Seafood At Almost Heaven South - Grilled Oysters

I don’t know if this everywhere, but Bev signed us up for a discount coupon place called Livingsocial.com – same as Groupon I believe. While we seem to get a deal offer from each of them every day, we’ve only bought one – seafood. Around here, the selection of good seafood is pretty sparse, and a place in Knoxville called The Shrimp Dock is the best I know of – but pretty pricey. However, when I could buy $100 worth for $50, I just could not pass it up, so Bev and I went shopping. I made a list of some things I wanted, including lobster tails, but at $32.50/lb, my $100 would go too fast and I wanted too many other things, plus Bev isn’t much of a lobster fan.

After carefully studying their inventory, we decided on 2# of frozen jumbo lump crabmeat, 2 dozen shucked oysters for frying, 2 dozen fresh oysters for grilling, 2 dozen little nick clams for steaming and grilling, a nice piece of wild caught Canadian salmon, and two flounder fillets.

Since most of it was fresh, we decided to eat as much as we could before freezing any, so the first meal was to be grilled oysters for an appetizer and fried oysters and cucumber salad for the meal. I’m not an experienced oyster shucker (bad actually), having only done it a time or two, and didn’t have the best tools - heavy duty garden knife for getting them open, paring knife for cutting muscles, pot holder for a glove.

I went through all of them all and managed to get a little more than half open - some really nice ones.

I’ve seen them in contests on TV and the proshuckers open several per minute – I just reversed it and used the same number of minutes per oyster. If I had a day job, I’d sure keep it and the Oyster Shuckers of America do not have to consider me a threat for their job. Plus, I’d probably starve to death on an oyster diet, as I likely spent more energy opening one that I got back eating it. I’m going to get a lesson and the correct tools before I buy fresh oysters again.

I’ve eaten grilled oysters at Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House (Paula Deens brother) in Savannah, Ga and from Acme Oyster House in NOLA and I preferred Bubba’s as I thought Acme had too much stuff on theirs and they cooked them way too long. But rather than use Bubba’s recipe, I decided to try a different one from ehow.com. I basically went by it and here’s what I actually did:

1/4 tsp dried parsley (didn’t have any fresh)
2 tsp garlic through the garlic press
6 tbsp butter - slightly melted
1/8 tsp black pepper
Salt omitted as I used salted butter

I mixed these together an hour early so the parsley could rehydrate and the mix set up a little. I added a heavy ½ tsp to each oyster (recipe was for 24, but I only had 18), sprinkled on a little Emeril’s Essence, and headed for the preheated grill. Getting some good smoke from the grill as some of the butter dripped onto the charcoal.

I was expecting little shriveled up, cooked to death oysters, like we had at Acme, but to my surprise, if you keep an eye on them, you can end up with nice plumb, but cooked-through oysters. I think they cooked for about 7 minutes, but that is very fire dependent. I had another senior moment and forgot to add the cheese to the butter, so I grated-on some Parmesan just after removing them from the grill. I think I prefer this as it all stayed with the oyster rather than running off into the grill. Here’s my plate and I dipped the bread in each shell to soak up the liquid as I ate the oyster.

My understanding is that Drago’s in Metairie is “The Place” to go for grilled oysters, but we didn’t make it there and I can’t remember those from Bubba’s that well, but I would almost guarantee, if you ate these, you wouldn’t bother with another oyster house – I liked these as well as anything I’ve ever blogged about and they will surely be on the menu when Rhett comes home from Afghanistan (he loved Acme’s), and for the other kids upon request.

I’m definitely going to learn how to open them because they were worth every agonizing minute I spent on each of them and with the butter and stuff, I probably could survive on them. Since they were plump enough to be filling, we just had these and cucumber salad and forgot about the fried ones. But tune in day after tomorrow for day 2 of seafood.

Have a great day, thanks for stopping by, and can you tell I liked these.

Larry