Aw, shucks - CSA oysters are back!
When I was debating rejoining the Greensgrow CSA this year, last year’s oyster share definitely figured into my decision-making process. That being said, as much as I enjoyed those oysters, there is a serious downside. You had to pop them open yourself. Shucking is a bear. I think I may have actually only eaten 10 of my 12, because I mangled the shells of the other two so badly that I couldn’t open them.
I can reveal to you now how crushing this failure was to me last year. You see, in Anthony Bourdain’s cooking memoir Kitchen Confidential, he talks about shucking his first oyster as one of his seminal foodie moments. Like some phenom hitting his first pitch right out of the park, he made shucking an oyster sound like a mystical moment between food lover and food, where the worthy would find the oyster shell creaking open of its own accord.
Perhaps I was insuffiently pure at heart, or perhaps my psyche just needed time to integrate my new skill, but this year’s shuck went a lot more smoothly. First of all, I used a much sharper knife, with a very definite point (for once a year, I haven’t yet invested in an oyster knife.) When you pry open a rock from a tiny, tiny seam, something sharp and pointy is going to get in there a lot better than something dull and rounded. I got over my (very well-founded) fear of cutting myself, and used a sharp knife.
The instructions said, “run your knife under the oyster meat to separate it from the bottom shell.” Perhaps next year, I will have become skilled enough to avoid mangling my oysters in this process.
20 minutes later, I had all 6 oysters shucked (ok, and eaten.) 3 minutes an oyster isn’t going to win me any shucking contests, but I did get that tiny glow in my heart from defeating a mechanism evolved over millions of years to avoid that very fate. One step closer to that mystical moment, eh?
