It’s like tabby, only beautiful and easy to clean. The crafty folks at Hog Island Oyster Company scooped up some crushed shells (and hog rings, and other oyster miscellany) from their parking lots and added the mix to the oyster bar’s concrete countertops.
A Blue Pool, breaching.
Gray whales came to play in Hood Canal! These pictures were taken by Connie Gallant up near Taylor Shellfish’s research lab in Dabob Bay. For more information check out the Orca Network. Big thanks to Bruce for the heads up.
With Hog Islander John Finger and an absolutely gigantic elephant seal:
Don’t sit on the logs:
Hello from California! We’re on a long overdue trip to check out the oyster scene in San Francisco and meet up with our friends from the Hog Island Oyster Company. This morning we took a tour with farm manager Erik and his wife Brenna, in charge of marketing and communications for the company.
Here are some observations from the road:
1. San Francisco is a truly beautiful city, varied and vibrant. We drove out of the city in the fog and found ourselves on a uninhabited, sunny coastline 20 minutes later.
2. Parking is way easier in Lilliwaup. Our most ridiculous mistake was putting money in the wrong meter and then getting a ticket for being in an unpaid spot.
3. The Hog Island farm is picture perfect. It’s located in Marshall, a town so sleepy (in January, at least) and cute that it quickly banished all preconceptions of California as a crowded place of strip malls and cement. Marshall has no cell service and appears to give Lilliwaup a run for its rural money.
You hear a lot about San Francisco’s fog, and this morning the weather lived up to the legend. The fog was so thick that on the boatride condensation collected on our eyelashes. Later, once the sun started to come out, we saw a fogbow.
Hog Island grows all of their oysters in bags, either directly on the beach, elevated up a rack, or in a tumble bag. They grow kumamotos as well as Pacifics, and sell most of their oysters through their own retail stores, farmers markets, and restaurants. We feasted on their delicious Sweetwaters, which are beautifully shaped, firm-textured, mildly briny for being grown so close to the ocean, and as sweet as their name suggests.
Talking to Erik about his farm brought up a couple of examples of regional oyster vernacular: They call their tumble bags “tipping bags,” and refer to oysters that don’t make the grade on the first cull (and therefore need more time on the beach) as “returns,” while we call them “put backs.” (Figuring out that last one… that a return and a put back are the same thing… took a surprisingly long time).
Below you can see the eponymous island… small, wooded and pigless:
Once the sun came out and dryness again seemed like a possibility, Adam and Brenna emptied out the water that had collected in their leaky or too-short boots:
After the tour we bellied up in their fantastic picnic area and feasted on raw Sweetwaters with shaved horseradish root, local beer, warm bread, and grilled oysters poached in a chipotle garlic butter. Perfect.
Tomorrow we’re headed up to Napa to do some guest shucking at the Hog Island Oyster Bar from 2 to 5 pm. If you’re in the area, come by to say hi!
Here’s (part of) what’s been going on here at Hama Hama.
First, the river got invaded by a giant sea creature. We’re thinking it was a sea lion. He was an incredibly uncooperative photo-documentary subject and made a complete nuisance of himself: eating salmon, barking, and antagonizing the birds. He’s the giant brown blur in the photos below.
Then the world proceeded to get really beautiful:
Before getting really cold and white:
That’s the view upriver from the middle of the bridges. Believe me, there were zero cars on the road. The storm made life pretty hectic for the barge crew and the beach crew… picking oysters in the snow isn’t a dirty job, but it’s slow and incredibly cold. Here at the seafood store we entertained ourselves by smoking some oysters and going crazy with the steam cleaner. Fortunately we’ve had power throughout this entire storm and (going into it, at least) were well stocked up on hot chocolate.
In other news, next week we’re headed down to California to meet up with the folks from Hog Island Oyster Co. and shuck some oysters. Saturday we’ll be at Hog Island’s Napa Restaurant from 2 to 5 pm guest shucking (more details to come) and then on Sunday we’ll be at the Culinary Institute of America’s campus in St Helena, CA for Cochon 555′s Napa event. (This is a huge festival of pork… you have to see it to believe it).
Have a great weekend everyone!
1. Oyster Stout 2012 is brewing!
2. Adam gains a pretty impressive title. No, we did not write this ourselves. Hopefully this world is big enough for two oyster kings.
3. More about the above: Seattle’s Bastille Restaurant (in Ballard) is featuring Hama Hamas in their new Monday- Wednesday oyster happy hour. The newly-crowned Oyster King and other friends will be shucking and yapping at the Bastille on Wednesday, February 1st.
4. Lastly: our aquarium has officially come back from the dead. The poor little tank was sadly neglected over the summer, so much so that it filled up with worms. They were sneak-attack worms worms that hid in the sand most of the time and then would come slithering up the walls of the tank all at once for no apparent reason. Long and skinny, they ate every other living thing in the tank except for a few hardy shore crab.
Writhing mass of skinny worms eating gunnels alive = not what we had in mind when we set up the tank. This is gross and disturbing enough in writing, hence the lack of photo documentation, but here are some pictures of marine worms out in the wild.
The situational low point was when a little boy came bounding into the store proclaiming that he wanted to see the eels… and all we had was a tankful of worms. Some really good friends tried to console us for our bad tank management by saying that it was an object lesson in how important it is to take care of the oceans…. but everyone involved in that conversation knew it
was malarkey.
But now, Ta Da! The worms are gone. Big thanks to Kara and Mike for dumping the worms somewhere far, far away from the Canal. The tank has achieved a humbler shade of its former glory, and we’re in love with it once again. Crystal clear, it’s now a second home to a couple of cutie-pie hermit crabs that we rescued from the retail display tanks.
2011 started on the rocky side, when we accidentally deleted all blog posts back to April Fool’s Day 2007, but we quickly recovered and ended up having a fantastic year, minus the truck theft. We bought a new truck, built a Flupsy, built a downweller, attended the first ever Meritage Oyster Fest in Saint Paul, had lots of fun here on the farm, and nursed babies of all shapes and sizes into 2012.
Here’s a recap:
Blue Pool Oysters hit the shelves. We’re really proud of these little jewels, and can’t believe we’ve only been selling them a year.
First annual Oyster Rama. Washington Sea Grant led interpretive tours, visitors harvested their own oysters and clams, and we paid hilarious homage to tideflat work with the world’s first intertidal oyster sports competition. Plus, we ate a lot of shellfish. Even better: we were able to donate half of the proceeds to a local education non-profit, and we kept the party intimate and real with lots of local participation and flair. Some of the best feedback came from people who said the Rama “felt like a family barbecue.” We’re already cooking up ways to make Oyster Rama 2012 better, but not necessarily bigger… stay tuned for more details!
Restaurant Visits: We love it when restaurants visit the farm because A) restaurant people like to party, B) we get to figure out what they’re looking for in an oyster, and C) we get a chance to show them what makes Hama Hamas special. This year we had a blast hosting several restaurants, most notably the Urban Farmer from Portland and the Meritage from St Paul. If you’re in the restaurant world and would like to visit the farm, give us a shout out at orders@hamahamastore. We promise it’ll be worth your while.
Oyster Stout: We partnered with Upright Brewing in Portland to concoct a deliciously salty stout that, in the words of one our customers, “tastes like it’s been lost at sea for six years.” Oyster Stout 2012 will begin brewing in early January.
Farmers Markets: There’s nothing happier than a farmers market full of dogs and kids and bluegrass music and absolutely delicious food. We began selling our oysters at two Seattle-area Farmers Markets (U-District on Saturdays and Ballard on Sundays) in April and despite missing a couple of weeks after Truck Heist 2011, we’ve been going strong ever since.
Best Hama Hama Song of 2011: Guster’s version. Some of the Guster band mates visited along with the Urban Farmer in January and got totally psyched about the farm.
Oyster Babies: These guys will really shine in 2012, when we can finally taste them. This coming year we also hope to be able to sell the Olympias (the white oyster in the photo on the right) we’ve been raising for the past year and a half.
Baby Cheeks: Little Man is a good eater and a welcome addition to any meeting.
Baby Seal: Apologies for the blurry zoom photo but we didn’t want to disturb the pup by getting too close. While he looks lost and abandoned, he’s actually just in daycare. If you see a baby seal on the beach you should A) lock up your dogs and B) leave the pup alone. You can also call the Seal Sitters to come in and protect the pup if you’re worried about its safety. 
Happy New Year!
The tide bubbling down for the afternoon.
Given the recent beautiful full moon, and the eclipse, and the calm, still days we’ve been experiencing here on the farm, we’ve been thinking a lot about the tides. Of course, we always think about tides: is the tide high enough for the pump to turn on? low enough to expose the gold bar? high enough to take the Battle Axe out? and on and on. The tide sets our work schedule. You can’t even work in the retail store without being aware of where the water is, what direction it’s headed, and whether or not you should clean the live tank now or three hours from now.
But paying attention to the tide is not the same thing as understanding it, as that last sentence demonstrates: when the tide goes out, it’s because the earth and the moon move, not the water.
And that’s one of the lovely and unique things about working on an oyster farm: every once in a while something happens that rearranges your perspective on the world, and your place in it.
Read more about how the sun, the moon, gravity, and our watery planet create tides here.
it did.
Native blue mussels are smaller than their Mediterranean counterparts, but just as tasty. They’re flash mob mussels: some years there are hardly any on the beach, then the next year they’re everywhere. Occasionally, just for fun, they aren’t blue at all, but golden.
Every now and again, a customer comes into the store with her heart set on mussels, and refuses to be comforted by steamers or oysters. So in 2009 we went big into mussels… for one week… and fell flat on our face because they didn’t sell. Also, we were keeping them in the live tanks, which allowed them to byssal themselves up (yep, we just verbed that noun) into one big scoop-proof ball o’ mussels.
A few weeks ago we (very quietly) began selling small quantities of blue mussels (5 pounds per week) out of the cold case, where they can’t get up to any mischief. So if you’re one of those mussel lovers, give us a heads up before you head this way and we’ll stock extra, just for you. 888-877-5844
Gratuitous oyster picture:
