The state of Louisiana, which produces one-third of the nation's oysters, has mustered the first quasi-official response to new FDA guidelines banning the sale of unprocessed Gulf oysters from April through October.
The strict new rules, designed to combat the deadly Vibrio vulnificus bacteria that swarms in warm water, require Texas, Florida and Louisiana oyster processors to freeze, heat, radiate or pressurize their oysters. But oyster connoisseurs worry their favored bivalves won't be the only casualty of post-harvest processing; Insiders suspect the law will also kill the Gulf coast's oyster industry.
No, that claw is not a scary Halloween trick. Look closer; it's actually a very tasty treat.
Because the price of lobster is so low right now -- almost half of what it was more than a year ago -- the bloggers over at REC(cession)IPES were able to add a little luxury to this simple, creamy risotto, made with arborio rice, olive oil, butter, onions, shallots and white wine. Plus, the lobster adds a much-needed burst of color to what can often be a very monochromatic dish.
Come to think of it, should you want to try this at home, there may actually be a little trick to achieving these picturesque results. As REC(cession)IPES points out, it's only live lobster that's so cheap right now. So unless you can bring yourself to butcher your own crustacean (think Julie Powell in "Julie & Julia"), you may have to settle for just feasting only your eyes on this lovely lobster risotto.
Gulf Coast oyster harvesters say a food safety plan introduced by the Food and Drug Administration this weekend could doom the domestic oyster industry by subjecting sellers to regulations they call needless and cost-prohibitive.
The FDA's Michael Taylor cited the deadly threat posed by the bacterium vibrio vulnificus in explaining the agency's decision to ban the sale of fresh, live, unprocessed oysters from Florida, Louisiana and Texas during the warm summer months. The law is set to take effect in 2011.
Oysters that have been quick-frozen, heated, pressurized or treated with gamma rays will be exempt from the ban, which mirrors a law adopted by California in 2003. According to Taylor, that law has winnowed the state's vibrio death rate to nearly zero, with just one fatality being investigated as a possible vibrio case. The nationwide vibrio death rate over the same period has approached 15 annually.
Crowds will converge upon the low-country town this weekend to feast on shrimp gumbo, meet Miss Yemassee and pay tribute to shrimp baiting. But even Lori Poston, who's chairing the 16th annual festival, cops to being slightly ambivalent about the peculiar regional practice of using a mix of clay and fish meal to lure thousands of wriggling shrimp.
"It stinks to high heaven," Poston says of the traditional bait. "It's the stinkingest thing you ever smelled. When my husband comes back from shrimp baiting, he takes his clothes off at the door."
Shrimp caught using bait don't return in much better shape than the shrimpers, she adds.
"The vein's the main thing," Poston says. "The meal gets into the shrimp and you have to clean the veins. It's nice when you can just free cast without bait."
Oyster, passion fruit jelly and lavender at the Fat Duck. Photo: smashz, Flickr
The Fat Duck restaurant is one of the world's finest eateries and has the statistics to prove it -- three Michelin stars, a number two rating by S. Pellegrino's World's 50 Best Restaurants, among them -- but it's the number 529 that has stuck with the restaurant since February.
That's the number of customers who fell ill with vomiting and diarrhea at the Bray, England restaurant, and forced its two-week closure. Now, Britain's Health Protection Agency has published a 47-page report pinning the blame on norovirus caused by oysters contaminated with human sewage, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Coastal conservationists say the first South Carolinians had the right idea when they flung the remnants of their oyster feasts back into the ocean.
"Native people didn't put their oysters in a cooler and head down the road for a party," says Joy Brown, marine restoration specialist for the South Carolina Nature Conservancy. "They put their oysters right back in the water."
The Nature Conservancy is now trying to replicate the Cusabo's recycling habits, which they credit with sustaining the state's oyster crop, filtering its waters and preventing shoreline erosion. The advocacy organization is partnering with the Department of Natural Resources on a pilot program to collect emptied oyster shells from Charleston-area restaurants and return them to the sea.
"A lot of times, these shells are going into landfills," Brown says. "But they can serve a better purpose."
I've been craving a lobster roll from Mary's Fish Camp in New York as of late, but since I've already maxed out the bank account with a mini trip to Miami, Mary's will have to wait for October.
I'm hooked on their lobster roll, that's really the only reason I go there. If you are lucky enough to get a table, their "limited" supply lobster roll is at market price, usually around $33.
So here is my healthier (and cheaper) version that you can have at home -- yes, Mary's fans know it's not exactly the same. Yet it's still tasty and satisfies the craving, working out to about $12 a pop.
Roasted broccoli with shrimp. Photo: Sarah LeTrent
Few of us want to make a complicated lasagna for solo dining -- by day six, you'll never want to see lasagna again! In this series, AOL Food staffer Sarah LeTrent taste-tests simple recipes suitable for a "table for one."
Grilling out defines summer, but after a busy weekday, few people feel like manning the grill or huddling over a hot grill pan. In this recipe, the oven does all the dirty work for you.
Enter this often overlooked and underrated method of cooking: roasting.
Try this method for broccoli and shrimp. Roasting caramelizes the natural sugars and brings out both ingredients' natural sweetness.
While shrimp is delicious on its own, deep-fried or sautéed with pasta and butter, it it seems to pack the most flavor -- and color -- when served as part of the classic shrimp cocktail.
Pleasing to the eyes as well as the palate, this single shellfish from No Recipes is dipped in an Asian-inspired twist on the staid red cocktail sauce, combining the usual fresh tomatoes and tomato sauce with Thai sweet chili and fish sauces, lime juice and wasabi. It sounds so good, we're tempted to try to pluck the perfectly pink crustacean straight off the screen.
Summer leaves seafood lovers craving lobster in some incarnation, whether it be tucked into a buttery roll, scattered throughout risotto or luxuriating in the butter-cream bath of lobster Thermidor (thought to have been a favorite of Napoleon).
However you like your lobster, getting to its tender meat can be nightmarish, with spiny claws and juice flying everywhere. Not so in this excellent Howcast video, with a demonstration by chef Marc Murphy of New York City's Landmarc, who knows his way around the leggy critters. Who knew you could either snip open or crush those dastardly knuckles? Or crush the tail under a towel?
We have joked (on more than one occasion) that if a rotted crab washed up on the beach of Brooklyn's notoriously less-than-pristine Coney Island and someone deep-fried it, we'd eat it.
As many psychiatrists will tell you, there is a hint of truth in all humor. There's just something so ... right about eating artery-clogging fried food oceanside. And per the folks at Concierge.com, who have just compiled a list of the world's 13 best beach foods, "to eat greasy French fries (or fried clams, or even fried dough) on the beach is human."
Perhaps it's the fact that sand cannot penetrate an armor of deep-fried batter (ever tried to eat a sandwich on the beach?). Or we could wax poetic and say the color of fried food was inspired by the shore itself. What's more likely, however, is that fried food stands line most boardwalks, at least in the United States, so it's what we eat -- just as we would a hot dog at the ballpark.
But that's just America. Adcock's "best of the world" list includes sausage and eggs in England, paella in Spain and fish tacos in Maui. [Via Concierge.com]
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
In the mid-1970s, when my mother put "Margaret's Hot Crab Dip" in our family cookbook, the recipe seemed exciting and somewhat exotic. After all, the simple combination of crab, scallion and cream cheese was basically a reverse engineering of the kind of appetizers that upscale restaurants were serving in Maryland and Washington, D.C. at the time, and its simple-yet-spicy flavor made it a hit at parties.
However, years later, when a girlfriend took me to meet her family in South Carolina, it took all of about 10 seconds to convert me to the wonders of chilled Carolina crab dip. This was lucky, as it seemed like every restaurant carried the stuff and passed it out with every meal. My girlfriend's mother's recipe changed depending upon the day, the amount of crab on hand, and whether or not I was taking notes. What follows is a pretty close approximation of her concoction.
Get the recipe for South Carolina-style crab dip after the jump.
Louisiana crawfish advocates have finally discovered -- after years of unsuccessfully appealing to economic interests -- that the quickest way to consumers' hearts is actually via their (unsettled) stomachs.
The state legislature this year enacted a law requiring restaurant owners to disclose whether their crawfish is Louisiana-raised. Bill sponsor Fred H. Mills, Jr. -- a pharmacist whose district includes Breaux Bridge, better known to Cajun gourmands as the "Crawfish Capital of the World" -- credits the law's passage to a major tactical shift.
"Everyone was upset that Chinese seafood was being disguised as Louisiana seafood, but the law just never could get any legs to it," Mills says. "The difference this time was we didn't talk about commerce. We talked about public safety."
The campaign against imported crawfish, after the jump.
Danielle Johnson Walker. Photo: Daniel Doke Photography
When beachgoers dine at the celebrated southern Maine restaurant Arrows and its sister seaside bistro MC Perkins Cove for a ubiquitous lobster roll, it falls to sommelier Danielle Johnson Walker to find an ideal wine to match with what she calls the "lazy man's lobster."
A self-trained sommelier, Walker uses the winter months -- when Arrows is hibernating -- to pair vacations with winery visits throughout South Africa and Europe to add extra oomph to her vino repertoire. As summer kicks into high gear and our hankering for lobster on buttered buns borders on fixation, we quizzed Walker about secret cooking techniques, wines to avoid and what makes lobster rolls so bleeping addictive. What makes the lobster roll such a great food? It's the lazy man's lobster. When in Maine, you eat boiled lobster once or twice and after that you have the lobster roll. I don't think it's a food people can get sick of. It's like a good hamburger.
After the jump, the secret the the Arrows lobster roll and why to avoid oaked chardonnays.
What you're looking at may very well be the platonic ideal of crab and corn chowder. Note the massive chunks of crab, the bounty of fat yellow kernels of corn and a creamy broth whose surface is speckled with little pools of chili oil. Made and photographed by Susan Filson of the appealingly named Sticky, Gooey, Creamy, Chewy, it looks like the perfect antidote to summer's swelter: If the dog days are getting you down, fight them off with a bit of crab.
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