I was shopping at Wegman’s the other day and saw a can of escargots, just next to canned sardines and tuna ya know… Oh I’ll just pick up some escargots while I’m at the store.
I usually think of escargots as a splurge on appetizers at a french restaurant where they’re ten to fifteen dollars for a plate of six. This can sitting in front of me was around three dollars, but of course you’d have to have the shells or a fancy cast iron dish to bake them in. I was going to experiment and cook them in a pan with butter, garlic and parsley. Forget the shells!
You can actually buy the shells at specialty food stores and random places, but I had some puff pastry I’d made a few weeks back. I decided to make an attempt at vol au vents for the first time. Vol au vents are hollowed out little puff pastry shells that hold a filling. They’re usually about three inches in diameter and sold in the freezer section at the grocery store, or they’re on the shelves at supermarkets in France .
In fact the first time I’d ever seen a vol au vent was when I was staying with a French host family years ago. My host mom had to work that day and told us kids to heat up the leftovers and pop them in the vol au vents for lunch. This was probably one of the fanciest lunches I’d ever eaten, and the “leftovers” were amazing. It was a creamy pasta sauce made of italian hams, mushroom, and wine, herbs, and who knows what all thrown together. Amazing cooks the French. So anyways, we put this sauce in the vol au vents and had that for lunch.
I made my homemade vol au vents with a fluted cookie cutter and punched out the middle, then flattened out the punched-out piece to use as a bottom. I carefully reassembled the cups and baked them in my oven until they puffed up nice and tall. I let them cool while I heated up the snails.
After cooking the snails in a pot with butter, garlic and parsley, I put one into each cup and spooned a little sauce on top. I put them back in the oven for a bit so the flavors could meld together. Then, I ate them!
Unfortunately, I had made too small of vol au vents (two inches in diameter), and that’s why the escargots are sticking out of the hole…they didn’t quite fit. I guess I should’ve opened the can to see how big they were.
So how were they? The flavor was good, but the texture of the snails could’ve been a little more chewy to be honest. I thought they were almost fatty in texture. I guess I’ll just stick to ordering them at restaurants. But they were fancy looking at least.
