Oysters Flashcards
Barcat
Harvest Locations: Chesapeake Bay – Virginia
Size and Availability: 2.5+ inches | Year-round
Flavor Profile: Very mild, but meaty. Salty start with a crisp, creamy, and slightly sweet finish.
Stingray
The Stingray is a quintessential Chesapeake oyster, plump, sweet, and lightly salty. in a bay that opens wide to the Chesapeake and has little freshwater river influence, it has 19 ppt salt—a bit more than its cousin, the Rappahannock River oyster, but still less than an Olde Salt or Northern virginicas. It’s the most balanced of the three Croxton oysters, not too salty, not too sweet, just right.
Olde Salt
Croxton’s take on the famed Chincoteague Salts, grown in the same salty bay. (The Croxtons also produce the Rappahannock River and Stingray oysters.) Olde Salts are very salty. They have a salinity upwards of 30 ppt, versus 15–20 for a true Chesapeake oyster. They taste more like the sea, because more of them is the sea. Thanks to that salinity, they grow fast, reaching three-inch size in just six months—a third the time of the Croxton’s flagship oyster, the Rappahannock River.
Malpeque
They are good transitional oysters, bigger and bolder than Beausoleils or Kusshis, but still light-bodied and clean on the finish. Easy to eat, with the perfect balance of sweetness, brine, and pickle-like liveliness, they make great accompaniments to a pint of lager. rival Bluepoints as most common restaurant oyster
Island Creek
Salty, firm, clean tasting.
Duxbury Bay oyster farmers, Island Creeks have an amazing butter-and-brine taste. They are as salty as all getout, making them the classic Boston partner for a pint of Sam Adams Lager, and every single one is delightfully firm and beautifully clean tasting, qualities that enabled Island Creek to win Best Oyster at the largest blind oyster tasting ever held.
East Beach Blonde
Charlestown Salt Pond, Rhode Island
3.5 inches | Year-round
Crisp brine with a buttery, sweet finish. Flavor Influenced By Salinity: 2.9% < 3.5% full oceanic salinity
Small tides with some freshwater input
Sand, gravel, and mud
Laguna Bay
Laguna Bay Name:LAGUNA BAY Type:PACIFIC Location:Baja California Flavor Profile: Plump, crisp meat, fresh ocean flavor, hint of cucumber
Sunset Beach
Species: Pacific Cultivation: Beach Salinity: Moderate Size: Large Region: Hood Canal salty, crisp, with a sweet melon finish.
Malaspina
A sweet, if mild, oyster with a distinct watermelon-rind aroma. Malaspinas tend to have creamy-white flesh and simple, narrow, khaki shells, toughened by intertidal life on the beaches of Malaspina Strait 150 miles north of Vancouver in an area known as the Sunshine Coast because it gets so little rain (at least, compared with the mist factory of most of coastal BC). The road network is virtually nonexistent in these parts, and few people are around except for the oyster growers. Malaspinas come out of some clean, clean water, and travel a long, long way to get to your plate.
Paradise
Harvest Locations Deep Bay, Southern Baynes Sound – British Columbia Size and Availability 2.75 inches | Year-round Flavor Profile Sweet brine with a creamy meat and light citrus finish Flavor Influenced By Salinity: 1.5% < 3.5% full oceanic salinity Tides: Two high tides each day of nutrient-rich water Bottom Makeup: Sandy bottom
Fanny Bay
Fanny Bay Oysters are beach cultured and harvested at a perfect half-shell size.
Harvest Locations. Baynes Sound - British Columbia, Canada.
Size and Availability. 2.75 inches | Year-round.
Flavor Profile. Full brine with plump meats and a sweet mineral finish.
Fanny Bays were one of the first BC oysters to become widely available, and they’re still considered the archetypal BC oyster—smooth, but with a pronounced cucumber finish. The town of Fanny Bay sits on Baynes Sound, but faced with a choice on an oyster list between a Baynes Sound and a Fanny Bay, which would you go for? The shells are beautifully fluted, as we expect for a tray-raised oyster. You never get a bad Fanny Bay. Somebody is practicing rigorous quality control in the Fanny Bay culling house.
Henderson
The Henderson Pearl oyster is a bag tumbled pacific oyster grown by the Nisqually Tribe in Henderson Inlet of the South Puget Sound in Washington State. The tumbling process takes place while the oysters are in the water using the tidal current to jostle suspended bags to create oysters with a smooth, hard shell and a very round shape. Henderson oysters normally have a deep cup, and tumbling actions accentuates that desired shell formation. Henderson Inlet is a shallow bay that is very productive with an abundance of food available for oysters to grow and fatten. They tend to be mildly salty, with an earthy sweetness and cucumber finish common in the pacific oyster.
Hama Hama
Hama Hamas are famed for their size, shell strength, firmness, cucumber flavor, and light finish. When you see a Hama Hama, you know it is a well-weathered oyster. The knobby, heavy, sand-green shells speak to life on the beach—not just for a few months, but from infancy. After all, every one of those larvae did it the old-fashioned way, conceiving in the wild and icy reaches of Hood Canal, navigating its way to the perfect Hama Hama River delta, then grabbing on to a piece of shell and holding tight. No two weeks in a warm hatchery bath for these guys. No one knows whether this makes any difference to the quality of the grown oyster, but I do know that when you bite into a five-year-old Hama Hama, you’re into something substantial. It’s a full-contact experience, your taste buds popping with salt and citrus, your teeth working, your nasal passage filled with aromas of lettuce and lovage.
Beausoleils
Beausoleils are farmed in floating trays in Miramichi Bay, New Brunswick, which is about as far north as you can push a virginica oyster
Kusshi
Kusshi resemble a Kumamoto, but it’s a plain-old Pacific that’s been tumbled into bonsai form.
Kusshis are grown in floating trays and tumbled very aggressively. This breaks off the thin growing edge and forces them to deepen and thicken their shells.
