Summer is done 🍁🍂 Oyster Season has begun! 🦪🌊 As the water temperature drops, oysters shift their energy away from spawning and back into building sweet-tasting glycogen, their energy stores for the cold winter ahead.
Oysters feed on phytoplankton (microscopic sea vegetables, basically), which use photosynthesis to grow (meaning they require sunlight!), so there is less oyster food during the winter.
Plus, oysters go into a hibernation state when the water temperature drops below 45 degrees or so (i.e. when they are in your fridge or on ice) so there’s not much new growth happening during the winter, just a sweet oyster taking a nice winter break.
By trying oysters from Swinomish Shellfish (Similk Bay, Swinomish Tribal Land, by La Conner & Fidalgo Island) and Skagit Shellfish (Skagit Bay, by the north end of Camano Island), two small shellfish farms that have different growing methods, you can taste different salinity levels in their bays, and a range of sizes. You can even get our PNW native species, the tiny Olympia oyster!
Food safety concerns are much lower in the winter than in the summer, too. You always want to make sure the oysters were harvested in safe-that-day waters, have been kept cold (around 40 degrees) since within a couple hours of harvesting, and that they contain liquid inside their shell (dry oysters are not safe!). Summertime brings a lot more temperature-specific bacteria concerns for raw shellfish (which is why buying from farms is great, because they are heavily monitored!). During the winters in the PNW, farms do get shut down if there is too much rainfall (but it takes A LOT of rain to make this happen) in large part because that rain often brings fecal matter from overloaded septic tanks (so please, get yours pumped and bug your friends!)
submitted by /u/eatsalinity
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