Nikas Culinaria

If you love oysters you likely have your own way of describing the experience of eating them. If you don’t like them, you probably have a more vivid description. If you have never eaten a raw oyster but are the sort to give new things a try, a description may do you some good.

I will try to keep this g-rated but it will be hard because the experience of eating a raw oyster is an adult advanced topic. I will also ask your indulgence because I KNOW that this has been written about so much in mundane food writing that it can become cliched.

For me, eating an oyster is a transcendent and inherently frustrating experience. If you are positively inclined toward the family Ostreidae, looking upon their delicate membranes, laid bare, is almost more than one can tolerate in polite company. Their plump bodies repose in pearlescent beds surrounded by an incongruent rough outer shell. The naked and disturbing (revolting?) truth of their morphology creates a rigid tension as it plays against the pleasurable memories of previous oysters.

Each new oyster represents a new choice: Do I slurp it off the shell? Do I spear it with a tiny fork? Do I gulp it down? Or do I allow it to fill my mouth completely and do I chew all its different textures?

Until recently, I would gulp them down, but the gulping leads to frustration, mostly because that makes a dozen seem like nothing.

The odd juxtaposition between full and empty that you feel when gulping oysters - full tummy but the short and insufficiently experienced oysters - lead me to find a more intense experience. That is how I ended up plopping large dollops of extra spicy red sauce on the oyster which I had balanced on a crispy saltine. When all of THAT is gulped, well, its a much more satiating experience. But its not really about the oyster then, is it.

As a poor but hungry student in New Orleans, I would eat a dozen but then continue with the free red sauce and saltines, not REALLY missing the oyster (lots of cheap beer helps, but that would help just about anything in New Orleans in the hot humid summer, and, OK, hot humid winter too).

However, to chew the oyster is to be honest about what you are eating. What the heck does honesty have to do with eating oysters? I guess as I grow older, honesty becomes more urgent because missed opportunities and numb experiences waste what little time there remains.

To chew an oyster is to pop and crunch and swish and swirl all the jiggly “icky” oyster bits around your mouth. All these things blossom in your mouth, one of the most intimate zones we have. While that can be an adult experience, I really think it goes deeper, back into the oral phase we all pass through as little ones, just as my 8 month old baby boy is now.

To chew, you do not use jarred oysters from the grocery store. To chew, you get the oyster on the half-shell as I did recently at the fantastic “Feast in the Field” Les Dames d’Escoffier- Boston Fund-raiser held this last Saturday at the Allandale Farm, the last working farm in Boston.

I am going to share more photos and details on that beautiful event in another post but today, I will share with you the story of a collective of 12 farmers called Island Creek Oysters who obviously LOVE oysters and who grow simply fantastic little creatures for you to either gulp or chew.

I learned about Island Creek Oysters first in the Spring issue of Edible Boston, a fantastic foodie magazine here in New England (obviously a part of the Edible Communities magazine empire but it was founded and is run by the driven and brave Ilene Bezahler, read more about her here).

Subscribe to Edible Boston! (I get nothing if you do, beside the fact that I get to share this with you)

You can read about Island Creek Oysters in the article “DUXBURY PEARLS: ISLAND CREEK OYSTERS” (PDF) in the Spring Issue by Michael Kirkpatrick with the awesome photographs by Michael Piazza. A lot of the information I share with you below, I learned from that article.

Skip Bennet first swam into the aquaculture biz back in 1992 by seeding quahogs and razor clams into his little part of Island Creek in Duxbury, MA. Three years later and after so much hard work cultivating and marketing these two species, the quahogs were decimated by an epidemic of QPX (Quahog Parasite Unknown). Many of us would find this perhaps too much of a loss to go on with the risks of establishing a new clam bed, Bennet chose to switch species and grow oysters instead. He teamed up with fellow aqua-dude Christian Horne and they formed Island Creek in 1997. Boston area chefs embraced Island Creek oysters and the business has grown. Chefs further afield choose Island Creek oysters, try Thomas Keller of The French Laundry and Per Se. Not bad clientele, huh?. It seems that Per Se serves something like 1,200 to 1,500 Island Creek oysters A WEEK. These lovely bivalves have even made their appearance on plates at the White House.

My experience with Skip, his guys, and Island Creek Oysters was not so coiffed, I got to see them in action and taste some of their oysters in the open air in a green field on Allandale Farm in Boston.

One of their trucks.

They were the nicest guys and they were literally shucking as fast as they could and ALL AFTERNOON. There were some people who stood at the cute little boat filled with ice and ate oysters the entire time, eating dozens upon dozens of oysters.

Hey, it WAS a foodie event.

This would be the equivalent of an open bar of the finest years of wine for a wine lover.

I think their motto is a wonderful thing: “Eat all you want … We’ll grow more!”

Sites of Interest:

• Edible Boston
• Island Creek Oysters
• Allandale Farm

Technorati Tags: oyster, eat, raw oyster, indulgence, Ostreidae, membrane, plump, red sauce, saltine, New Orleans, beer, Feast in the Field, Les Dames d’Escoffier- Boston, Allandale Farm, Boston, Island Creek Oysters, Edible Boston, foodie, New England, Edible Communities, magazine, Ilene Bezahler, DUXBURY PEARLS: ISLAND CREEK OYSTERS, Michael Kirkpatrick, Michael Piazza, Skip Bennet, aquaculture, quahog, razor clam, Duxbury, QPX, Quahog Parasite Unknown, Christian Horne, Thomas Keller, The French Laundry, Per Se, bivalve, White House, shuck