The World is Your Oyster
The World is Your Oyster
At the Bayshore Center at Bivalve
The Bayshore Center at Bivalve teaches an appreciation of several things—the marine environment of South Jersey, the oysters that are and have been a major New Jersey commodity, and just how difficult the lives of the oystermen were back in the heyday of oyster commerce in Cape May County. It teaches that evolution is capricious. Somehow, we humans slithered up on the beach while oysters, around for 15 million years, are quite content to stay stuck in the mud.
Maybe because their life is so diverse. Each oyster filters between 25 and 50 gallons of water a day, the saline waters of the estuaries sweeping through the cilia on their gills, filtering algae and other planktonic life. They don’t have to even budge to find their food; it constantly rushes through them. They start life as a male and then change sex and become female when they are about three years old. They may live up to 20 years and are legal for harvest when they are three inches long or about 3 years in age. Extremely prolific, they form communities of enormous size by spawning during the summer months, when both males and females release sex cells, with a female oyster releasing up to a hundred million eggs in a single spawning. Due to the human pressure of environmental toxins and silt run-off, as well as their own inadvertent appetite for themselves, less than 1% survive, still making them a very productive species.
Due to their seasonal mating cycle, the season for eating oysters subsides after April until September rolls around again. The old adage against eating oysters during months that don’t have a n “r” in them is based on the fact that it is during the warmer weather that the spawning takes place and their meat is softer and less appetizing, though some people prefer them that way.
There are only five distinct species of oysters in the United States, though these distinctions are often blurred by nicknames or place names, like Bluepoint, Wellfleet, or Cape May Salts. The three most important are the Atlantic, Crassostrea Virginicas, which grows along the East and Gulf coasts; the European or Flat, Ostrea Edulis, grown in the Northwest and in some parts of the far Northeast; and the Pacific, Crassostrea Gigas, found along the West coast. Two less-well known varieties are the Olympia, Ostrea Lurida or Ostrea Conchapila, a tiny oyster indigenous to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, and the slightly larger Kumamoto, Crassostrea Sikamea, a smaller and separate type of Pacific oyster.
Each species is as distinct in flavor as a wine variety, and each species contains many variations related to where they are farmed. Oysters can have flavor differences akin to vineyard designations based on climate, water quality, and age and condition of the oyster bed. Think merroir instead of terroir. To evaluate these nuances, the oysters must be tasted in a raw state, a practice that is considered risky from a food safety perspective.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which publishes Nutrition Action, cautions against eating any raw shellfish, particularly oysters that originate in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Coast of Florida. Vibrio vulnificus is a bacteria that thrives in warm water and can cause a blood infection that has proven fatal when ingested by raw oyster enthusiasts. People with immune system deficiencies are particularly susceptible. Treating the oysters from those areas with heat destroys the bacteria and measures have been initiated to encourage the FDA to treat shellfish from these waters with mild heat treatment to guarantee their safety.
Though difficult to wrestle the meat out of the shell even with the aid of an oyster knife, oyster enthusiasts slurp down great quantities of them with and without simple condiments like lemon, horseradish, or a light shallot-infused sherry vinegar called Mignonette sauce.
Stewart Tweed and his associates at the Rutgers aquaculture labs did revitalize the oyster industry in South Jersey and it is up to us to support this local delicacy and truly make “the world our oyster” again in Bivalve.
so interesting!