How do you erase mountain lion to install snow leopard?

Hi, My mother now has a new to her late 09 mini that originally shipped with snow leopard. When she bought it it came with mountain lion preinstalled from a private seller. We were thinking that to be on the safe side that it might be better to erase and install what's on it just to be sure it is secure. I tried to erase and install snow leopard from a disk but it says that the installer is not compatible with this version of osx(mountain lion). Question: How do I erase mountain lion and install snow leopard?
I've read here that there is possibly a built in recovery disk that I can use to erase and reinstall mountain lion. Q: Is there a built in recovery disk available in my situation? and if so should I use it or be even safer by installing snow leopard instead?
Thank you,

I think I found the answer (from sl install disk use disk utility to erase then install sl). Thanks for looking.

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