Hama Hama® Oyster Blog

Tube feet in action! Today the sea star was doing laps around the aquarium. Maybe he ate too much over the weekend?

We sped it up to double time, and it’s still pretty slow.

A couple of months ago Adam pulled some seed out of a grow-bag and brought it into the store to shuck. The oysters had led sheltered lives… they hadn’t yet been tumbled or tossed around on the beach, and so they had soft, brittle shells that broke into pieces when we shucked them.

You might be upset if you ordered oysters in a restaurant and that mess arrived on your plate!

The Hama Hama Oyster Mama was so strong in her twenties that she could twist an apple into two pieces. Now we’re taking it a step further and opening oysters with our bare hands.

It helps, of course, to have burly hands and a wimpy oyster.

Purple varnish clams, aka mahogany clams or Nuttalia obscurata, are yet another invasive from Asia. About two decades ago they were introduced to the West Coast from ship’s ballast waters.

Varnish clams are bimodal benthic feeders, which is a fancy way of saying they can filter food out of the sand and eat whenever they please. Other clams have to wait until the tide is in to feed.

These clams are edible and you can harvest them recreationally in BC, Washington, and Oregon. A few years ago farmers in BC began marketing them as “savoury clams.” But just because something is edible doesn’t mean you should eat it. Although some people rave about them, we find varnish clams to be mealy, soft, and pretty disgusting. {UPDATE: This might be because we’ve only tried them in the summer, and maybe they’re more seasonal than other clams?}  They also seem to be particularly susceptible to pea crab infestations:

Final reason why we’re wary:  because they filter sand, they can potentially consume toxins or resting algal cysts that other filter feeders aren’t exposed to.

So, what to do with the varnish clam? Even though they’re not delicious, they are spectacular looking, so we started making earrings out of them:

Maybe we would have sold more if the photo had been in focus? Hard to tell.

Last thing about varnish clams: one time, while out digging clams for earring production, a family approached and asked what we were doing. We explained that the clams were bright purple inside and very beautiful and that we were going to use them for jewelry. To prove our point, we stepped on a clam, breaking it into pieces. But surprise! The clam was bright white inside. It was the first white varnish clam we’d ever found, and we’d smashed it. Since then we’ve found a handful of others. Has anyone else ever found an albino varnish clam?

Come explore the oyster farm! We’ll be opening up the flats for u-pick oysters (plus u-find mussels, u-dig clams, and u-spot sea cucumbers, sea urchins, moon snails, etc) on March 20th from 1 to 3, April 17th from noon to 3, and May 15th from 11 to 2. Bring boots, buckets, raingear if necessary, and picnic supplies, and email us at orders@hamahamastore.com if you’re planning on attending.

If you want to stay on the Canal and make a weekend of it let us know and we can recommend hotels, vacation rentals, and other things to do.

See photos from last year’s Open Farm Days here and here.

More details to come!

There used to be only a few of these little critters on the beach, now there are thousands. They’re very, very sociable, and like to congregate on muddy sections of beach. We didn’t know what to call them, but someone came up with the term algae eaters, and it stuck. Unicorn horn shell was in the running but deemed too fanciful. Their real name is Battlearia attramentaria, or Asian mud snail. They are originally from Asia (surprise!) and are normally associated with oyster farms… probably because they piggybacked in on the Pacific oyster when farmers first began importing seed from Japan.

To be really specific, they eat diatoms. And although ‘diatom eaters’ sounds really cool, it’s a bit of a tongue twister.

Oysters are legendary aphrodisiacs, and Casanova reportedly began each day with  a couple dozen raw ones.

Now, we would just write these statements off as old wives’ tales propagated by oyster farmers around Valentine’s Day, except that scientists have proven us wrong. It turns out that that raw oysters actually do stimulate the release of certain sexy hormones.

And of course, eating them with champagne doesn’t hurt much, either.

If you’re on the hunt for some oysters this Valentine’s Day, you can always buy some from us (!) or you can hit up one of the many champagne and oyster dinners happening around the country.  Here’s one in California (and not, as we first proposed, Miami) and a whole slew of them in New York City, which should not be confused with a whole slough of oysters, which isn’t very fancy at all:

Friday both the tide and the sun were out during the day, and it was marvelous.

Coyotes. So much less scary than these guys:

From the blog Food, She Thought:

I worship the oyster, but a creamy oyster grosses me out. Hamas, in my opinion, are beautiful bivalve perfection. Good for eating raw, yet substantial enough for cooking.

Hama Hama Oyster with Lemon Foam

Not quite as scary as the cougar, unless you happen to be an oyster.