Entries tagged with 'oysters'
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[Photograph: Michael Nagrant] Though we are surrounded by the azure majesty of Lake Michigan, Chicago is generally not a seafood kind of town. Fed-Ex and dry ice have done wonders for the scene, but it's still pretty rare to find great oysters here. Even all the upscale spots around town that have raw bars are wildly inconsistent. Still, anticipating a recent road trip to New Orleans, I couldn't get the idea of raw oysters out of my head and I wanted to do a little pre-trip eating. But, where to go? I settled on the Coq D'Or in the Drake Hotel on the Magnificent Mile. It's the sister lounge to Drake's famous Cape Cod Room where Jack Benny, Marilyn Monroe,...
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L to R: Strawberries on the honor system, Chef Geddes Martin and his garden.Toni Hermansen popped open an tiny, briny oyster and handed it to me as I picked out a couple dozen bivalves at the Buck Bay Shellfish Farm on Orcas Island, a bucolic spot about three hours from Seattle. I slurped it straight out of the shell and thought: "Sold!" Actually, I had been thinking about taking home some Buck Bay oysters ever since devouring a half a dozen at the New Leaf Cafe at the historic Outlook Inn in Eastsound, the Island's biggest little city. The entire population of the laid-back island is about 4,500. And driving on the winding roads, you'd swear half the residents...
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"We can attest to Hog Island's oysters being delectably plump, thoroughly slurpable, and downright delicious." Oysters are dastardly creatures. You think they're innocent—sitting there on their bed of ice waiting to be shucked and devoured—and then your finger slips and before you know it, you've got a gash so deep it needs stitches. Only you just got to the farm and you're hungry, and if the oysters think you're giving up, they can think again! You slap a bandage on your mutilated finger and keep going, but by then you're bleeding so profusely that no one wants to eat your iron-laced oysters. So you pass the shucking knife and glove to someone else. And so it came to be that...
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Photograph by Robyn Lee Galveston Bay won't be harvesting oysters for a while, according to Misho Ivic, the owner of Misho’s Oyster Company in San Leon in Galveston County. Most boat docks, refrigerated storage facilities, and shucking plants are "in shambles," reports Robb Walsh for the Houston Press. But, luckily oysters are pretty resilient to hurricane weather. They are so adaptable, in fact, they'll change their sex from male to female or vice versa to keep population numbers up. Lance Robinson, a Texas Parks and Wildlife oyster specialist, thinks we should be okay overall: Short term, Hurricane Ike will have a detrimental effect on the Galveston Bay oyster industry. Long term, it will probably be positive. Of course Walsh...
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Photograph from clgregor on Flickr The French seafood industry just can't get a break. First a violent herpes outbreak killed an estimated 80 percent of France's baby oysters, and now authorities fearing contamination by a poisonous microalgae have banned the sale and consumption of Arcachon Bay's oysters. Oyster producers, up in arms, are threatening to sue the government for permitting the bay to become polluted, reports the Independent. But after several French beaches were invaded by poisonous algae and jellyfish this summer, scientists have suggested that a rise in water temperature due to global warming may be the culprit. The Independent suggests an easy test for raw oysters: "If an oyster is open, tap the shell. It should close right...
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Photograph from benjamin_harrison on Flickr First honey bees, then snails, now this? Baby oysters are mysteriously dying by the millions along the French coast from Normandy to the Mediterranean, in what has become the worst crisis to hit the French oyster industry in 30 years. There's speculation that warmer sea temperatures have generated more plankton and baby oysters are dying from eating too much of the tiny organisms. But that doesn't add up: why would adolescent and adult oysters remain unaffected? Why are some oyster beds completely killed off while others remain immune? The impact on the French oyster industry could be devastating. Officials are assessing ways to change the harvesting process in the next several seasons, and the...
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In his latest post, Gerald takes us into the Crystal Seas oyster packing plant in Mississippi where each worker hand shucks 8-10 oysters a minute. The oysters are triple-rinsed before being collected in six pound buckets and the empty shells are planted back in the Gulf of Mississippi to become the new homes for next season's oysters. See more photos on Gerald's website, Foodite— I especially like the the ones of the oyster "waterfall."...
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It will be a two-round championship match between these two popular and alleged aphrodisiacs. In the first round, judges will be fed a
three-course meal of oysters, then go home and have sex. In the second round, a
three-course meal of chocolate. After each round, judges will rate their arousal and pleasure on a scale of one to ten. Which will take home the belt?
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