Day 52: Fanny Bay Oysters

Love these oysters and I got them from a food market where they were charging $10 for 8 pieces... shucked, with lemon and cocktail sauce, and including tax, so you're looking at around $8 before tax! And also consider that you have to ship these in by air freight from BC. So all in all, they weren't making a ton of profit per oyster, although they certainly CERTAINLY made it up in volume. I did a quick estimate on their sales based on the number of empty cases of oyster laying around, and I can tell you for a fact that made out pretty well today, and they probably did even better after I left, which was when the crowds really started pouring in. The truck was associated with Diana's Seafood, which is apparently an amazing location to buy your seafood.

Sometimes they say only buy oysters in months containing an "r" (e.g. FebRuaRy is good, and july is bad). I think this rule has more to do with safety, as the summer months don't have the letter "R". These oysters today was proof that that this letter "r" trick has nothing to do with flavour. They were completely filled with meat, the flavour was buttery and like a delicious tasting cucumber, with a soft and milky texture. It was cold on the tongue, it was fresh. A little tabasco on the side would have been nice.

Sometimes oysters will spawn and the meat will be about half the size as the one show above. But that was not at all the case with these puppies, eaten in July.

If I had to criticize these oysters (from this vendor), it is that there were little bits of shell in them which is the result of not washing the oyster after shucking them, especially if the shucker was having trouble opening them and had to pop them from the side rather than form the hinge of the oyster. Not washing them has the benefit of preserving the "nectar" which is where a ton of the flavour comes from, and also has the benefit of speed in processing, which is obvious. But you end up with little nuggets of shell every bite or so. These shell fragments also comes from the fact that some of the oysters were stacked (i.e. the shell of one oyster was touching the meat of another on my plate). This not only cause bits of shell, but it can be dangerous, because the bacteria (e.g. "vibrio") sits on the shell and this can cause sickness in some people. But look, I'm not sick, and these oysters so far as I could tell, were being professionally handled by the crew, so whatever - that's why you have lemon to kill off the bacteria, right?

On Fanny Bay Oysters:

Fanny Bay oysters are cultured near Comox just off of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. They develop their nice cup and thick shells, reaching market size in 18 to 24 months. Water from the Pacific Ocean flows directly through the Strait of Juan de Fuca then up the Strait of Georgia over the site, producing oysters that tend to be quite salty. Their flavor is sweet with an aftertaste similar to that of cucumber.