African snail is one of the many delicacies enjoyed by Africans in general and Nigerians in particular.

Snails are available in different sizes but the most popular one is the giant African snail because of its size.

Typically, it is cooked and added to different dishes and soups.

Despite the delicious taste and the general love for this dish, many people avoid cooking it.

This is because cleaning snail and getting it ready to be cooked requires certain expertise.

To make cooking snails easy, I would be sharing how to clean snails properly with the ingredients listed below.

Ingredients for cleaning snail

• Snail
• water
• alum

Alum also known as aluminium sulphate is used for purifying water.

It is also commonly used to clean and remove slime from the surface of slimy foods such as catfish, snail and so on.

Below is a comprehensive step by step detail on how to clean for cooking.

How to clean snail

• Break the shell of the snails starting from the pointy tip
• Put a fork into the broken area then pull out the snail
• Put all the snail meat in a big bowl

• Warm up enough water
• Pour the warm water into the bowl filled with the snail meat
• Put alum in the bowl and leave for 2minutes
• To make more more room for cleaning, pour everything into a bigger bowl
• Add more water and start cleaning
• Rub the snail meat with the alum to remove the slime
• Also remove the intestine at the bottom and put the clean meat in a separate bowl
• After the cleaning. the water will change colour and the slime will be visible
• Feel the snail for any slime and clean again until no slime can be felt
• After the slime has been removed, clean the meat with fresh water but this time without the alum.

Clean snail is ready to be cooked

Attached is a free tutorial video you can watch anytime.

You can access more free recipes are available on this blog.

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