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A decade ago, I wrote a book called A Geography of Oysters that celebrated the romance of oysters, the primal rush of slurping a raw denizen of the sea, and the mysteries of molluscan terroir. The book struck a chord, and American oyster culture has been in overdrive ever since. Where there used to be a few dozen places in the country from which you could get great oysters, and a few dozen in which you could eat them, now there are hundreds. But with every bored banker throwing a few oyster cages off his dock, and every dive bistro reinventing itself as an oyster bar, oyster know-how hasn’t kept up. I’ve never seen so many scrawny, mangled oysters going down so many clueless gullets in my life.
It’s high time for a primer. Over the past year, I’ve been visiting oyster farms and oyster bars across North America for a new site called Oysterater and a new book called The Essential Oyster. During that time I’ve settled on twenty rules for choosing—and dispatching—oysters. Use them, set your friends straight, and for God’s sake tell your servers. Viva la revolución.
The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans taste different, and oysters draw most of their flavor from the waters they live in. The Atlantic is a pure, sharp brine, while the Pacific is sweeter and more kelpy, like miso soup. Keeping that in mind can help steer you toward your oysters of preference, especially if you also:
Most of the oysters consumed in North America are either the Eastern oyster (from the Eastern seaboard to the Gulf of Mexico) or the Pacific oyster (from British Columbia to Baja). The Eastern tastes like brine and broth with a sweet-corn finish. The Pacific tastes like cucumber or watermelon rind. Hugely different. Most people strongly prefer one or the other. A classic example of an Eastern oyster would be an Island Creek, from Duxbury Bay, Massachusetts. A classic Pacific would be a Hama Hama from Washington’s Hood Canal. There are also four other minor species of oysters you might encounter. Kumamotos are like baby Pacifics, and have even more of that green-melon flavor. European Flats, also known as Belons, are the native oyster of Europe and taste like a battery terminal covered in iodine. Olympias, the only oysters native to the West Coast, are tiny and taste like a Bloody Mary. Kiwas, the native oysters of New Zealand, are closely related to the European Flat and are, pound for pound, the most ferocious oyster I’ve ever tasted. They are only now becoming available in the United States. Try one if you dare.
All day long, oysters pump seawater through their bodies, filtering out the plankton. They become just as salty as their environment—which can vary a lot. The upper section of Chesapeake Bay has only one-third the salinity of the ocean. Estuaries like Puget Sound and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence are in between. If you’re a full-on brine hound, look for oysters grown in pure ocean water, like Fishers Islands and Hog Island Sweetwaters. If you like an oyster with a fresh, mineral bite, look for oysters tucked near river mouths, like Murder Points. If you prefer balance, split the difference. Oysterater maps all the world’s oysters, so you can make a pretty good guess about salinity and water temperature, which will help you to:
Oysters are strongly seasonal. They eat algae, which generally have a big bloom in the spring (as soon as water temperatures begin to warm), proliferate through the summer (when sunlight is abundant), tail off in the fall, and go dormant in winter. Oysters go into hibernation in the winter, when their food supply disappears, just like bears—and to survive the winter dormancy, they stuff themselves in late fall. They get plump and sweet, then live off their reserves. By early spring, they are emaciated. So: Most oysters I know are best from November through January. Far northern oysters, which have to survive the longest dormancy, can be crazy sweet around Thanksgiving or Christmas. They also suck in March and April, when southern and Pacific oysters have already been feeding and fattening for a month or two. Following these trends will lead you directly to Rule No. 5:
More often than not, the oysters served in raw bars look like this—a shrunken gray ghost in a pool of seawater. That oyster is running on fumes: no fat, no glycogen, no reserves, no sweetness. It’s just going to taste like saltwater. An oyster should be plump and opaque, completely filling the shell, like these Beauregard Islands here. That photo was taken in April, when Gulf Coast oysters had been feeding heavily for months, but Northern oysters are still sleepy and starved. Among other things, this means:
I’m so bored with northern chefs telling me they don’t serve southern oysters because southern oysters aren’t salty, firm, or safe. These chefs haven’t kept up with the times. It used to be that the last great wild-oyster harvests came from Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, so these were the only southern oysters most people had ever tasted. Wild oysters are dredged by the ton and sold by the sack; they get none of the pampering of farmed oysters. They tend to be gnarled, muddy, and less salty, because wild oysters thrive in brackish waters—like Chesapeake Bay and the Louisiana coast—where their many saltwater-loving predators can’t go. That’s how the South got a reputation for bland, skanky oysters. But in the past few years, growers in the Southeast and Gulf Coast have been using state-of-the-art gear to farm oysters in super-salty waters, and they are cranking out some of the briniest—and best—oysters in the country, such as Virginia’s Sewansecotts and Alabama’s Point aux Pins.
Almost all oysters are farmed these days, and that’s a good thing. The debacles that are salmon and shrimp farming have conditioned everybody to think aquaculture is inherently bad, but shellfish aquaculture is actually the greenest form of protein production on the planet. Shellfish get all their food by filtering algae out of the water. You just put baby oysters in the water and take out market-size oysters two years later, leaving the water cleaner than you found it. Win-win. Also, oysters don’t move, so there’s no such thing as a free-range oyster. A farmed oyster gets much better (i.e., roomier) living conditions than its wild kin. Choose the farmed ones. Support the farmer. And forget the R rule (which suggests eating oysters only during months that have an R in them, i.e., September–April); that applied only to wild oysters.
