Buzz
Hey everyone, welcome back to a rich and flavorful edition of Will It Sous Vide?, the weekly series where I tackle any culinary challenge you throw at me with my trusty immersion circulator.
You might have noticed that this week’s topic wasn’t the most popular choice from our topic-picking session. While I initially wanted to dive into a crawfish boil, a few things made me change course. First, a crawfish boil requires live crawfish, meaning you need to kill them. Typically, this is done by boiling them alive, but sous-vide cooking calls for much lower temperatures, and the thought of sealing live crawfish in a bag and letting them slowly die in a 145°F bath didn’t sit well with me. Another challenge with a crawfish boil—or any type of boil, really—is the vegetables. Corn and potatoes cook at much higher temperatures than shellfish (around 180°F), so trying to cook them all together in one bag wouldn’t work.
So, I passed on that idea and opted for Carl’s suggestion of escargot instead. I’m a huge fan of snails and was curious if sous-vide cooking would make them more tender and less rubbery for a better eating experience.
After calling four different stores, I finally found one that carried canned escargot, along with shells for presentation. Since I had never made escargot at home before, I decided to do a side-by-side test: sous-vide snails versus ones cooked in-shell in the oven. Using this recipe as a guide, I prepared some herb butter with the following ingredients:
1 stick of butter
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 shallot, minced
2 tablespoons of flat parsley, chopped
2 teaspoons of lemon juice
Salt to taste
I combined all the ingredients with a fork and transferred half of the buttery mixture into a vacuum bag. After draining the snails, I added six of them to the bag, ensuring they were fully covered with butter, then sealed it up tightly.
I submerged the sealed bag with the snails into a 154°F bath for an hour. While the snails were cooking, I prepped the oven-baked batch.
My goal was to coat the snails with as much butter as possible. I began by spooning a bit of the butter mixture into each shell, added a snail on top, and covered it with more butter. Lacking a proper escargot dish, I used a mini muffin tin, which worked quite well. After chilling the tin in the fridge to set the butter, I placed it in a 350°F oven for 15 minutes, while the sous-vide batch had 15 minutes left to cook. The result was a bubbly, hot escargot batch.
When the sous-vide snails were done, I carefully removed the bag from the water bath, opened it up, and transferred the snails to their new buttery homes, which were remarkably similar to their previous ones. With plenty of melted butter remaining in the bag, I generously poured it over the escargot to ensure no goodness went to waste.
I placed the oven-cooked escargot in a bowl, toasted some bread, and prepared for the taste test. This naturally brings up the question: Will snails sous vide?
The verdict? Yes, they sous vide just fine. However, the flavor was nearly identical to that of the escargot cooked in their shells. Both batches were rich with buttery, garlicky, and earthy goodness, and I couldn’t discern a noticeable difference.
In terms of texture, there was a very slight variation. The sous-vide snails were just a touch softer than their oven-baked counterparts, but the oven-cooked escargot were far from “chewy.” The difference was so minimal that I’m not entirely sure I’d recognize it in a blind taste test—though I would have gladly tested the theory if I had someone around to blindfold me and feed me snails.
Additionally, cooking them in the shell keeps them hotter longer, as the shells themselves heat up with the snail. After removing the sous-vide escargot from their bags and putting them into their shells, I noticed they cooled off quite a bit by the time I was ready to eat them. (I could’ve served them without their shells, but they don’t look as appetizing without them, and the shells certainly help with presentation.) So, I’m not convinced sous-vide snails are “worth it,” considering they take longer to cook and taste nearly the same as the ones cooked in-shell in the oven. (Both versions were delicious, of course.)
