Cheesy garlic butter escargot
- Preparation 20 min
- Cooking 12 min
- Servings 4
- Freezing Absolutely
Ads
🐌 The escargot recipe I have been making forever
This one is mine. I have always loved escargot, and at some point I stopped making it complicated: butter, shallots, garlic, a splash of white wine, cheese on top. That is the whole thing. Twenty minutes of prep, a few minutes under the broiler, and you get a starter that looks like it came out of a restaurant kitchen.
The best part is that my boys love it. If you still think snails are something only serious food people order, hand a plate to a hungry teenager and see what is left in the dish.
🍄 Shiitake mushrooms, and no parsley
Two things set this apart from the classic. Shiitake first: it tastes earthier, deeper, and under garlic butter it brings a forest-floor note that a plain white mushroom will never give you.
And no parsley. Almost every version calls for it. Mine does not. To me, escargot butter is garlic butter, not an herb bouquet.
❄️ When the escargot plates come out
Christmas, mostly. And any cold night when you walk in the door and all you want is something hot with a browned cheese crust on it. Butter, garlic, melted Gruyère: the smell alone warms up the house.
Get the bread out. You are going to want it.
Ads
Ads
🍄 Shiitake is not a fancy detail
A white button mushroom would work. Shiitake tastes earthier and deeper, and it is what gives the butter its forest-floor bottom note. If your grocery store does not carry it, use what it has: the dish still works, it just tastes flatter. Chop them small either way. A big chunk of mushroom steals the bite from the escargot.
🛒 Canned escargot: buy the cheap one
You will find canned escargot in any large grocery store, in the specialty canned goods aisle. Here is the part nobody says out loud: I buy no-name or store-brand escargot and it is delicious. The imported label at three times the price does not survive a bath in garlic butter under a crust of Gruyère.
The 36-42 on the can is a size grade. The smaller the number, the bigger the snails. For an appetizer, 36-42 is the sweet spot: big enough to hold their shape, small enough for two bites.
🌿 Skip the parsley
Most recipes want it. Mine does not. Try it once without and you will notice the garlic stands up perfectly well on its own.
🧀 Cold plates, cheese over the top
Do not preheat your escargot plates. Take them out cold, spoon the filling in, cover it with cheese, and put them in the oven. That is the order, and it matters. The cheese has to cover everything: what you want is a golden crust that stretches when the fork goes through, not gaps where the butter escapes.
No proper dimpled plates? Any small baking dish does the job. I use the real ones, but that is a luxury, not a requirement.
🔥 Stand in front of the oven
Under the broiler, golden turns to black in about thirty seconds. Do not go answer the phone.
📦 Make ahead, scaling up, and leftovers
The filling can be made the day before. Let it cool before you cover it and slide it into the fridge, then broil only when you are ready to serve. It is the best way to host without spending the whole evening at the stove.
You can double or triple this easily. The only limit is the size of your pan: if the filling is piled up, it steams instead of cooking down dry.
Leftovers keep 2 to 3 days in the fridge and go back into the oven, not too hot. The microwave turns the cheese rubbery, so leave it out of this.
On freezing, the distinction matters: the filling freezes beautifully, the finished gratin does not. Cheese cooked twice is not the same cheese.
✅ What to serve with my cheesy garlic butter escargot
Bread, first and always. A crusty baguette, or my bread baguettes with olives, fresh herbs and beer if you have the time to bake. Half the pleasure lives at the bottom of the plate.
Then my white balsamic arugula salad. Peppery arugula and sharp white balsamic cut through the butter exactly where it needs cutting.
And if you are building a whole appetizer spread, put these next to my legendary Rockefeller oysters and my homemade parmesan fondue. Three baked dishes, three different textures, and nobody gets bored waiting for the main course.
Ads
Cheesy garlic butter escargot
- 2 cans (4 oz / 115 g each) escargot, size 36-42
- 2 tablespoons (30 ml) butter
- 2 French shallots, finely chopped
- 3 1/2 oz (100 g) shiitake mushrooms, chopped
- 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
- 2 tablespoons (30 ml) white wine
- 1 cup (250 ml) mozzarella cheese, grated
- 1 cup (250 ml) Gruyère cheese, grated
Ads
Preparation
- Set the oven rack in the middle position and preheat the oven to broil. Rinse the escargot well under cold water, then set aside.
- In a large pan over medium heat, melt the butter, then add the shallots, mushrooms and garlic. Cook for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring.
- Add the escargot and the white wine, then stir. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring, until the pan is dry. Season with salt and pepper.
- Remove from the heat and divide the filling among 4 cold escargot plates. Bury it under the grated cheese, then set the plates on a baking sheet. Broil for a few minutes only, until the cheese is deeply golden on top!
Escargot is cooked land snail, eaten as an appetizer in France and across most of French Canada. The snails are farmed, cleaned and sold cooked in cans, so the work of preparing them is already done before they reach you. The flavour is mild and slightly earthy, closer to a clam or a mushroom than to anything you might be bracing yourself for. Texture is firm and a little springy, never slimy. What people actually remember about escargot is the garlic butter, and that is not an accident: the snail is the vehicle.
Yes, almost certainly. Fresh live snails need purging, boiling and shelling before anyone can cook them, and no restaurant kitchen is doing that on a Tuesday night for a $16 appetizer. The canned ones are cooked and ready, which is exactly why they exist. So if you were hoping this recipe was a shortcut around what a restaurant does, it is not a shortcut. It is the same thing, in your own kitchen, with better cheese.
That is exactly what this recipe does. Canned escargot comes out of the shell already, and I never put it back in. The filling goes straight into dimpled escargot plates, gets buried under mozzarella and Gruyère, and goes under the broiler. Shells look dramatic on a table, but they make the butter hard to reach and impossible to share. If you do not own escargot plates, any small oven-safe dish works.
Snail meat on its own is remarkably lean: roughly 90 calories and 16 grams of protein per 100 grams, with almost no fat. That is leaner than chicken breast. The calories in a dish like this one come from what surrounds it, which here is butter and two cups of cheese split between four servings. Nobody eats escargot for the nutrition label, but it is worth knowing that the snail is not the part doing the damage.
Crusty bread, non-negotiable, because the garlic butter left in the plate is the best part of the dish. After that, something acidic to cut the fat: my white balsamic arugula salad was built for exactly that job. If you are putting together a full appetizer spread, my legendary Rockefeller oysters hold their own right beside it.
Ads
Ads
Ads
Ads
Ads
Ads