A Day in the Life of an Oyster
A Perfect Food
“I had my first oyster. Now, this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity — and in many ways, more fondly.” ― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, 2000
I see you sitting there, glowing from too much Rosé. You slurp a pearl of meat and brine from a craggy shell. The flesh is cool and soft and textured ever so slightly. You chew and consider. Perhaps close your eyes for a moment, the best way to enjoy the bite. Curl your toes if you like, no one will know. Flavors develop as you chew: sugar, seaweed, ocean water. You wash the briney-sweet liquor down with a sip of whatever happens to be in a glass in front of you. You get that subtle ocean breath across your palate, mingling with whatever you just drank. You are not full yet, after all, you’ve only had six bites. You only feel refreshed, and your palate is stimulated. You are ready for whatever else your meal will offer, as well as the rest of the night. Ah, the joys of eating the oyster. You want more, and you should be satiated. Order another dozen, why don’t you?
Whether near the coasts, or further inland, dining establishments gleefully serve oysters. It is one of the most ubiquitous foods from the ocean. I have known it to be a polarizing food, but those who love it do so with a passion. There’s a reason it tends to live near the top of the menu: it’s a perfect way to begin a meal. An oyster is bracingly refreshing and salty, a sip of cold ocean which prepares one for the meal to come. Best of all, it is an immensely satisfying experience without weighing you down like an anchor. You can put away a dozen of the things and still feel stimulated and ready for a generous meal.
Of course a chef loves the oyster. It is popular and will surely sell. It can impress in the way that few other foods can. Many luxury items require a bit of gussying up to really appreciate. At the very least, they deserve some creative reflection on the part of the cook. The oyster defies these rules. It is a pure thing and should not be monkeyed with. It is such an undiluted expression of the sea that you want to be able to taste every moment of its gustatory delights. Maybe a splash of Mignonette sauce or a drop of lemon will accentuate the oyster properly, but really you don’t have to do anything to it. Well, that’s not entirely true. You have to shuck it properly. It requires a touch of finesse to ensure that the oyster is free of grit, looks beautiful and is ice, ice cold. That being said, an oyster is an oyster, shuck it properly, keep it cold and you are done. It’s simple. It shows confidence and understanding of seafood. An individual who can select a beautiful specimen, avoid messing it up, respect its subtlety of flavor and appearance is deserving of some respect at the very least. The admiration of friends, family, and discerning gourmands can be yours if you take the time to shuck an oyster and let it be itself.
It’s a Farm I Can’t See
Merroir
There is one characteristic of the oyster that sets it apart from others in its field by leaps and bounds. An oyster would still be remarkable if it did not excel at this quality, what with its simple charms and refreshing talents. Perhaps you have heard us food people throwing around the word Terroir, as in “The terroir of this wine really expresses itself.” What we are saying by this is that you can taste the place that the wine came from. We don’t mean you can literally taste the dirt or water of the location in the product, that wouldn’t be very pleasant. Terroir refers to the unique flavors that the place of a raw product imparts upon it. Terroir helps create the distinction between a cheese produced in say, Île-de-France (where Brie is from) and Normandy (Camambert’s home). Brie and Camambert are both made from cows milk and are produced in a similar fashion. While they are recognizable as cousins, they taste different. Part of this is because of the Terroir, the unique circumstances of the land which the cows who gave the milk for the cheese were raised on. Tasting such uniqueness in food or drink can send the most experienced eater into fits of joy. Everybody wants something new or distinct on their table, and the best way to fall in love with that style of wine you have had a hundred times is to try one from somewhere else.
Farmers in aquaculture have their own word for terroir, which is merroir. It comes out to the same meaning: the conditions of the body of water, expressing themselves in the raw product. For anyone who has ever tasted salinity in some creature from the sea, merroir is self-evident. Merroir is the reason for the season when it comes to oysters. Yes, they are freaking delicious, yes they look cool, yes the are simple to serve and eat and enjoy, and yes they could fit on almost any menu anywhere. But what makes them so special is that teaspoon of liquor the little oyster sits in while it waits to be shucked and plated on a bed of ice. That tiny sip you get before you slurp the nugget of meat from the shell is merroir incarnate. An oyster drinks and expels 50 gallons of sea water a day. When they are harvested, they bring some of this ocean water with them. It lives in the shell and is literally the liqueur of the oyster. Remember when I said that tasting the dirt or water that was used to produce a raw product might not be all that nice? Not the case with the oyster. This sip of ocean water is what makes the oyster such a special and perfectly self-contained food. It seasons the oyster with salt and the distinct aroma of the ocean, and not just any ocean. The oyster tastes exactly of the time and place where it was harvested, not the outcome of the merroir, but the literal flavor of the ocean.
They’re so SMALL
A Story about Farmers
"At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind." -Michael Pollan, Interview by Helen Wagenvoord Sierra Magazine, September 30, 2004
In Duxbury, Massachusetts there is a garden. It is not made of soil and fertilizer and sprinklers like the one you played in as a child. It does not grow carrots or cabbages. It is a garden you cannot walk to. It is set in the ocean and its vegetables are not found in the produce section of your local Co-op. The gardeners look like the kids from the community college, but they don’t dig potatoes and beets. They grow a beloved food from seed and nurture it by hand into maturity. These farmers grow crassostrea virginica, the Atlantic oyster and their garden of brine and craggy coastline is the Island Creek Oyster farm. It is one of the most respected of its kind in the world. In the 90s a Duxbury local, Skip Bennett, was the only guy harvesting shellfish in the Duxbury bay. He was convinced the waters of that part of Massachusetts could produce a terrific clam. Unfortunately, all his clams died, so he switched to oysters. Those lived and were delicious so he became an oyster man. It was not insignificant that some years later one of the chefs from Per Se, while traveling Massachusetts after a kitchen fire closed the New York restaurant, discovered Skip Bennet’s operation and brought the oysters back with them. Skip was correct in believing his oysters were something special, and the oysters became an important part of the Restaurant’s signature dish “Oysters and Pearls”. The Oysters from Duxbury even garnered a shoutout on the menu, the sort of recognition reserved for the most prestige ingredients. Receiving this sort of acknowledgement from Per Se was a massive feather in the cap of Island Creek Oysters. A Chef will usually only refer to a product by name if the quality is unquestionable. When Per Se says your oyster is great enough to mention on the menu, it is truly a great oyster. It has been about 15 years since Per Se put Skip Bennet’s oyster on their menu. It remains enthroned there and in many other temples of gastronomy around the country.
As is true with any grown thing, the work of raising an oyster begins before the seed is planted. The diet of an oyster, like the diet of any living creature, must be well balanced. Although an oyster in the Duxbury Bay will feed upon myriad strains of algae, sometimes it needs just a little something else. Sometimes, an oyster seed is so tiny that its mouth cannot open wide enough to accommodate the rigid algae cells. Wild algae doesn’t care if it disagrees with a growing oyster, but the farmers at Island Creek Oysters do. There are labs at Island Creek’s headquarters dedicated to the growth of exactly the kinds of algae that the oyster needs. The farmers take tiny flasks, fill them with sterilized Duxbury Bay water and inoculate them with one of seven strains of Algae that they have deemed worthy to feed to their Oysters. From only a single cell of algae, massive tanks of perfect oyster food can be grown. This algae-laden seawater will be taken to a different part of the Island Creek Oysters facility called the hatchery to feed massive tanks of oyster larvae.
The Hatchery is like an aquarium at the zoo. It is full of tanks and flasks of all sizes to perfectly accommodate an oyster at a specific stage of life. It hums with the sound of water circulators. When it begins its life, oyster larvae is so tiny that the water in its tanks looks clear. After two weeks in these tanks, the oysters are ready to set, or to latch onto an old piece of oyster shell on which they will lay the foundation for one of their own. In the wild this occurs on reefs. A larval oyster will latch onto the shells of its forebears and live its life right there, without moving once. The result is many oysters clumped together. This is not an ideal situation for an oyster farmer. First, it would be difficult to have to pull every single oyster away from a large mass. Second, the farmer cannot control the appearance or size of the oyster’s shell. At a place like Island Creek Oysters, where the finest restaurants and most discerning customers will consume their product, aesthetics and consistency are a serious consideration. In order to avoid these clumps, Island Creek farmers produce single-set oysters which will remain as individual pieces. This is achieved by circulating larvae and ground pieces of oyster shell, in water. The larvae will find a fragment of shell and grow its home right there as a free floating particle. After it has set, the seedling oyster will live in flasks the size of beer kegs, each containing hundreds of thousands of its brethren. The water they live in must constantly be agitated so they do not suffocate themselves. Tens of millions of seedlings will be sorted to find the ideal size to be raised. They are then placed in a mesh bag inside a metal cage and deposited into the welcoming waters of Duxbury Bay to feed and grow.
One should understand that an oyster does not grow to the size at which they are sold quickly. The chicken you bought at the store took about 3 months to grow to proper weight. The pig that your bacon is made from took 7 months. That giant of American culinary delight, the cow, takes a year and a half. The humble Atlantic oyster, which comes in about 3 inches, takes 2 full years to reach maturity. The entire time those oysters are out there in the bay, the farmer is praying that something will not happen to their crop. Oyster farming is not a turn and burn operation. It is slow, methodical, and cannot be rushed. There is even a size requirement imposed by Massachusetts on oyster growers to dissuade them from selling smaller specimens which could result in a depletion of the resource. After an oyster matures, it is brought out of the ocean and must be sorted by hand. The process of hand-sorting oysters requires an experienced eye to identify the exact characteristics that Island Creek Oysters has become known for. Only the paragons of an Island Creek Oyster are sold.
When you consider the pains required to produce a perfect oyster, it seems essential that the final product is so perfect and delicious on its own. Why else would anyone bother to indulge the immense effort that the farmers at Island Creek go through to produce the delicious little bivalve? It is also stunning at how little Island Creek sells their oysters for. On average, retailers charge $3 for an oyster, while Island Creek only receives 50 cents per unit. Now, I understand that making sweeping assumptions about the motivations of people you don’t know is generally a poor idea, but I’m going to do it anyway. It seems to me that after such an involved process, where the oysters must be monitored constantly, fed a specific diet, kept in controlled environments and sorted through by the thousands to find ideal specimens, one can only really say one thing about the people who work the Island Creek farms. No matter how much money they make, they really only care about growing a damn good oyster.
Psst! You can take your own tour with Island Creek!