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| FEATURES | BLOGS | DAILY DIG | GEAR |
SLUG SAFARI
Your yard tastes delicious
By CARA BAYLES
del.ico.us
reddit!
Josh Pitts knows where his food comes from. He hunts slugs. He unsuccessfully pursued a goose for Thanksgiving dinner on the bank of the Charles, while a few gentlemen who routinely use the river as their bathtub cheered him on. When the city of Boston forced him to shut down a coop of chickens he was raising in his front yard, he gave them to a farm, but killed and ate Fluffles, the cute one, himself. He's considering trying earthworms next.
"Especially with cultural things, where everything's socialized in a certain manner, I find myself trying to push those limits, just for fun," Pitts says. "I feel like a lot of people get polarized toward certain opinions without thinking. And just trying new things lets me not be part of that."
I'm on the opposite end of the consumption spectrum, the variety of vegetarian who finds a spider in the house and begs someone else to catch it and set it free. As a general rule, you probably shouldn't eat anything you wouldn't kill yourself. But slugs are about my speed. So on a rainy Friday, we went hunting in Pitts' backyard.
Summer is slug season. It's easiest to find them at night with a flashlight ("easiest" is a relative word), or on a rainy day. You can also set out traps: Toilet paper tubes stuffed with something irresistible, like old fruit, or beer in a buried jar, because, as Pitts explains, "Snails and slugs can't resist beer and will come to the beer and possibly drown." Great, I thought. Slugs have the same weaknesses I do.
But to hunt them, you just look on the stalks of small plants, and lift up rocks that sit near vegetation. I hadn't turned over a rock since I was a kid, and even when you don't find a slug, there's always something, like a teeming community of ants or white roots lacing the ground like veins. But finding a slug is kind of thrilling. While at first I'd shout, "I found one, it's over here," and point like a deranged spaniel, eventually I started grabbing them myself. You don't exactly start salivating when you discover a slug; many resemble clumps of snot, and they leave a trail of ooze on your hand. We spent about 90 minutes scouring before Pitts deemed the mission successful, estimating that we'd caught about 30 (I'd caught five of them).
The next step in slug cuisine is to house them in a container with herbs like sage, thyme and dill for a few days. "That also gives them time to digest whatever they've been eating, in case it doesn't taste good," Pitts says. "Not that it's bad for you. They only eat plant matter." Slugs, unlike slug munchers, are vegetarians.
You soak the slugs for a few minutes in something acidic, to kill them and leech their slime. We used water with vinegar and orange juice, but lemon juice works, too. Pitts' housemate, Joe Garrick, goes to culinary school and was up to the challenge of making the slugs more ... palatable. He diced them into the filling of stuffed mushrooms with goat cheese, and made an appetizer with slivers of garlic and slug, which was slightly more graphic, and not for the faint of heart (check out weeklydig.com for the recipes!).
"Snails are such a hoity-toity kind of food, a delicacy, prepared in very elaborate ways. But slugs are the same anatomically," Pitts says. "I think a lot of what we eat is subjective. Certain cultural standards dictate to us what we can and can't eat." Once you get past that, your backyard is crawling with food.
It may sound like a foreign experience, but when you chop them up (if you have the stomach for it), slugs just look and smell like tiny fish. And they taste earthy, kind of like mushrooms.
Actually, they're not bad at all.
