hello my name is Simone Nicole and today on how to heroes I'm going to show you how to clean and shell conch whole-life conch here we have a conch it is a large sea snail basically conch is delicious if you haven't tried it before it's similar to scallops or abalone it's sweet it has a firm texture it's really it's delicious if you haven't tried to go out and get one in the Caribbean where conch is eaten very often you use a hammer to break a hole in the top of the spiral and then you try and gradually force the snail out of its shell they can be pretty stubborn and they don't like leaving very often I actually just break the shell in halves remove it okay so here we go I take a dish towel and I cover the shell you don't want pieces of shell coming up and getting in your eyes or hitting you in the face I have a bowl for the show then I have a bowl for the meat and with the back of a heavy cleaver or a mallet all you do just take it you don't you don't want to just crack it in halves like that because if you were to do that the shell will cave in on itself it'll crush the meat instead what you want to do is you just want to knock you can see there's the snail coming out of his shell there we go now that we have the shell broke in the next part is to remove the conk from its shell and you do that like just grabbing it and giving it a firm twist and there you have the conch hole after you've removed the conch from its shell you just want to make sure to rinse it really thoroughly and clean your entire work surface just to make sure that there's no shell or debris anywhere while you're cleaning okay now that we have gotten the conch out of his shell and we've cleaned it we're going to trim and cut it basically clunk you want to remove all of the dark parts and there's also a hard shell here on the bottom and it's innards which you don't necessarily want to eat so we'll start by just trimming the top right off of it set that aside on the bottom you can see there's a hard shell it looks like a mussel shell that's its foot and you also want to remove the foot and you can see this is the firm white meat that you're really going for it and it's really delicious stuff so I generally make a cut down the back and then just trim off the dark parts trim all the way around the flesh is very firm it's not like fish at all all right so there we have it we've removed the tough darker skin from the exterior of the conch now we just have its white flesh left and want to cut it depending on how you plan on serving this is how thick or thin you plan on cutting and today I'm going to call it cut it relatively thin but if you were to grill these you would want to cut thicker pieces so just a few slices there we have it that's our conch chop disassembled cleaned and removed from the show