Cheftimony Episode 004 – Considering Oysters. And Beer.
Consider the oyster. There’s a good deal in that. In 1941, M.F.K. Fisher wrote her short wonderful treatise on the oyster, and the book has inspired readers and oyster eaters (and readers to become oyster eaters) ever since. If you haven’t read it, and especially if you have, I recommend it for your summer reading list.
In this fourth episode of Cheftimony, we spend the whole first half of the podcast and a meaningful part of the second considering oysters. My first guest is Richard Boucher of The Curious Oyster Catering Co. Look for him @curiousoyster. Richard is without doubt my go-to source on oysters. He’s passionate about the subject, he’s built a full-time oyster-catering business, and he is endlessly patient with my endless questions.
The funny thing is, Richard was not always excited about oysters. Like many people, he used to recoil at the idea of eating one. It wasn’t until an interview for a front-of-house job at an oyster bar in Ottawa turned into an impromptu tasting session that Richard finally downed an oyster. That was at The Whalesbone in Ottawa and not long after, Richard headed west to Vancouver where he’s been working with oysters ever since.
Listening to Richard, you’ll learn that the species of oyster native to the west coast is not harvested on the west coast anymore! At least not in Canada. This species – ostrea lurida or the Olympia oyster - is slow-growing and difficult to farm commercially. Instead, the species most commonly grown on this side of the continent is crassostrea gigas or the Pacific oyster, a species native to the Pacific coast of Asia.
Although this one species accounts for the vast majority of west coast oyster production, it goes by many different names, and those all come from the producers who shape the species into their own particular type of oyster – whether it’s Fanny Bay or Royal Miyagi or Black Pearl or any number of other names. Interesting! In our interview, Richard commented on the techniques producers use to create very different oysters from the exact same species.
As to complements for your oysters… Richard recommends a drop or two of acid (lime juice for west coast oysters, lemon juice for east coast) and a glass of wine grown in soil containing oyster shells. Richard is a particular fan of the muscadets brought to British Columbia by Racine Wine Imports.
And now for a beer! After speaking with Richard, I met up with a new friend, Chad McCarthy. Chad is a lawyer in Vancouver and also a beer enthusiast. But unlike the rest of us, Chad has an actual certification. He is a cicerone, a certified beer expert, one of the very first in Canada. Think of a cicerone as a sommelier for beer, an expert there to guide the rest of us in choosing, serving and enjoying beer.
Having grown up in British Columbia, Chad spent some time working in Silicon Valley as an engineer, and it was there that his eyes really opened to the world of beer. Returning to Vancouver in the early 2000s to attend law school, Chad joined a home brew club and studied beer formally through a course taught by Canada’s first cicerone, Chester Carey, at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts.
Chad puts his training to work as a judge certified under the Beer Judge Certification Program. In our talk, Chad explained that the competitions he judges are only secondarily about declaring a winner. The real goal is to provide informed, helpful feedback to home brewers looking to improve their own beer. What a great way to give back to the community.
Oh, and Chad is a certified mead judge too! All of his training and qualifications notwithstanding, Chad is not remotely snobby about what he drinks. His overriding advice makes perfect sense to me: “Drink what you like.” When he has a beer himself, Chad loves to share it with friends, preferably around a backyard BBQ where fellow beer enthusiasts can share their home-brewed creations and hopefully some delicious smoked meat and a little homemade charcuterie too.
Chad and I spoke a lot about matching beer with food, and I put to Chad an article in GQ I found quite amusing on the topic of beer. It was written by Chef David Chang of the Momofuku restaurant empire. In the article, Chef Chang made the case for what he called “shitty beer”, basically mass-produced North American lagers that he says go really, really well with food. Chad thought Chef Chang absolutely had a point. These types of beers – which Chad tells me are very challenging to make – do indeed go well with food, and many serious beer experts enjoy them and have their favourites among them.
Given my discussions with Richard of The Curious Oyster, I couldn’t pass up the chance to ask Chad for some beer recommendations to go with oysters. Chad told me that the classic pairing is an Irish stout (the most famous being Guinness), but that a Belgian beer known as a gueuze could make a great match too. Chad went on to give me more fantastic suggestions for matching beers with food… from ribeyes all the way to ice cream. Those matches and more are waiting in Episode 004 of the Cheftimony podcast