Pages tagged Washington
Fat Bastard
Taylor Shellfish's large tide-tumbled Pacific from Willapa Bay: a Shigoku grown on to 2.5 to 3.25 inches and about twice the volume.
Hammersley Inlet
A South Puget Sound beach oyster, spread on a pebble bottom and picked by hand. Low in salt, big in body, with cucumber and a metallic note at the end.
Henderson Inlet
A South Puget Sound inlet once closed by pollution. A community oyster farm began in 2002, sold its first oysters in 2008, and saw 240 acres upgraded in 2010.
Quilcene
A Hood Canal bay that once held about 100 acres of solid Olympia oyster beds. Pacifics replaced them; a 2018 survey found the natives scattered but still there.
Willapa Bay
The estuary that shipped oysters to the forty-niners and now supplies around 70% of Washington's oysters. Big, working-bay Pacific oysters with a long history.
Vibrio Moves North
In 2004 raw oysters from Alaska made cruise passengers ill, 1,000 km north of any oyster previously linked to the illness. Warming water is redrawing where raw oysters carry risk.
Chelsea Gem
An Eld Inlet oyster tumbled by the tide in bags that rise and fall twice a day, from the family farm that developed the method.
Dabob Bay
A deep, forest-ringed bay so short of food that its oysters grow slowly and stay crisp and salty. Taylor Shellfish chose it for a hatchery.
Pacific Oyster
The Asian oyster that replaced failing native oysters from Washington to France, and whose taste depends almost entirely on where it grows.
Penn Cove
A Pacific oyster started in Samish Bay and finished in Penn Cove, home of the oldest and largest mussel farm in the United States.
Samish Bay
Wide, shallow tideflats in north Puget Sound, farmed since at least 1935 and home to tide-tumbled oysters from several growers.
Skookum
A shallow inlet at the far end of Puget Sound that empties at low tide. Its mudflat algae make buttery, low-salt oysters.
Hood Canal
A deep, narrow arm of Puget Sound whose tidelands grow some of Washington's best-known Pacific oysters, from Hama Hama to Dabob Bay.
Blue Pool
Hama Hama's small, deep-cupped oyster, tumbled for a smooth shell and named after a pool up the Hamma Hamma River.
Olympia
The small native oyster of North America's Pacific coast, nearly wiped out by 1900s harvest and pollution, now farmed in small numbers and restored.
Shigoku
A small, deep-cupped Pacific tumbled by the tides in floating bags, released by Taylor Shellfish in 2009.
Hama Hama
A Hood Canal oyster grown by a sixth-generation family business that started in timber, sold at their farm store and Oyster Saloon in Lilliwaup.
Totten Inlet
An algae-rich south Puget Sound inlet that grows Pacifics fast, and one of the few West Coast places where Eastern oysters are farmed.