YvesNY's Profile
Favorite Oysters?
Now about pairing oysters with a drink. Dry wine, red or white is fine, Champagne Brut, but the best match is BEER. Try that combination with flats in Ireland or Zeeland (Holland), and you are in heaven...
About condiments, who said oysters need condiments? Just a twist of white pepper from the mill brings up their true flavor, although I have become partial to the Raspberry Granité recently...
Also there is nothing wrong with a little cultured butter, salted, on a slice of buckwheat bread (that's how they eat oysters in Brittany, and all over France).
Favorite Oysters?
West Coast gigas are the best. That's what they grow in Brittany. I find East Coast virginicas kind of bland and inconsistent. Too bad, I live in NY, and West Coast oysters are hard to come by here, and supply can be erratic
My favorites: Snow Creek by Tom and Marie Madsen, and Fanny Bay. Penn Cove Select are fine too.
My top choice would be the European flat (belons), especially those that Tom and Marie used to grow in Snow Creek. Too bad they don't grow them any more because of the disease that struck the whole area. Still looking for a replacement, hence going to France as often as I can...lol
This Food Is Offal!
Totally agree with you. Whenever I think of all this processed food Americans love so much, it makes me sick. It reminds me of Soylent Green... Why is it we don't want to know that what we eat was a living thing, whether plant or animal. Would not that make us more in touch with the world we live in, and with ourselves...
No food is weird, just people are...
From my early childhood in France I have eaten all kinds of variety meat/offal, because because butchers there sell as much of them as regular (muscle) meat, and people love it. The greatest recipes in French cooking are based on variety meat and offal (e.g. tete de veau, vol-au-vent, andouille - not the Louisiana andouille which is just a sausage). Things I have been fed when young: brains, sweetbread, tripe, tongue, liver, udder, lungs, spleen, kidneys, heart, "white kidneys", from beef, pork, mutton, duck, chicken, rabbit , guinea pig). We very seldom had beef steak because it tasted sort of bland and dry compared to the breadth of flavors and texture you get from the other meats...
One of the greatest restaurants in Paris, Apicius, cooks a lot of them.
Maybe some day America will wake up and enjoy real good meat, eat fish, raw things, good tasty vegetables, and... eat less....
Why is the coral separated from the scallop?
The only way to get good fish/shellfish in the US is to go to the source, i.e. to the fisherman or the grower. That's what I have been doing for 20 years, as I could not find the same variety and quality I enjoyed in France, specially in Paris where all the fish is shipped every night right out of the boat from Normandy and Brittany. Here in NY going to the fish market, now at Hunts Point in the Bronx, is an option, but it does not guarantee freshness. There was a piece on Food TV "Follow that fish", showing that it can take about a week for a cod caught in Boston to get to a restaurant kitchen in Pennsylvania... Oops!
As to scallops, which BTW are delicious in the US (larger and sweeter than the European variety), once you have passed the "dry scallops" rip off, you sometimes can find them in the shell with the roe in Japanese food stores, but at a high cost...
Not being able to buy scallops in the shell is really a pity because for a gourmet, there is nothing better than a scallop carpaccio WITH the roe.
I don't think the roe spoils any faster than the muscle part, if it is kept under proper refrigeration . Shellfish can keep for a long time. I keep my oysters and clams for 2 weeks in the refrigerator. Scallops (sea or bay) whose shell is always open can keep for at least 3 days.
About eating scallops, try to cook them as little as you can, like quickly sear them. Better, eat them raw if very fresh, as tartare or carpaccio, where they really taste what they are...
