Hama Hama® Oyster Blog

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

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.

It has been really, really cold here for the past week, and the Canal is full of floating ice bergs. Above, Nathan and Miguel are cutting their way through the ice to reach the oyster tubs. When the tide goes out it leaves solid sheets of ice on the intertidal beaches.

Louie recalls that in 1949 Quilcene Bay and Pleasant Harbor Bay froze solid… and that somebody even took a horse and sleigh out on the ice. We’re not asking for anything that spectacular, but we do hope to be ice skating by tomorrow on some of the area ponds.

Hama Hama oysters are now officially ice cold.

This is both ridiculous and sad: To test whether or not oysters in France are safe to eat, officials inject three mice with oyster liquid. If two of the mice die, then the oyster producing region is shut down.

This year a failed mouse test caused the closure of the Archachon Bay region, near Bordeaux, for the 5th consecutive summer. But farmers claim the test is “meaningless” and ” a sham and a fraud” and, in defiance of the health department, are continuing to harvest and sell oysters. Read more here.

Hama Hama Oysters: Not Tested on Animals.

It’s been hot and dry for weeks, the water has warmed up, and the oysters are starting to spawn.  And this is actually a really good thing, because although we do buy oyster seed, we rely on natural “sets” to maintain the farm’s oyster population and genetic diversity. As Teresa puts it, the fact that the estuary is right now glowing fluorescent white with oyster spawn is “job security.”

The spawn looks tropical.

The fertilized eggs will form larvae and swim around in the Canal for the next couple of weeks before settling down and growing shells (a process called spatfall). During the larval stage oysters are highly susceptible to cold water, so we’re really hoping that there isn’t a big south wind, which would bring cold water to the surface and potentially kill off the oyster larvae.

We’re having some internal disagreement about the meaning of the word “spat.” Two of us think spat refers to the fertilized larvae, the product of sperm and eggs that were “spat out” by the adult oysters. Another thinks that spat refers to oyster seed. Fortunately, according to this online dictionary, we’re all right:

spat

The flotsam and jetsam is getting sillier every day.

Some oysters have absolutely no taste: yesterday we found one that had permanently attached itself to a fake snake.

Several years ago Cait and John stopped by our farm and collected oyster shells, saying they were going to use them in their wedding at the nearby Alderbrook Resort. At the time we didn’t think anything of it, but now we think they’re geniuses. Turns out that they turned the oyster shells into keepsake wedding ornaments. Yesterday they dropped off one of their creations and gave us the recipe. First they printed clear decals on their computer, then they attached them to the oyster shell, and then they double dipped the shells in a clear polyurethane. Easy.

The Nature Conservancy has just released the first ever report on the state of the world’s oyster populations. The prognosis is bad: 85% of the global oyster habitat has been destroyed by development, pollution, and destructive fishing practices.

Read the report here.

Short on time or attention span? Read a newspaper account of the report  here.

Update: Check out The Economist’s take on the report.

Trifecta! A Pacific oyster, a blood oyster (see earlier post), and a kumamoto.

Like the Pacific, the kumamoto oyster (Crassostrea sikamea) originally hails from Japan. Some people think the kumo is a variety of Pacific (Crassostrea gigas) that evolved in isolated bays and estuaries. Kumos can’t reproduce in Puget Sound or Hood Canal because the water is too cold, so the only way to grow them in these climes  is to buy seed from an oyster hatchery.

In the late 60s, when oyster aquaculture was in its infancy, scientists tried to create an oyster that would grow as fast as a Pacific but retain the deep cup and small size of a kumo. But according to this excellent San Francisco Gate article, the resulting hybrid oyster, called a “gigamoto,” was a disastrous watery blob. Unfortunately, the gigamoto oysters infiltrated the kumamoto broodstock, so for the next couple of decades nobody in the Pacific Northwest could find pure Kumo seed. Researchers and oyster farmers had to go back to Japan to get unadulterated broodstock to use in their hatcheries.

The near oyster is a kumo that spent the past two months on the HH delta; the far oyster is a Hama Hama Pacific. Hama Hamas are a very slow growing Pacific, and, at certain times of year, they have a flavor very reminiscent of a kumo. These two oysters, at any rate, were both deliciously sweet and clean tasting, and we’d pit our Hama Hama against a kumo any day. But we’re not exactly impartial.

And we include the blood oyster in the post simply because he’s beautiful.

There are two kinds of oyster beer: one kind accompanies oysters, the other is actually made with oysters. We’re more interested in the latter, because it sounds so outrageous.

According to beer guru Michael Jackson, in 1929 a New Zealand brewery began adding actual oysters to its stout, and in the  late 1930s a London brewery picked up the idea. In the post-war period (which wikipedia refers to as the “nourishing stout” or “milk stout” period) several British breweries brewed oyster stout.

Currently Bushy’s Brewery, on the Isle of Man, is one of the few breweries (and maybe the only?) to add oysters to stout. Here’s Jackson’s description of it:

Brunnschweiler uses oysters imported from England by a fishmonger on the island. He adds them whole, at the rate of a mere five or six per barrel, to the kettle in which the barley-malt and hops are brewed. The oysters melt away during the boiling stage, leaving just a touch of their gamey flavours to enhance the brew.

Bushy’s oyster stout: available only “when there’s an ‘ahh’ in the month!”

We emailed Bushy’s to see if there was any way (short of a trip to the Isle of Man) for us to taste-test their oyster stout. (We’ll keep you posted).  According to somebody on Chowhound, Philadelphia-based Yards Brewing Company used to add oysters to their Love Stout. But for now it looks like the best way to try oyster stout in the U.S. would be to make it ourselves.