What's the perfect oyster?

Oyster farming offers many lessons in humility. Part of the job, for everyone at Hama Hama, is to discover ways to change (and hopefully improve) how we operate, whether it's to refine shell shape, adjust to changing weather or climate, or reduce our environmental impacts.

Another (huge) part of the job of farming oysters is to acknowledge that in the quest for perfection, the true measure of success is to become nearly invisible: To farm in such a way that the person eating the oyster has a direct connection with something wild.

Permit us a bit of farmer philosophizing: A perfect oyster teases you with unknowns, making you consider the things you don't know about the world, the oceans, the moon, and your own taste buds. It slips a little bit of magic into your life, changing your mood and maybe the trajectory of your day. It energizes. Even for oyster farmers, it's a wondrous thing, not to be taken lightly.

Like any memorable food, the perfect oyster is situational. You're as likely to find one at a family bbq as at a Michelin-starred restaurant. But if you're in a rush, or if you've just obliterated your palate with a swig of early morning coffee (common occurrence around these parts), it might slide by unnoticed. Taste may be subjective, but nutrition is a little easier to quantify; here's more on calories in oysters.

It's also subjective: some people prefer briny oysters, others prefer creamy plump ones. We've shucked at enough raw bars to have heard every possible opinion about shell size, salinity, and texture [1]. We've seen people have apparently transportive experiences eating oysters that an expert would consider badly shucked.

What we're left with is this: any oyster (plump, skinny, salty or sweet) can find perfection in the clarity of its message. The greater the sense of place and time, the more perfect the oyster. Seen from this angle, it matters less what the oyster tastes like than that it tastes authentic to its place and time [2]. The role of an eater, then, is to stay open-minded and curious... to notice how oyster flavor changes with season and location, and what those changes can tell us about the world around us. We've spent a lot of time talking about the perfect oyster; if you're newer to all this and wondering what are oysters, we've got the anatomy version too.

If it's been rainy, the freshwater flowing into the seawater can reduce salinity and increase available nutrients, leading to less salty, fatter oysters. If it's been a cool spring, the algae might be a bit late in blooming, so the oysters will stay skinny later into the season. At the height of the growing season, the oysters have so much to eat they nearly burst from their shells. They're sweet with a very complex flavor, and not as salty as they are when skinny or off-peak. Mid-summer, oysters have softer texture and mellow creaminess. Read more about what makes a kumamoto different from a Hama Hama.

The sight of several million oysters feeding.

As part of our staff onboarding process, and when we're out and about at restaurants helping them train their crews, we teach that a "perfect oyster" experience is the culmination of effort on behalf of the farmer, the restaurant, and the environment.

This is a little more concrete than all that philosophizing above. And possibly we should stop talking about perfection, and instead use words like good, excellent, and memorable.

A good oyster experience is one where the farmers did a good job matching their interventions to the oyster's growth rate. They harvested the oyster from a healthy body of water, handled it carefully, and sold it knowing its seasonality and condition, to a restaurant that cares about preserving the oyster's story and sense of place. Take a virtual tour of Puget Sound, via its oysters, with our best selling "Farm Sampler" - order now!

Cheers to excellent oyster experiences, wherever you find them!