Hama Hama® Oyster Blog

Oysters are hardcore about sticking together. When clusters come in off the beach we try to break them apart into singles, but it’s generally impossible to do so without damaging the oysters. Now scientists at Purdue University have figured out exactly why that is: the oysters are cemented together.

Oyster shell typically contains 1 to 2 % protein, and oyster adhesive (or what they use to attach themselves to each other) contains 5 times that amount. But as explained in this NY Times article :

oysters seem to use far less protein in their adhesive than other marine animals do. Mussels and barnacles produce a softer glue with more protein, while oysters produce a harder cementlike material.

For centuries people have used oyster shell to make concrete, so it’s fitting that shells contain a cementlike substance. (Concrete = cement plus an aggregate like sand or gravel). Oyster shell concrete, called tabby, is made of oyster shell, lime (which you can extract from burned oyster shell) and sand. Depending on whom you ask, tabby was either developed in Morroco, then spread to Spain during the Moor conquest, and then introduced to the Americas with the conquistadors… or it was used in the New World before Europeans arrived (although none of these structures have ever been found)… or it was developed by the British. Either way, the U.S. Atlantic coast is the world’s epicenter of oyster shell tabby construction. Early colonists used oyster shell mined from Native American middens to build forts, chimneys, and even vats to dye indigo.

Someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, we’re going to construct something out of tabby. Maybe a fence. Maybe a wall. Maybe a tower. Maybe an outdoor chimney. Maybe just a giant tchotchke. Stay tuned.

Read how to make tabby.

Read more about tabby’s history on the east coast.

 A couple of weeks ago we put the beginning touches on our very first tumble farm.

The tumble farm is an energy-friendly oyster pruning device. We spend our days working around the tide, and here we’ve put the tide to work for us. Each of the bags pictured above is filled with oyster seed and attached to a buoy. As the tide comes up, the buoys floats, and the bags flip up and tumble the oysters. The fragile new growth gets broken off in the tumbling process, and in response the oyster forms a deep cup instead of growing long and skinny.

Tumbled oysters don’t necessarily taste any better than a wild oyster, but they have a more consistant shape… they are a nugget of oyster, brimming with brine, and perfect for eating on the half shell.

Sounds good, huh? Stay tuned for availability.

(Read our earlier post about oyster conformation here).

We caught this oyster spawn event just at the right moment… 15 minutes later and the spawn was gone, dispersed by the currents.

Whose idea was it to designate August 5th National Oyster Day? Is there an Australian prankster embedded in the Bureau of Obscure Food Holidays who’s sabotaging our ability to truly celebrate our nation’s most valuable bivalve?

If you haven’t already heard: August is an iffy month to consume raw oysters. They might make you sick, and they might be spawny.  But maybe August is a fantastic time to be an oyster? The water’s warm, the sun’s out, you and all your friends and neighbors are spawning, and there’s less risk that you’ll be harvested and eaten.

Tomorrow we’ll be celebrating National Oyster Day by doing what we always do this time of year: frantically trying to recruit as much oyster larvae to our beach as possible.

The beach crew spent the morning bagging oyster shell. Later, during the oyster spawn, we’ll put the bags out on the beach to collect oyster spat in hopes of getting a good oyster set.

Spawn, spat, set. Read more about it here.

And we are unofficially naming February 5th National Oyster Day, observed.

Well, it’s that time of year again. Summertime. And the oysters are doing what they do: getting spawny. And you can no longer eat them raw because of naturally-occurring salt water bacteria. We’ve all been here before.

If you look really closely at the oyster in the foreground you’ll see vein-like patterns in the belly meat. Yes, this isn’t appetizing, and we probably shouldn’t show you. But it’s interesting and educational. This is what oysters look like just before they get really spawny. This oyster wasn’t milky, just soft.

And see the black specks on the oyster in the background? Oysters are strange creatures and they sometimes have black stuff on them. It happens all the time. But last month we came across this story about a man down south who saw black stuff on his oyster and claimed it was oil. Oil and oysters don’t mix very well, but we’re thinking his story was much ado about nothing.

We sell two styles of oyster knife in the store: a Dexter Russel with a long blade and a generic short handled knife with a short blade. The size of the blade you need depends on the size of the oyster you’re attacking: bigger oysters need a bigger blade. Our shucking crew uses Dexter Russel knives sharpened to a dagger’s point. At oyster tasting events we stick with the short-handled blades… they’re all the horsepower you need for an extra small oyster.

The collection pictured below was assembled by the folks at Oyster Aficionado. We found it on Rowan Jacobsen’s blog.

Over at chowhound folks have been discussing oyster knives and their relative merits. Curved blade or flat? Short handle or long? Wide or narrow?  Here’s our advice on oyster-opening tools: stick to what you’re used to, don’t buy an expensive knife if you’re not going to use it very often, and whatever you do, never use a folding pocket knife.

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.

Juan, John, Roberto and Pina shuck oysters, with Miguelito on forklift.

The shucking room is refrigerated, hence the hats, jackets, and the bit about short sleeves.

Here are the oysters reproducing earlier this summer:

(Read more about spawning oysters in our earlier post.)

Now here are their babies:

The black specks on this shell are miniature oysters. When left to their own devices, oysters grow on top of other oysters in one giant bundle of oyster love. This is the main reason the state requires harvesters on public beaches to leave oyster shells on the beach. When you remove an oyster shell from the beach, you kill the baby oysters living on that shell and demolish a potential home for future oyster larvae.

Oyster farmers in the Hood Canal are lucky to be able to farm naturally-set oysters. We have all sorts of tricks to recruit new oysters and keep our beaches fully stocked.. we put bags of oyster shell (or cultch) out on the beaches during the spawning season and we string bags of suspended cultch from floating barges. A couple of decades ago, it was common for farmers to plant forests of concrete-covered lath in the tideflats to catch oyster spat.

Now we can also buy baby oyster seed from hatcheries:

And put them out on the beach in bags until they’re big enough to fend for themselves:

The bags roll around in the current when the tide comes in. They serve two purposes: they protect the fragile oyster seed from predators, and they tumble the new growth off of the oysters, encouraging them to develop a deeper cup and more desirable shape.

We’ve never noticed before how colorful Olympia oyster shells are. They’re full of earth tones: browns, deep purples, and mossy greens.

There are places on the farm where Olympias are abundant. They live on and amongst the larger Pacific oysters. These particular Olys had the misfortune to be attached to Pacific oysters that came up to shore to be shucked. We pried about 50 of them off the Pacifics, ate a couple, and put the rest out on the beach.

If you’re at all interested in learning more about the history of the Olympia oyster, we highly recommend Rowan Jacobsen’s newest book, The Living Shore. It’s a beautifully written, meditative book about humanity’s relationship with shellfish and the intertidal world. The book was released on September 1st and is available at Amazon for $14.70.