Category Archives: clamming

Clams in Wine & Chorizo

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CLAMMING SEEMED like a dicey proposition to me as a kid. I remember watching my dad wade out to his neck looking for quahogs. This was on Cape Cod, near the Eel River. Eels had the run of the place, I was told.

To get the quahogs, you had to feel along the bottom with your feet. This was the sort of goopy bottom that us kids desperately tried to avoid touching at all. But I discovered early on that I loved the taste—the whole ritual—of eating what we simply called steamers. 

Littleneck clams around Puget Sound are more forgiving. With short siphons, they’re usually found in the top few inches of substrate and often higher up in the intertidal zone, no swimming required. 

Steamed Clams in Wine and Chorizo

1 onion, diced
1 yellow pepper, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 pound chorizo
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1/4 tsp salt
2 (or more) tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup white wine
1/4 cup vermouth
2 heaping tbsp fresh chopped cilantro
2 lbs live littlenecks, scrubbed

In a deep casserole or pot, sauté the onion, garlic, yellow pepper, and cumin seeds in olive oil until the veggies are soft, then add the chorizo and cook until lightly browned. Next add the wine and vermouth and bring to a boil. Add the clams and cover. When the clams have opened, stir in the cilantro and serve with good bread.

Razor Clam Chowder

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2 cups chopped razor clams
4-5 strips of thick, quality bacon, diced
1 large onion, sliced into wide half-moons
2-3 cups peeled and cubed potato
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp flour
1 quart chicken stock
1 pint heavy cream (or half and half)
1 tsp dried thyme
salt and pepper to taste

Sauté bacon in heavy pot, then remove with slotted spoon (or not). Sauté onions 1 minute in bacon fat, add potatoes and cook 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove onion-potato mixture for later use. Melt butter and mix in flour to make roux. Slowly add stock over medium heat. Return onions and potatoes and simmer until potatoes are tender. Add thyme and seasonings. Slowly add cream and clams and cook over low heat. Serve piping hot, as my dad always says, with good bread or oyster crackers.

Pasta alle Vongole

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NEVER WAS A  show-stopper so easy to prepare. Linguini with Clams, or Pasta alle Vongole in Italian, has the hallmarks of a classic dish: fresh shellfish glistening atop a feathery bed of pasta with accents of red tomato and green parsley to draw the eye.

3 dozen steamer clams
1/4 cup olive oil
1 shallot, diced
4-5 cloves garlic, diced (or more)
1/4 cup diced tomatoes
1/2 cup white wine
red pepper flakes, to taste
1/2 cup chopped Italian parsley

1. Add a pound of linguini to boiling salted water.

2. Meanwhile, in a deep pan or pot over medium heat, sauté shallot and  garlic in olive oil until soft. Add tomatoes and a generous pinch of red pepper flakes and cook together for a minute. Add a half cup of white wine. Stir and raise the heat. Add clams and cover.

3. Remove the pasta when two-thirds cooked and add to saucepan as clams begin to open. Stir well. When all clams are open, mix in chopped parsley. The linguini should be al dente. Add a ladle of pasta water if necessary.

Serve immediately with garlic bread and salad. Serves 2 large portions or 4 smaller portions. Salute!

Sunshine Daydream

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Did last week really happen? Props to the weather gods for giving us Nor’westerners a break. I celebrated over the weekend by taking the kids to the beach, where we did our part to harvest non-native species. Both the Manila clam (Venerupis philippinarum) and the Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas) are East Asian bivalves that were introduced into Puget Sound. In fact, the introduction was a twofer: the first Manila clams were imported by accident with Japanese oyster seed early last century.

Though I didn’t look too closely, I probably got some native littlenecks (Protothaca staminea) in my limit as well. The littlenecks look similar to the Manilas, with the same crosshatching pattern of concentric rings and radiating ridges on the shell, although they tend to be paler and less oblong in shape, and the tips of their siphons are fused. While the natives are usually buried four or more inches beneath the substrate, the Manilas—with their short siphons—are shallow burrowers … and we thank them for that. Even a two-year-old can get a limit!

A new yellow sign at the beach warned of the dangers of eating uncooked shellfish. I hate to see these signs. Like the white county signs (“Proposed Land Use”) proliferating along the urban-wild interface, nothing good can come of this signage. Every few years, it seems, we have to travel farther afield to find clean beaches and edible shellfish. This particular spot has been our go-to beach for the last year. The view is great, there’s plenty of room to spread out, both clams and oysters are available at low tide, and it’s open almost year-round. I always bring a couple good beers and a lemon so I can eat a few oysters right off the beach. Today was no different, despite the sign. Vibriosis be damned.

More Thoughts on Razor Clams

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My friend Trouthole thinks it’s sacrilege to consign razor clams to a kettle of chowder, but I’m from New England originally and there are few higher expressions of good home cooking than a hearty chowder on a winter day. (Don’t ask me about Manhattan.) That said, Trouthole has a point. No clam tastes better fried than the razor. I don’t want to be overly provincial about this. I’ll eat clams from all over the world—Cape Cod quahogs, Long Island littlenecks, New Jersey longnecks, British surf clams, Japanese manilas—but after discovering the meaty bivalve that Northwesterners have known about for millennia (going back to the first inhabitants) I have to concede that the crown goes to the razor.

This is no small claim coming from an uprooted Connecticut Yankee. Let’s face it: New England has a monopoly on fried clams and clam shacks. There’s a lot at stake here. Fried clams are to New England what barbecue is to the South, and like the barbecue wars, the region has its own family arguments about what constitutes a good fried clam. Generally speaking the clam is dipped in liquid (usually evaporated milk) and then rolled in some sort of flour (breadcrumbs, cornmeal, plain flour, or a combination) before deep frying. Whether or not to include the algae-packed stomach is one of the central squabbles in the tradition (this point being moot with razors, since they must be cleaned before cooking). If the clams are fresh and succulent, few foods compare.

Some will call it heresy, others an indication of how far I’ve strayed. But I’ll say it anyway: fried razor clams are the best. (The photo above was my lunch today: fried razor diggers, or feet, the anatomy of the clam used for digging into the sand, and the tenderest part.) Too often the clams of the East Coast, especially if not dug and shucked that day, are unobtrusive enough that a person with no particular love of clams—or an abiding taste for Styrofoam—can order a basket without fear for his undiscerning palate. Granted, the conditions of the clam shack where he orders that basket will be far superior to the simulacra we have here on the West Coast. But history and atmosphere notwithstanding, I still urge my Compatriots of the Clam from Ipswich and Essex, from Narragansett and Kennebunkport, to journey west and try a fresh razor clam in its native habitat. These golden beauties are positively ebullient with the essence of clam, the experience not unlike gulping down raw oysters: a sweet, delirious taste of the sea.

One last thought: razor clamming reminds me of that great Henry Weinhard’s beer commercial from several years back. A bunch of young slackers are on the dunes drinking Henry’s. Goatees, lots of plaid. “Here come the hotties,” one announces. Cut to a shot of the wind-swept beach with a cold, gray ocean backdrop—and a bunch of girls clad not in bikinis but in so many layers of foul-weather gear that they look like nothing so much as the Michelin tire man. Ah, the Northwest.

Honey, Get the Gun

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The Ace Hardware in Ocean Shores, WA, had guns galore. You might say it was going great guns. I picked out a nice gray one, gun-metal gray, in fact, and then drove to the Porthole Pub for a bacon cheeseburger. An hour later the rain stopped and a few rays of sun snuck through the clouds—not that the weather would stop anyone today. By 2 p.m. the beach was already crowded. We drove out onto the hardpan sand like everyone else. Low tide was 3:58 p.m. I put my boots on, got the gun out, and wandered down among the people. The hooting and hollering had already begun. I took aim and fired.

Open season on razor clams!

Like Noodling for flatheads in the Delta, running a sap line in New England, or dropping a baited hook through a hole in the ice in the Great White North, digging razor clams is a peculiar and time-honored expression of regional identity. Golden-hued and shaped like a straight-edged razor, the Pacific razor clam (Siliqua patula, for “open pod”) makes its home along the sandy, storm-tossed beaches of the Northwest, from Pismo, California, to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, where they earn a living filtering plankton, particularly a species of diatom known as Attheya armatus.

Both humans and grizzly bears have a powerful taste for razor clams. Which brings us back to the clam gun. An ingenious device. Nothing more than a humble length of PVC or metal tube with a handle attached. Lacking a grizzly’s sharp claws and hump of back muscle, the human clam digger must strike a pose with his gun like a hard hat-wearing jackhammerer, then work his tube several inches down into the wet sand before closing a vent on the handle. With suction he can now pull up a core of sand—and, if he’s skilled, a razor clam secreted within.

Overkill, you say? Razor clams are fast. Go ahead and laugh. Reports vary, but one researcher clocked a razor clam burying itself at a rate of an inch per second. At that pace, I refuse to entertain snide remarks about fair chase. These tubes are by far the weapons of choice for extracting the clams. Wherever you go you hear clammers referring to their “guns,” but in truth the term was originally coined to describe a small, angled shovel invented in the 1940s and used for the same purpose, and there are old-school clammers who will eagerly correct you if you call your tube a gun. But everyone does, and so did I.

A limit of razor clams (15 per day in Washington state) may not seem like a lot on paper, but these clams can be monstrous, and one with a six-inch shell surely has more meat on it than a small quail. (The clams to the right, both shucked and one cleaned, are just average sized.)

For both fish and clam chowders I hew closely to the classic New England recipe outlined by Mark Bittman in How to Cook Everything, which happens to be the same recipe used by my grandmother Mimi on the Cape, although unlike both Bittman and Mimi, I prefer using a generous roux of melted butter and flour to thicken the chowder. However, I’ll never go back to my earliest love of the whipped and creamy style so thick you can spread it on toast points, not since working in my youth at a Martha’s Vineyard restaurant famous for its chowder. Between us, that miraculous, float-a-cherry-on-top creaminess didn’t come from any particular technique or wizardry in the kitchen; it came from giant cans labeled “Chowder Base.”