9:50am Thursday 10th December 2009
By Ruth Meech
SLOW food doesn’t get much more leisurely than the latest addition to the menu at the BridgeHouse Hotel.
Ever dedicated to local grub with a quirky slant, the Beaminster hotel has introduced a winter dish with a distinctive, molluscular twist.
The Snail Breakfast consists of a piece of lightly fried bread topped with fresh snails and a quail egg, accompanied by mushrooms, black pudding, a piece of bacon and a grilled cherry tomato.
All the ingredients come from local sources. The bread is baked each day at the hotel, the meats come from Beaminster butcher Nick Tett, the eggs from a supplier in Sherborne, the tomatoes from Washingpool Farm Shop and the all-important snails from Dorset Escargot, in Witchampton, East Dorset.
Mark Donovan, who runs the BridgeHouse with his wife Jo, said: “We are so lucky to live here and be surrounded by so many wonderful local providers.
“Other counties seem to only have arable farming, but here we have everything. The hotel has been here for 21 years and has always used local produce, free range produce and, wherever possible, organic produce.”
He added that he hopes the new breakfasts will be seen as a very British alternative to the traditionally French image of snails served in their shells with garlic butter.
The snails are not tinned, like many molluscs used in French restaurants, but come fresh from Dorset Escargot. Tony Walker founded the company three years ago using 1,000 breeding snails imported from Serbia. After a slow start, in just under two years he had a consistent supply of snails and each week, 6,000 eggs are harvested.
They become marketable after about 16 weeks, when they are blanched and vacuum-packed before being sent out to clients including Gary Rhodes, Antony Worrall-Thompson and the Hotel du Vin chain.
Tony said: “For the chefs to be able to buy fresh snails is extremely rare, and the only real alternative are tinned snails that are not really a comparable product to the fresh ones.”
Mark agreed: “Fresh snails taste totally different to tinned ones. If you go to a French restaurant, the chances are you will be served tinned snails and the taste is different. Tinned snails need garlic butter but fresh ones have a taste of their own and are so succulent.”
At the BridgeHouse, chef Stephen Pielesz poaches the snails in a vegetable bouillon for an hour until they are tender and sautes them in garlic and parsley butter.
He said: “We wanted to get away from the classic French way of serving them, so instead we have come up with a great British dish with a subtle twist to it.”
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