January 8th, 2010
I recently had the chance to eat a few dozen Hawk’s Point oysters from Willapa Bay on the half-shell, and it clarified something for me: Willapa grows the best Pacific oysters in the world. But it also brought up an old mystery: Why is it so hard to find oysters on the half shell from […]
January 8th, 2010
From the North Branch of Johns River in South Bristol, Maine (Pemaquid Light territory) comes a new oyster: Colonial Cocktails, grown by longtime shellfishermen Dave Cheney. This is classic oyster terroir, and the oyster delivers: stupendously sweet, briny, and with a surprisingly fruity flavor that you almost never see in east coast oysters. If you see these, […]
December 10th, 2009
Though I find it hard to believe, the hardworking members of the Kachemak Shellfish Growers Co-op, down at the tip of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, will actually schlep out to their floating oyster nets in the middle of December, land of the midday moon, and haul up oysters and ship them to your door. Crazy! But […]
December 10th, 2009
I call the Kumamoto “the Chardonnay of oysters” because it’s sweet, fruity, nonintimidating, and everybody likes it. Many consider it the perfect oyster. There are major Kumo farms in Oakland Bay (Puget Sound), Humboldt Bay (California), and Baja (Mexico). The oyster, which is the little cousin of the Pacific oyster that dominates the West Coast oyster […]
December 10th, 2009
The Mystic oysters coming out of the Noank River right now, longtime favorites of mine, are amazingly robust. In just two years, these babies have reached maximum-half-shell size. You have to stay focused to eat them raw. Their flavor is equally massive: briny, mineral, and more metallic than in the past. Serious, graduate-level oysters. How’d […]
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