MOLLUSC MUSINGS

I know I have bored table guests witless – especially Mrs. Nosebag – whenever the subject of oysters comes up. She is especially tolerant seeing that she doesn’t eat oysters. She has tried. In fact is fascinated by the raptures of the true oyster lover. Just doesn’t like them. I put her in the same category as the ‘professional virgin’. Tried it once and didn’t like it.

I have a head full of oyster trivia and once, at a seafood restaurant down Galveston way, actually found a perfect pearl in one while dining with a beautiful blonde in a Stetson who was showing me around Texas. A fellow foreign correspondent, the late Ross Waby, looked at the girl and looked at the pearl and said ‘When your luck’s in, your luck’s in.’

Among the oyster facts I impart at every possibility is the clue to why South Australian oysters are the best in the world. Especially those from Coffin Bay, followed by Streaky Bay and Smokey Bay.

They are so clean and fresh you can actually taste the brine. Why are they so good ?  Because they are grown in clean water beds near the cold Antarctic waters. The water sluices through them cleaning them at 7 knots and each oyster takes in and emits 30 litres of cleansing, filtering water, every hour.

Last year I tested the Coffin Bay ‘best oysters in the world’ theory at the Lobster Bar & Grill at the Island Shangri-la Hotel in Hong Kong.  As I wrote in my review:

 ‘The place could easily have been called The Oyster Bar. They served such a variety of them (when available) from around the world. I thought I knew a fair bit about oysters but tried some beauties from France and Japan that I’d never heard off. Fines de Claires were thin and briny. Apparently they are fattened in ‘Claires’ beds’ for two months. The Japanese Kumamoto were my favourites. Small, sweet and only slightly creamy. And they did serve Australian oysters, Tasmanian and my favourites from Coffin Bay in South Australia. Plus Blue Point oysters from the U.S. which are huge and among my least favourite varieties’.

Flash forward a year to The Botanical in Melbourne. They were serving Kumamoto oysters —which I thought was a strange item to import especially when The Bot serves the widest range of the best Aussie oysters. I tried them. They were the smallest, sweetest, best oysters I had ever eaten. Better than Coffin Bay. Couldn’t be. Check again.

They were called Kumamoto Fingerling oysters but they did not come from Japan. They came from – Coffin Bay. From the Coffin Bay National Park and grown by artisan farmers called Pristine. They are the size of a thumb nail. A Japanese businessman apparently came across them and started importing them to Japan where they are much prized because of their delicate size and sweet. Almost fruity flavour. I kid you not.

The Botanical is the only place I know in Melbourne that sells them at 3.75 each and I promise you I am not exaggerating when I call them Oyster Caviar.

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And while musing about mollusks. I am indebted to that walking encyclopaedia, Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki, for finally answering a question about mussels.

You may recall a previous Hungry Hinch disaster when I was still courting the then Ms. Nosebag and with an air of casual authority (bloody know all!) assured her that an unopened mussel in a bowl of moules meuniere was perfectly safe to prise open and eat. And that talk about unopened mussels being dead and poisonous was an old wives’ tale.  She took my sage pre-marital advice, ate it, and had the worst food poisoning in her life.

I wish I could have used Dr. Karl as a ‘phone a friend’ lifeline. I wish he had written his Myth Conceptions column in the Good Weekend magazine about mussels about three years earlier.

He tracks the myth and debunks it. It started with English food writer, Jane Grigson in her 1973 book called  Jane Grigson’s Fish Cookery. She wrote ‘Throw away any mussels that refuse to open’. That dictum caught on. If it doesn’t open  then it’s ‘off’.

Australian fisheries biologist, Nick Ruello, was commissioned to research and write a report for Seafood Services Australia to improve the mussels’ reputation.  He ate hundreds of them. And he discovered that nearly two per cent of mussels opened early when cooked. If you ate them you risked food poisoning. And he found that 11.5% remained tightly closed after normal cooking time but when he forced them open they were fully cooked and safe to eat.

According to Kruszelnicki, who used to be a special guest on the Midday Show  when I hosted it, the unsupportable rule that ‘if it doesn’t open don’t eat it’ means that 370 tonnes of perfectly good seafood gets thrown away every year.

He says the best way to tell if a mussel is suspect is to smell it before cooking. But then you often can’t tell a bad oyster until it is shucked.

Whatever, I know Mrs. Nosebag won’t be convinced.