Oysters and Samphire

I know most of my recent posts have been about fish and shellfish but with the weather like it is and being from a seaside town it’s what I have been mostly cooking, it’s seasonal and it’s what I feel most passionate about at the moment and I’m just going to write about what I love.

So with bank holiday weekend coming up I decided to put a couple of specials on and one thing that I had not done in a little while were oysters, so I went down to weyfish and got a dozen for the evening.

If you have never had oysters before I really recommend that you try them at least once, and I mean try them raw as long as they are really fresh. I have introduced them too so many of my friends and colleagues and once they got past the texture of oysters most of them liked them or at least admitted it was nicer than they thought it was going to be. 

You don’t however have to eat them raw, I have tried them poached, baked and grilled and they have always been good, you do not need a lot to go with them either, just a splash of lemon juice with a drop of tobacco sauce does it for most people.

When preparing oysters you must make sure you are careful as if you are too rough you run the risk of breaking the shell, not getting the oyster from the shell cleanly or wasting all the good sea water that is inside the oysters.

So for my special I had the option of just straight up raw oysters with a choice of simple dressings or baked with garlic, paprika and chives, served with a simple garnish of samphire.

Samphire or sea asparagus is a perfect garnish for fish; it’s quite salty but a great colour, tastes lovely and can be found around Weymouth and Portland.