Oyster Blog — Oyster World

Last week we traveled to Monterey, California to serve oysters at the Monterey Food and Wine Festival. It was a smashing success. So successful, in fact, that we didn't really have time to take photos because we were too busy shucking oysters... it was an "all hands on deck" situation.   The event was held in the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We recommend that everyone make a pilgrimage to the Aquarium sometime soon. We particularly liked the Outer Bay exhibit-- and feel like our lives are richer now that we've discovered sunfish. As for the wines at the festival, we fell...

If you find yourself near Monterey, California tomorrow evening stop by the Aquarium for the 32nd annual Monterey Food and Wine Festival. We'll be there serving freshly shucked extra small Hama Hama oysters. We're pulling them out of the salt water tomorrow morning and flying them down specifically for the event... they'll be ridiculously fresh and good.

The first is a profile of Jerry Yamashita, who grows oysters in Puget Sound near Olympia, Washington. Jerry offers a pretty good description of the technical (not political) difficulties involved with farming shellfish downstream from residential development. The second is just completely silly, and adds unnecessary confusion to the debate about how to correctly pronounce Hama Hamma.

This year the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association's annual conference is in Lake Chelan, an area of Eastern Washington which purportedly looks something like this: But, from what we can tell, really looks more like this: (apologies for the cell phone pictures). The conference started out with a bang on Wednesday morning with a talk about ocean acidification by Dr. Richard Feely of NOAA and the University of Washington. Here's a brief, and dirty, description of the problem: Scientists have long known that the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide... and for a while they thought that was a good thing because...

A Lebanese woman found 26 pearls in a single oyster and a) made international headlines and b) is thinking of submitting her discovery to the Guinness Book of World Records. Who knew oysters could make you famous? Not us, otherwise we wouldn't have passed up our 15 minutes of fame. A few years ago we found over 600 pearls in one medium sized oyster.