Razor Clams

A week ago we went out for one of the Northwest's favorite foraging edibles: Razor Clams. It's been a week and I've been trying to figure out the best way to write about it. Ultimately, I think the photos probably tell most of the story.

None of us had ever gone Razor Clamming before, so we had only a vague idea about what was involved. The WA State Dept of Fish and Wildlife has a comprehensive and helpful website, so we began there. Digs are strictly regulated, and often the beaches are only open for a couple tides at a stretch. We chose Saturday the 27th, which had an evening tide and coincided with the Ocean Shores Razor Clam festival, so we figured it would be a popular day to go. The State divides the major clamming areas into five management zones: Long Beach, Twin Harbors, Copalis Beach, Mocrocks, and Kalaloch. Having never been to most of the beaches we just headed for the coast and figured we'd play it by ear.

Of course, there's really no quick way to get to the coast from Seattle. Puget Sound and the Olympics are in the way, after all. So we left Seattle about 10 AM. A brief stop at the Cabela's in Lacey scored us a new PC clam gun for $12, and one day razor clamming licenses ($7) for those who needed them. By noon we were at Fish Brewing in Olympia for a tasty lunch and beer procurement. Then another two and a half hours or so to get to the beach. We decided to avoid Ocean Shores, due to the festival, and instead headed up Copalis Beach, ultimately parking at Griffiths-Priday State Park.

There is not a whole lot there, but free parking, beach access, and a bathroom counts for a lot. So we unloaded gear, strapped on waders, grabbed shovels and clam gun, and set off toward the beach. Of course, the roadway to the beach had washed out, and with dunes, cars and many people in sight on the beach, we still had to walk along the Copalis River for about a quarter mile to reach a footbridge. Fortunately, for March, it couldn't have been a nicer day.

Next time we're definitely going to just drive on the beach though. It's legally a state highway after all.


There were already dozens of people pulled up there, busily clamming away as the tide retreated. We got to work.

We weren't having a lot of luck. In fact, the only razor we bagged in the first hour and a half was one that I found at the tideline. Presumably it fell out of someone's bag, but it was still alive and fine. Finders keepers.

We then tried an area where no one else was and, surprise, had no luck there. Turns out that the Copalis River went into the ocean there, so we assume the freshwater was too much for little clam tolerances. So we went a bit further up the beach, and after some helpful conversations with people toting full catch-bags we started to get the hang of it.


Basically you're looking for tiny, nickle-sized indents in the sand, which take some time to recognize but eventually become easy to spot. Then you start digging, trying hard not to damage the clam's brittle shell. They're usually about 4-5 inches long, and can dig nearly a foot a minute, so you need to chase the little buggers up to your elbow, sometimes further. I had good luck using my clam shovel to dig most of the dirt away, then reaching in and feeling around until I could pull out the clam.

Meredith's weapon of choice was the Clam Gun. Basically, it's a sharpened 4" PVC tube, with a handle attached on top and a small hole drilled in the endcap. You work the tube down around the clam, put your thumb over the hole (creating suction) and (bend with the knees!) you pull out a tube of sand. Two or three times doing this and if you're lucky there will be a nice intact clam in the last shot of sand. No fuss, no muss.

In theory, anyway. Apparently I suck at the Clam Gun. I had one major success with it, and a whole lot of failures.

Meredith seemed to get the hang of it though, and was the first to catch her limit: 15 clams. Queen of the Razor Clams that day, who'd have thought a marine biologist would be good at this kind of thing?

As the light dimmed and the tide turned, the remaining three of us only had 1/2-3/4 of our limits. We'd just decided to call the day a partial loss and head home, when we picked up the backpack we'd brought along. There, underneath, was a clam hole! And near it, another! As the tide had gone further out, apparently the beach had drained and now the holes were easy to spot. A half hour of running around "Look, there's one! There's one! There's three!" and we all had our limits. 60 razors in total. Sweet...

Victory. Cold, wet, tired, sore and sandy victory.

We headed home as the sun set. Three and a half hours later we were back in Seattle, almost 12 hours to the minute after leaving it. The clams were kept alive overnight on trays in the fridge, covered in layers of wet paper towels. The next day everyone got back together to clean, cook, and divvy up the spoils.

Unlike Atlantic Razors, the big Pacific ones need to be shelled, gutted and cleaned before cooking. And after an hour or two of cleaning the clams, an unpleasant business, we ended up with about eight pounds of ready to go clam steaks. Not too shabby, considering they sell for $15 a pound.

For dinner we cooked them three ways. I took some of the more abused ones and chopped them up for a Razor Clam chowder. Wine, leeks, potatoes, cream, homemade bacon, razors. Excellent. Just made it up as I went along, no recipe.

Next I made a sortof pseudo-Spanish thing, using some of my chorizo, a shallot, some garlic, bay and thyme, and roughly chopped razors. Good, but went really excellently on toast the next day!

Finally, ask most razor clam fans and they'll tell you: fried is best. So I panko-ed up some strips and fried them until crispy and delicious, about a minute a side. I made up a cocktail sauce using ketchup, Worcestershire, lemon, Sriracha and wasabi. It was outstanding.

So we divvied them up into 1/2 pound containers and stashed them in the freezer. I'll bring them out from time to time.

Last night, for example, I made a sortof Northwest Springtime Paella using stuff from my fridge. Razor clams, chicken, pork, chorizo, mussels, fiddleheads, peas, bell pepper, leek, onion, garlic, olives, risotto rice.

And I managed not to light the pan on fire too! Though it still bears the scars.

There's three more Razor Clam tides scheduled two weeks from now. But they are all morning tides, which means we'd have to camp overnight. Think I'll pass, and maybe go for some littlenecks instead. Though there is talk of another tide in May...

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Salmon Six Ways From Sunday

Ok five ways. So two weeks ago we decided it was time for salmon. And at one of the fishmongers at the Farmer's Market, we managed to score their last 'Fish In A Bag', a whole Coho salmon, gutted but scales and everything else on, all for $25. This guy was about 10 lbs total I'd guess. Very fresh, straight off the boat from the current Alaska runs. The idea was to use as much of this guy as possible, in several different ways, then figure out the cost/meal we got out of it.

Scale isn't so good here. That knife is about a foot long when open. Well, I had this whole fish. Time to get to work.

Filleted it out. Then cut one fillet in half. I believe the term you're looking for is "hacked by a blind woodsman." Could use a bit more practice here.

Head, collars and belly went into one bowl. Spine and trimmings went into another. Then I went back and pinboned the fillets as best I could. Also, I didn't think about scaling it before I got started, so I had to go back and scale the fillets, belly, etc. while they were separate. Which meant they were a floppy pain in the ass and difficult to handle. Oops.

Now that the salmon was broken down, here's where it went from there.

Gravlaks

Laks really isn't very hard to make. Basically you're using the osmotic power of sugar and salt to pull moisture out of the fish and quickly cure it. The basic recipe I use is from Andreas Viestad's Kitchen of Light. His recipe calls for two 3-pound fillets, which is a lot of laks! Like 30 servings. But the basic cure ratio is 1 part salt, 2 parts sugar. Add some dill seeds, cracked black pepper, and some dill and that's your ingredients.


Take one half of your fillet and cover liberally with the salt/sugar, add your pepper, dill seed and dill.
Slap on the other half of the fillet. Then put a weight on it. I use these two nesting Pyrex baking dishes, separated by some plastic wrap. Stick it in the fridge. Every 12 hours or so you'll flip the fillets and use a spoon to spread the brine around (lots of liquid will come out of the salmon and will soak up the sugar/salt.) After three days it should be good to go. Wipe off the dill, thinly slice with a very sharp knife, and serve on some homemade bagels (yay wife!) like so:

It'll keep about a week before it starts to get pretty fishy. So if you're making a lot, best to serve it all at once at a party. Or make no more than a pound or so at a time. The two fillet/press method works well, but you could use one fillet and just put plastic down and press on that.

BBQ Salmon

To make dynamite BBQ salmon all you need is a glaze of honey, ginger and soy. And since that's what we always do, I decided not to go that rout this time around. Instead I went for the rub in Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen, which is more of a paprika based classic BBQ rub and which he sells in commercial form all over the place. As I remember I added some smoked paprika and my own chile powder mix to spice it up a bit.

But step one of grilling salmon is: cure it first. Just a quick cure before going on the grill will make it firmer and juicier and just all around better. I used the leftover laks salt/sugar mix and sprinkled it on, then left it for an hour.

You can see that it's starting to give off liquid and it helps form a nice pellicle, a tacky surface on the meat, which will help hold the smoke from the BBQ. Those are collars and belly in the photo, I was prepping them for their brine while this was curing.

After an hour or so I washed the fillet, then put the rub on it. Let that sit while I lit the BBQ. Advice on grilling fish:

• Keep the skin on. Before putting it on the grill, oil the skin side.
  
• Use smoke wood, I used alder here. You want a good medium heat on the coals.
  
• Brush the grill really well first. Then apply cooking oil using tongs and a rolled up paper towel. Then on goes the fish. When it starts to flake and goober little bits of fat/protein then it's basically done. Don't overdo it, particularly if it's really fresh. If you want you can oil another section of grill, and flip the fillet over (meat side down) really quick before removing.
  
• If your grill is really crusty, or your fish really fragile, you can also grill the fish on a piece of aluminum foil. This is also a good way to do the honey/ginger/soy glaze because it caramelizes and cooks on the foil.
  

Served with a bit of lemon/dill compound butter and a salad. Best fish evar!

Collars and Bellies

The collars are my favorite part of the salmon. There's a lot of fat and cartilage in that area, and when grilled or broiled it just comes out fantastic. The bellies too are pretty great, brined and quickly grilled. So the collars and belly went into a brine of soy sauce, ginger, garlic, star anise, and chile. Bring everything to a boil and cool, then in go the collars and belly. Steamy!

I let it hang out for a day or so. Then the collars and belly went onto a very hot grill until just done, served with some stirfried bok choi from the backyard. In retrospect I might have left out the star anise, I'm just not that big of a fan. But I have this whole huge jar of them so I feel obligated to use them.

Salmon Flakes

So there's a lot of meat on a salmon. And a lot of it gets wasted if you just eat the fillets. (Especially if I'm the one filleting it for you!) So you take the spine, and all the trimmings and bits leftover and throw them on the grill till done. Let it cool a bit, then pick out all the meat and discard all the bones.

That's a lot of flaked, cooked, slightly smoky salmon. Easily a pound and a half. You could make salmon salad with it. Or do what I did: salmon omelettes and salmon cakes. For the omelettes, just add a handful in when you're stirring the eggs around, and serve with a bit of lemon, dill and sour cream. For the salmon cakes get a big bowl and throw in anything that sounds like it should be there. Panko? Check. An egg or two? Check. Salt/pepper/cilantro/kaffir lime leaf/Rooster Sauce/chopped onion/garlic/whatever? Check. So long as it forms a patty. Then flour, egg dip, panko crusting and into a pan with some oil and clarified butter. Cook till golden brown and delicious. Serve with dill mayo or on a hamburger bun with some lettuce, remoulade, etc. We did both!

Fish Head Soup

Waste not want not. We had the head leftover, and some of the flaked salmon. This soup came from Hank at Hunter Angler Gardener Cook.

Into a pot went the head, a 2x3" piece of kombu, and some ginger slivers. Cold water to cover the head. Heated until 190 degrees, then left to simmer for half an hour. No boiling your salmon heads! Also, remove all the gills. I missed a spot (oops) but it didn't ruin it. Once done, strain off reserving the broth. Once the head cooled a bit I picked the meat off.

Those big white bits are the cheeks, and are one of the absolute best parts of the salmon. There's some other heady bits, and you can see a bit of gills that got through. They are bitter and not good eats.


Doctored up the broth with some mirin and soy sauce to taste. Then into the bowl went a tablespoon of miso. Poured a bit of stock on it and mixed throughly. In went some cooked somen noodles, some dry wakame seaweed, salmon bits from the head plus some of the BBQ flaked salmon to beef it up, and stock to cover. Subtle and delicious. A fairly easy and excellent soup using leftover nasty bits! Only wish I'd had some green onions for it.

THE FINAL TALLY

• Laks = 10 delicious breakfasts (frankly, we couldn't finish it all in time before it got a bit fishy)
  
• BBQ = 4 awesome servings
• Belly and Collars = two meals
  
• Flaked Salmon = two big omelettes and four good sized salmon burgers
• Head Soup = two meals
  

So I count 24 meals from our salmon, which works out to $1.04 a serving. Pretty sweet! I guess the lesson is, buy whole and use every bit of it. Putting in the extra work to scale and fillet it paid off in spades. The only downside is that by the end we were pretty salmoned-out. But maybe we'll get another one next week before the Alaskan season ends. And throw half on the smoker...

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Horse Clams (NSFW?)

So about a day after I set foot back in Seattle I got a message from a friend saying that it was going to be at least a minus 2.0 tide. It was Memorial Day. I was on Bainbridge Island and I didn't really have anything going. So I went online, found a beach and bought a shellfish license (along with the complete salt/fresh/dungeness license). Grabbed boots, shovel and bucket and within the hour was out on the lovely and sunny tideflats at Fay Bainbridge State Park.

Perhaps I should preface this by stating I had never been clamming and had no idea what I was doing. So I just went to the waterline and began digging at holes. I was aiming for geoducks but I kept pulling up Horse Clams. These guys aren't geoducks, they're their smaller cousin. But they only bury themselves about a foot and a half down, not three feet. So In no time I had my limit. (Seven) As you can see I hit more than a few of their shells in my frantic and amateurish shovelling. I don't have any pictures, which is a bit of a shame, but I also dropped my cellphone in the tideflats so it's probably best that I left the camera at home. I spent some more time and got a few small clams, but I decided the monster horse clams were probably enough.

Which is good. Because while shellfishing seasons are regulated by the WA Department of Fish and Wildlife, shellfish safety is regulated by the Department of Health. And though they crosslink a bit, they don't really talk to each other. So while Fay Bainbridge is open to clamming by the WDFW, it is closed to Butter clams by the DOH. But you wouldn't know that from the WDFW website. Grrrr. Thanks a lot for the paralytic shellfish poisoning risk.

So I took them home and let them purge for a while. Then set about trying to clean them. Here the horror began.

It turns out that Horse clams often have symbiotic little Pea crabs that live inside them. Which I discovered when some crustacean legs shot out of the shelled clam ("Sweet Jesus!") and a crab proceded to poke its head out, Alien style, from my clam.

At this point finesse went out the window and I began to just hack away anything that didn't look like food. A clam or two later I tried a 10 second blanch in boiling water, which made the whole process easier (especially skinning the siphon).

Here's where the NSFW begins.

Hurr Hurr.

Honestly, grow up.



But I had seven of these suckers and in an hour or so I managed to clean them.

Obviously not all clams are created equal.

Along with the salvageable body parts (mostly aducter muscles) about half of the clams became clam fritters, which were good but nothing to write a blog about. The rest will become chowder sometime soon.

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Sailfishing

So my stuff has arrived in Seattle and I finally found the cable that connects my camera to my computer. So here's a few posts that have been in limbo for the last month.

First up, to celebrate graduation my Father, my housemate Youhei, my friend Glenn and I all went on a half day charter on the Sonny Boy out of Crandon Marina on Key Biscayne.

Fishing was good, the seas not so much. Off shore the seas were 6-8 feet. So things were ... bouncy. But after a rough time picking up bait we set the kites and almost immediately the first sailfish was on. I was closest to the rod and so the first one fell to me. It was the second sail I've caught, and it fought much more than the first. However, shortly after we boated and released it my inevitable decline began.

Normally I don't really get seasick. But just in case I'd taken a bonine that morning, and had been eating some crystallized ginger. Alas, it was not sufficient. I felt like Rainier Wolfcastle being swept away by the radioactive tidal wave while filming the Radioactive Man Movie ("My eyes! Ze goggles do nothing!") The seas were intense, and after taking the above photos of my dad catching the next sail, I had apparently not spent enough time staring at the horizon. The next four hours were...vomitastic.

I was able to raise my head off the rail to take a few more photos though. A highlight of the trip was Youhei's first time fishing. Ever. He spent an epic fight against a good 30lb kingfish until...chomp! Huge cuda took off the back 1/3 of the fish! Still, it left most of the good steaks.

Glenn caught a sail himself, and we got two cudas. Normally I don't eat barracuda due to ciguatera but since I was moving (and frankly, you'll get it from snapper and grouper too) I said screw it and took one of the cudas (filleted) home. I made it into a huge bowl of ceviche for a graduation party at Glenn's that night.

It was easily, hands down, the best ceviche I have ever made and or/had. Cuda is delicious.

Kingfish however has the problem of being very, very fishy. And we had about 10 one-pound steaks of it. So I was determined to find a way to make it tasty. To my delight I found three.

1) Walker's Wood Jerk Kingfish. Use the jerk marinade, it's delicious and overpowers any unpleasant taste on anything. It's the reason I completely gave up ever bothering to make my own jerk marinade. It simply can't compete with the real thing.

2) Grapefruit and Garlic Kingfish. Marinate the steaks in grapefruit juice with a little salt, pepper, and garlic. The acid does a bit of a ceviche thing on the fish and cuts the fishiness way back, while the garlic goes well with the sourness.

3) Soy-Miso-Shochu Kingfish. Youhei gets the credit for this one. A paste of miso, soy, and shochu.

Lay foil on the grate and grill. (You could probably oil a clean grill, but we grilled these for a party in which a wide variety of things would hit the BBQ and didn't want to make everything fishy.) All three were superb. Frankly, with kingfish freshness counts for a lot.

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