Shellfish of the Day: Fresh Live Whelk Snails!

Do you like Snails? I do! When it comes to fresh live Snails, I like to just simply steam them and dip with butter! Have you had Whelk Snails before? They have a unique shell shape and come in many different sizes. I went to a Seafood market over the weekend and grabbed 3 lbs of these snails! It's pretty easy to cook but slightly tricky to eat!

Ingredients:

3 lbs of fresh live Whelk Snails
Butter
Lemon

Instructions:

1. Submerge all the Whelk Snails in a pool of water to allow the snails to excrete any dirt/rocks/etc for couple minutes

2. You'll need to repeat the above steps with a fresh pool of water for a couple of times until there's no visible dirt/rocks/etc
3. Now some stubborn dirt/rocks/etc are still stuck on the shell itself and will require some brush to remove.
4. Perform one final wash of all the snails and prepare to steam!
5. Depending on the size of the snails, aim for steaming them from 10-15 minutes. Be careful though if you overcook them, they tend to be more chewy/rubbery than desired. The perfect time is merely best guessed through trial and error. I think 10-11 minutes is ideal for my size/amount of snails.

6. Now melt some butter and squeeze lemon over it as your dipping sauce. Another option could be to use Soy Sauce instead.

How to eat them??

• Simple grab two to three toothpicks together and stab the snail meat as inside/deep as possible and pull the meat out of the shell in the direction of how the physical shell is spirally outwards. The hard lid on the snail is not edible and needs to be removed before eating. Also the dark piece/tail end of the snail is not edible either so be sure to remove before eating!