Gabriola Island: Shellfish-Gathering Expedition

During a recent trip with my wife, Sandra, and our two young kids up to Botanical Beach, within Juan De Fuca Provincial Park on Vancouver Island, we got inspired to try a little shellfish prospecting.  We checked with the regulations and safety closures, and they all checked out.  So, once we were done looking over all the tide pools (and critters trapped therein) at Botanical, we got back in the car and traveled a short distance south of the park to give it a shot.  The reason for the shift in locales is that shellfish harvesting is prohibited within the boundaries of the Provincial Park, so we needed to get beyond its southern border to get started digging.  As we soon found out, though, there aren't exactly an abundance of the kind of picturesque sandy beaches in the area that one envisions when thinking of clam digging.  It's more like an unending series of dark sandstone formations that look roughly like the outside edges of an active volcano.  There is no digging to be done there.  I attempted to salvage the excursion by pulling whatever mussels I could reach, out from their crevices and assorted hidey-holes.  This was in-between alternately sprinting away from, and toward, the crashing waves as they pounded forward and then receded.  Suffice it to say, I gave up on that fairly quickly, and returned the meager handful of mussels I had collected to a tide pool.  We gave up on the quest for fresh shellfish on that day, but we resolved to form a new plan and attack these critters from a different angle.

The new plan kicked off on the weekend of April 30 - May 1, and began with another examination of the regulations.  This time, we were going to travel up to Nanaimo, and then take the ferry over to Gabriola Island, where my step-dad has a trailer on a piece of land that we're allowed to use.  We made sure that the spot I had in mind, called Brickyard Beach, was open to shellfish harvesting, and that there were no sanitary or PSP closures in the area.  The Department of Fisheries and Oceans website confirmed those facts, and we then moved along to more pressing questions: how many are we allowed to keep?  Even though I'd never even attempted to harvest shellfish until the debacle south of Botanical Beach, I felt cocky enough about outsmarting these miniature brainless beasts that I wanted to know what kind of limits we were looking at.  Sandra and I determined that we were each allowed a daily limit of 75 total clams, made up of an aggregate of as many littlenecks and manilas as we wanted, but not more than 25 butter clams or cockles.  We studied up on what each of these clam species looked like.  In addition, we were allowed 15 oysters each.  Naturally, since we would be there for two days, I planned on walking away with our full allotment of 300 clams, and 60 oysters; so we packed our stuff, including a 100 litre cooler for our bounty, and set out for Gabriola.

This time out, we had the foresight to plan our trip around the low tides at the beach we would be digging, and as soon as we arrived on the island, we drove straight to Brickyard Beach and started excavating.  Sandra figured out pretty quickly that the majority of the clams were to be found in the upper third of the tidal zone, which is the opposite of what I had assumed.  Apparently these things were wilier than I had given them credit for.  After about two hours of scratching around in the sand, most of which time we shared the beach with an entire busload of shellfish-digging tourists, we did indeed come away with a limit each of both clams and oysters.  We half-filled the cooler with seawater, stowed our catch in it, and drove to the trailer for dinner and sleep.  Seeing as how we had two adults and two small children packed onto one bed in a trailer, and one of those kids apparently wanted to pull an all-nighter, the sleep part never really materialized.  We had originally planned to take advantage of one more low tide early in the morning, and get two more limits of both clams and oysters, but those plans changed.  Instead, we got a late start, and decided that Sandra would just quickly go down to the beach and get her 15 oyster limit, and then we'd go straight to the ferry terminal.  That brought our total haul to 150 clams, and 45 oysters.  Now we just had to pick up a couple of oyster knives on the way home, and figure out what exactly one does with what felt like about 100 pounds of mollusk meat and shell.  Mostly shell.

First, I scrubbed all the shells with a nailbrush under running water (the hose in the yard) to get them clean.  Then, we let all the shellfish sit overnight in the cooler in a 12:1 ratio of fresh water and salt, to let them purge most of the grit remaining inside the shells.  Then the fun began.  If you've never shucked oysters before, you can't really imagine the kind of frustration and hand injuries that can occur during that activity until you've tried it yourself.  Watching Youtube tutorials about it is sort of helpful, but mainly just serves to breed resentment toward the people in the videos and how easy they make it look.  Sandra and I managed to get our 45 oysters done in about an hour and a half.  I then washed the oyster meat (which at this point looked like a bowl of loogies) in a colander under cold running water to wash away any remaining grit.  I wanted to smoke the oysters, because I've spent my entire life eating commercially processed smoked oysters out of cans, and I wanted to see what I could come up with for a homemade alternative.  I made a brine consisting of 3/4 cup of kosher salt, 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar, 1/2 cup of soy sauce, 3 bay leaves, 1 tbsp of garlic powder, 1 tbsp of onion powder, 1 cup of white wine, and a dash each of black pepper and hot sauce, in 5 2/3 litres of cold water.  I stirred that up until all the salt and sugar had dissolved, and left the oysters to soak in it in the fridge for 36 hours.

While waiting for the oysters to brine, I turned my attention to the clams.  We had gotten mostly manila and littleneck clams, with a handful of the larger butter clams and a few cockles mixed in.  I filled a pot with water, and steamed the clams open in batches of a dozen or so at a time, picking the meat out of the shells as they opened, and collecting it in a colander to rinse.  It was during this process, after the lugging and the scrubbing and the shucking, and now the steaming and the rinsing of nearly 200 individual shellfish, that I realized just how lucky I was that we had not fulfilled my initial lofty expectations of two full two-day limits of all these bloody critters.  I wanted to smoke the clams as well, so after a quick rinse of all the clam meat, I set it aside in the fridge while I prepped a brine for it.  This consisted of 2/3 cup of brown sugar, 1/3 cup of kosher salt, 1/2 tsp of cayenne pepper, and 1/2 tsp of garlic powder.  This is a dry brine, so you place a bunch of clam meat in a single layer in a large flat-bottomed container, cover it in a layer of brine, then layer on more clams, cover them in more brine, and continue until you're out of clam meat.  Now you've essentially got a heap of salt, sugar, and clams.  I let that sit in the fridge for two hours.  During this time, the brine draws all the moisture out of the shellfish, and the whole thing turns into a sludgy, sloppy, mud-puddle-looking deal.  Once this process was complete, I dumped the clams into a colander once again for another rinse, and oiled the racks of my smoker with olive oil to prepare them for loading.  I folded a sheet of window screen over my smoker racks before putting the clams on them, to prevent them from falling through.  I have a Big Chief smoker with no temperature control, no timer, and no ability to auto-load wood chips at pre-set times, so I have to do everything manually.  The clams were pretty simple, though; an hour with no smoke, just to dry them and create a nice surface for the smoke to adhere to, then an hour of smoking with alder wood loaded in the chip pan.  Immediately after removing the clams from the smoker, I placed them into a container partly filled with olive oil, to allow the warm meat to absorb the oil.  Done!  They'll keep in a container of oil for a couple of weeks in the fridge, or basically forever in a deep freeze.  I vacuum-sealed mine in a small amount of the oil and put them in the freezer.  I've read that while it's perfectly safe to pressure can them, it's not a good idea to do so, because it all basically turns to mush.  That's why I went with the freezer option, instead of the more nostalgic smoked-mollusk-in-a-can.

Having finished my clams, I then turned back to the oysters, after their brining session had been completed.  The same rinsing off of the brine and oiling of the smoker racks applied for the oysters, after which I loaded them up and smoked them for four hours, also with alder wood.  While they were smoking, I prepared an olive oil infused with lemon zest and chopped garlic.  This is accomplished simply by boiling the oil, adding zest and garlic, and allowing it to percolate for a short time before removing it from heat and setting it aside to cool to room temperature.  Once the oysters were done with their smoke, I put them in an oven, preheated to 400 degrees, to finish the cooking process for 10 minutes.  I then took them out and tossed them in the infused olive oil while still warm, to soak up flavour.  They can be stored in oil in the fridge for a couple weeks, like the clams, or frozen indefinitely in vacuum bags in the freezer.  One note about freezing shellfish in oil, is that the oil will turn opaque when frozen, which could be off-putting if you're not expecting it, but it will return to translucence again once thawed. 

That's it!  That's how you acquire a hundred (slight hyperbole, but not far off) pounds of mollusks, and after a couple days, a little effort, and maybe some stitches in your hands if you're not super handy with an oyster knife, turn them into about three pounds of delicious finished product.  Worth it?  That depends on how you look at it.  It was great fun, shucking and shell-scrubbing notwithstanding,  and exactly the kind of activity that I love doing.  It's certainly a great time for kids, who get all the fun of collecting live shells on the beach, and bringing them home and seeing the weird creatures that live in them, and then get to skip all the actual hard-work part involved in the rest of the process.  On the other hand, after a quick calculation, I figure you could buy the same amount of smoked shellfish, fully processed for you, in a nice convenient can, refrigeration disturbingly not required, for about $30 plus tax.  If you've got the time and the inclination, I recommend doing it the hard way at least once.