpected things I learned from the experience.

There’s more tech than you think

Sans guided tour or ancestral wisdom, and with many foraging-gone-wrong horror stories fresh in our minds, we found foraging, counterintuitively, to be quite a plugged-in exercise. We’d see a plant, identify it on LeafSnap and immediately Google “Is X edible”. However, even if the answer was a resounding yes, the inflated risk in our minds meant we then plopped down to search other variants of the question: are all parts of X edible? Does X look deceptively similar to Y, which is actually lethal? What can the unassuming X be confused with or contaminated by? More often than not, we ended up unconvinced that said ingredient was, indeed, what we thought it was. At the very least, we ended up online for a long time.

The ethics quickly become murky

My son’s immediate declaration when I told him we could find food for free and take it home? “That’s illegal.”

In a world of such staunchly enforced borders and ideas of ownership, the blurred boundaries of food from the land and of the land was difficult for him to reconcile. Who owns these foraged ingredients, and if we can forage in the park, why not gather some wild craft materials from that lovely rose bush in our neighbour’s garden, or forage for rollerblades while we’re at it? Where is the line?

It’s a bit of a slippery slope: where does nature’s abundance end and private ownership begin? Not to mention, “Those hard-working plants who spend all this time making babies and we just kidnap them,” courtesy of my fiercely loyal daughter.

For the latter at least, I had read about 1/3 rule where you forage only a third of the plant, and spoke to the kids about leaving an area better than when you found it, as well as acquainting themselves with non-native species. We didn’t fully shake the feeling that this might somehow be wrong though and were less than happy doing it in full public view.

They understand the ‘what’ more than the ‘why’

While intellectual discussions theorizing the foraging mindset weren’t particularly fruitful, children are wonderfully skilled at embracing the tactical nitty-gritties. Once a specific type of plant was identified, they gleefully plucked off Hawthorne buds or Dandelion stems. That was likely the high point of our experience, as they genuinely felt they were part of nature’s elaborate scavenger hunt.

Fully embracing the persona, they became confident tour-guides – almost deceptively and scarily so. “We are in the heart of the Amazonian jungle,” my daughter brazenly declares under the perpetually overcast British sky. “And this plant that you see here is Teliza,” she motions, basing her knowledge off unreliable sources such as The Lion King.

Children expect some sort of output or finale…

As we trudged on, it was difficult to explain when, exactly, one can tick the box that foraging is “done”. My younger twin failed to realise why we were “Hiking for an hour instead of going to Sainsbury’s when I’m already starving,” but when he got into it, they found many things they wanted to forage on the way home – not recommended because of the pollution and special dog vinaigrettes. In hindsight, it would have been best to cook with the foraged produce immediately as it lacked immediacy and gratification the next day. Going forward, we will schedule our foraging adventures with time built in to enjoy nature’s bounty shortly afterward to make it more meaningful.

…But they remember the experience anyway

Despite all our hiccups, I’m confident there will be a next time. Overall, foraging with children – whether you’re the cool aunt/uncle, a teacher, cousin or the parent yourself, leaves an indelible imprint and opens the door to many intriguing conversations. While they may not become expert foragers right away, children will remember something that, perhaps sadly, is a novel experience for them in their increasingly hyper-connected, urban world: “Remember that day we went to find our own food out in the jungle, Mama?”

By Aysha Imtiaz / 17 May 2024