[Sca-cooks] snail recipes

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Mar 5, 2008, at 11:56 PM, Stefan li Rous wrote:

> <<< But Khli is fermented meat that is done in an odd fashion... saw
> it on the
> travel channel Bizzar food.s >>>
>
> Fermented, in what odd fashion?

I can't really address the question of how this is especially odd, but  
then I didn't become exposed to this via a television show on odd  
foods, so perhaps my motives are different from those of The Travel  
Channel ;-). But I did happen to do a little web searching on this  
when the subject came up t'other day, and here's what I found:

Khli is meat, generally beef, cut into strips and marinated in a thick  
sauce made from crushed garlic, other spices and probably salt (I  
forget, but it would make sense) for 24 hours. Then it is dried on  
racks (remember this is North Africa we're talking about, so drying  
isn't difficult in the climate). The dried strips are then placed in a  
crock or jar and covered with melted fat, which congeals around the  
meat and seals out air and airborne pathogens, much in the same way as  
the French confits of semi-cured pork, goose or duck in jars of their  
own fat.

Standard usage apparently involves removing a piece or three from your  
jar, removing the fat, and frying it with eggs.

If they did this with bacon in someplace like Poland or the Ukraine,  
we'd be saying it totally rocked. I'm wondering if perhaps there was  
some artificial but local ick factor included in the TV coverage of  
this product, like maybe shots of fly-covered beef carcasses in the  
sub-tropical, traditional, open-air market? Or maybe the marinade  
looks like something that shot out of one end or the other of a less- 
than-healthy baby?

I'm just sayin'...

Adamantius