Fried Oysters Remoulade (Page 329)

RECIPE #1125

• Date: Saturday, February 27, 2010 -- 6pm
• Location: Berkeley, CA
• Kitchen: Our Temporary California Home
• Fellow Chef: Matty
• Recipe Rating: A-
  

I chose this recipe as part of the All Seafood All The Time plan. For a long time I avoided the recipes in The Book that contained mussels, clams, and oysters. I just never ate any of those things growing up, and frankly, I didn't have much interest in eating them. Eventually I reached a point when I knew I needed to start making some of those recipes. Arbitrarily, I decided to start with mussels. Quite a while later I adventured into the clam recipes. For whatever reason I continued to avoid the oysters. I no longer have time for such nonsense though, so I decided to make some oysters. This was the first oyster recipe I made from The Book, and further, the first oyster I had ever eaten!

We started by making the remoulade. My special gentleman and I stirred together mayonnaise, coarse-grain mustard, tomato paste, minced shallot, minced dill pickle, minced scallion, Worcestershire sauce, Old Bay seasoning, minced parsley, sugar, red wine vinegar and cayenne. Then while my special gentleman shucked the oysters, I whisked together milk, egg, salt, and pepper. In a shallow baking pan I spread out a mixture of saltine crumbs, salt, and pepper. We heated vegetable oil to 375 degrees, then my special gentleman dipped each oyster in the egg mixture then dredged them in the cracker crumbs. We fried the oysters until golden. I cleaned out the bottoms of the oyster shells, and once the oysters were fried we returned them to their cleaned shells and topped with the remoulade. In a word: Yum! These oysters were super tasty! The breading was wonderfully crunchy and flavorful, and the oysters were perfectly cooked. It was the sauce, though, that really stood out to me. It was fantastically balanced, and incredibly flavorful. Lots on ingredients went into it, but the flavors all came together in a great way. We had leftover sauce and I ate it on bread for days. Yum! This recipe was a winner -- definitely a wonderful introduction to oysters.

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Today was day two at the mini math workshop in Palo Alto. The four of us are having a great time working and hanging out. We have settled into a routine for the week. We head over to the institute nice and early and work together all morning in a corner room with whiteboards on three walls. It didn't take long for us to fill every board with project ideas, conjectures, computations, etc...! We leave the institute for lunch, walking to nearby restaurants. After lunch we go back to the institute, eat some candy (today: gummy Coke bottles and astronaut ice cream -- Mike's choices!), and continue to work. In the early evening, just as we are starting to feel a little braindead, there is happy hour! The institute provides beer and wine in the evening, as well as soda, juice, coffee, tea, bagels, cookies, nuts, fruit, etc... all day long. I have been eating so much since I arrived! Tonight we also had a special "banquet" dinner for our little group at an Italian restaurant. It has been a fun, productive couple of days, full of mathematics and food (two of my favorite things!). I am looking forward to the rest of the week!