How To Shuck Oysters

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Oysters are some of the most succulent and superb creatures that grow in the sea.

But they’re not about to make it easy for you to eat them. Arguably, any creature that made it easy for other creatures to eat them would have disappeared down an evolutionary back alley and quietly gone extinct, not very long after they first existed.

Zoologists believe the first oysters as we understand them came into being around 145 million years ago. The first ancestors of human beings arrived about 6 million years ago.

Oysters are really not about to make it easy for you.

Shucking oysters – the art of getting inside the shell they grow – is a business that has vexed Mankind since we first understood there was food in there, which amounts to at least 164,000 years, and history is littered with oysters that have been butchered by poor shucking.

Not to mention spattered with the bloodstains of those who have gone about it the wrong way.

If you’re going to shuck your own oysters, do it the right way.

If you don’t know the right way, you are at least in the right place. We’re about to put everything you ever wanted to know about shucking oysters but were afraid to ask right at your fingertips.

What Is Shucking Oysters?

There’s a chance this strikes some people as an odd, or even a redundant, question. Everyone knows what shucking oysters means, right?

Well, let’s just think about that for a minute.

At its most basic level, shucking oysters means removing the shell of the oyster, so you can get at the flesh inside, in such a way that it can be eaten.

That’s the level on which most people understand what shucking oysters means.

But there’s both more – and weirdly enough, less – to shucking an oyster than that.

What more can there be?

OK, well shucking oysters does not mean, for instance, prying open the shell by sliding a knife right into the delicate oyster flesh inside. Sure, you can open the oyster shell that way.

And in purely practical terms, if you’re on a desert island, you can eat that oyster. But if you do it in a commercial kitchen, any chef worth the name will weep bitter tears and fling you headlong from their kitchen.

That’s not shucking – that’s butchery. Part of the joy about an oyster is its freshness, its living, sea-liquor completeness. When they’re fresh out of the shell, oysters are most usually eaten whole.

Even when they’re prepared and cooked before serving, there’s an elegance to the shape and coherence of an oyster that’s a fundamental part of the pleasure of eating them.

Strange to relate, sliding a knife into the flesh before you open up the shell is not considered the best way to go about maintaining that fresh, live feeling.

We would never credit an oyster with the capacity for revenge, given that they’re non-sentient creatures without a brain, but if you’re going to haphazardly stab it before tipping it down your throat, it’s probably safe to assume you’re not enjoying the oyster at the peak of its perfection.

Shucking oysters also doesn’t mean chipping at the shell until bits break off, only to be found when you slide the oyster into your mouth.

It does not mean pounding away at the shell with something heavy out of sheer frustration, while calling the oyster all the foulest names in Christendom because it won’t open to you.

Shucking oysters is a technique that allows you to open the oyster, usually by the insertion of a knife or similar tool between the two halves of the shell, so that neither the flesh, nor the shell, are damaged.

Like all the best kitchen techniques, it’s a process which at first can seem impossible, but with practice, can become second nature, so you can shuck more oysters in less time and with much less drama than ever seems possible when you begin.

How To Shuck Raw Oysters

Shucking raw oysters is easy – when you know how.

There is one essential to the technique of shucking oysters. You insert something between the halves of the oyster shell, and at the right moment, you twist.

That means that a number of techniques have sprung up for getting inside the shell and keeping the flesh and liquor intact.

For the most part, the techniques differ only slightly, while the technology changes.

You can shuck oysters with everything from a screwdriver to butter knife, to a bespoke oyster knife with a look of the ceremonial dagger about it, and even to a complex machine.

The way you choose to get into your oysters will very much depend on a) the frequency with which you eat them, b) how difficult you find the technique to master with straightforward tools, and c) what tools you have to hand.

Assuming you have something relatively flat to insert between the halves of the shell, the techniques are similar, irrespective of the nature of the thing being inserted.

1. Have something with which to protect your non-moving hand. This can be anything from a special oyster-shucking glove to an oven mitt, a kitchen towel to a piece of clean rag. The point about this is that it needs to help you a) keep the oyster still while you open it, and b) serve as a barrier in case of accidents.
2. Place the oyster on a flat surface with the flat side up and the cupped side down. Yes, this will probably feel counterintuitive the first few times. It’s also why you need the hand protector – you’re ‘operating’ on a bowl-shaped vessel placed on a flat surface. Given even the slightest leeway, it will rock, skitter, and escape from you.
3. Find the ‘hinge’ of the oyster. This is the part where the oyster is held together more seriously than it is by the muscle that is the oyster flesh. It’s usually pretty easy to find – look for the V-shaped end of the oyster, as opposed to the fan-like end. That V-shaped end is usually the hinge. Some people find it easier to insert their shucking implement directly into the hinge, but the way that is accepted as generally easier and quicker is to find a point near the hinge. There are complex physical reasons why this is easier to do with fulcrums. Essentially, it’s easier to pry something open by inserting a crowbar near the point of most resistance than at that point, because if your crowbar is at the point, it has equal resistance on either side of it, and its effectiveness is lessened.
4. Insert your implement near the hinge and twist it upward. Think of prying the top off a recalcitrant jar. You should feel the effect of the twist immediately as a kind of ‘pop.’
5. Slide the implement between the shells, keeping any sharp side like a blade ideally flat, or less ideally tilted a little upward, never down. Gravity will mean all the liquor and flesh will be in the ‘bowl-like’ section of the oyster shell. You’re aiming to avoid piercing it or spilling any liquor while opening the shell.
6. When you’ve run the implement all the way along the shell, you should find you’re able to pry open the flat section of the shell relatively easily, exposing the flesh and liquor, ready for consumption raw or scooping out for preparation.

If you have oysters regularly, or simply find hand-shucking too much like hard work, there are oyster-sucking machines you can buy, though obviously with them, the technique is a little different.

There are any number of varieties of oyster-shucking machines, but the trick in all of them is to line up your oyster correctly with a dull on board drill or chisel bit.

This will use minimal pressure, usually driven by a handle, to part the halves of the oyster shell and give you access to the oyster and its liquor.

By taking some of the instinctive skill of the hinge twist out of the equation, machine shuckers have caught on in restaurants and the like, where they need pound after pound of fresh oysters shucked on a daily basis.

Depending on their construction, they can be significantly safer than using shucking knives or other sharp implements, because there are rarely such dangers involved in a shucking machine. 

How To Shuck Oysters Without A Shucker

So, you need a lot of oysters in a hurry – you have guests coming for your Oysterfest in 20 minutes, and wouldn’t you know it? Your oyster shucker just up and snapped right off at the hilt, leaving you holding nothing but a bulbous handle and some broken, oyster-tasting dreams.

How do you get your oysters out of their shells now?

Don’t panic – there are a handful of other options you can use to get those succulent bivalves to open up and share their salt-liquor secrets.

Heat

1. Crank your oven up to super hot.
2. Load up a tray of oysters, bowl-side down, and add them to the oven. You may well need to find a solution to stop the liquor leaking out when the magic happens. Solutions include the likes of adding a wire rack to the bottom of a sheet for extra stability. Some people simply use a layer of coarse or kosher salt to make more natural support structures for their individual oysters. Do whichever is easier for you in the moment.
3. Wait, and watch. Watch really hard.
4. You’ll eventually see the tops of oysters open up a little.
5. Get them out at that point – the hard work has been done for you, and you don’t necessarily want to cook the oysters.

The use of high heat over a short period to open up the oyster shells is a time-honored tradition for those who don’t have a shucker, but who do have a fire.

Once they’ve opened up that little bit, you can use any implement you have, from a butter knife to a screwdriver, to part the shells further and get at the flesh and the liquor.

You will of course have somewhat warmer oysters this way than you would if you had shucked them from cold or room temperature, but if you watch closely for the moment of shell-opening, you should avoid cooking the oyster flesh, and the warmed liquor gives you a different taste sensation than it does when you drink it cold and fresh.

NB: While this way of shucking your oysters is significantly less likely to give you a piercing injury from slipping with something sharp in your hand, you do run an additional risk of steam build-up inside the shell leading to exploding oysters.

While this is less of a hazard to life and limb, as they’re sealed away inside your oven, there’s no task in the kitchen quite like wiping down your oven to remove pieces of exploded oyster. It’s positively science-fictional.

There’s no need to especially freak out if some of your oysters explode in the oven (for all there’s a certain alien hand grenade feel when it happens), but just be aware that when shucking with heat, this is a risk you run.  

Paring knife

While there’s a certain sharpness to a standard oyster shucker, and as we’ve seen, the heating method carries its own risk of oyster explosion, part of the point of oyster shucking is that you don’t really need the implement you use to be particularly sharp.

What you need here is a crowbar action from something relatively long and flat. You’re prising, not cutting, the oyster open.

So, if you don’t have an oyster shucker to hand, but you do have something like a paring knife to hand, you should be able to use them in the same way you would use your standard oyster shucker.

1. Hold the oyster firmly, bowl-side down. It’s less necessary to have an intervening layer between your holding hand and the oyster when using a knife that’s not sharp, because there are significantly fewer paring knife fatalities than is the case with standard sharp knives, and the most damage you’re likely to do with one is to give yourself a vicious scraping.
2. Find the hinge, as you did with the oyster shucker.
3. Slide your paring knife between the halves of the shell somewhere near the hinge, and twist.
4. The ‘popping’ of the shell’s seal should be immediately apparent
5. Slide your paring knife along the lip of the oyster shell, twisting upward where necessary. Because of the generally weaker and shorter nature of the paring knife than the dedicated oyster shucker, this may be necessary at more points to encourage the shell to open.
6. It may also be necessary to apply more force behind the blade of the paring knife than it would be with an oyster shucker
7. Part and pull open the oyster.  

How To Shuck Oysters Without An Oyster Knife

If you’ve lost your oyster knife, or you’ve never possessed an oyster knife – they’re a somewhat niche piece of equipment, and not every cutlery drawer will have them – you needn’t despair of getting your lips around some top-quality oyster-flesh.

There is a whole range of options in any standard kitchen that should help you get at the oyster. You can use your microwave oven to persuade the oyster to loosen its lid.

You can take a screwdriver to the hinge of the oyster. You can even use a common-or-garden butter knife, because as we highlighted with paring knives, you’re not actually relying on the sharpness of a blade to get you into the oyster.

You’re looking more for a certain length and strength of implement, so you can use it to prise the shell apart, rather than a sharp edge with which to slice it open.

How To Shuck Oysters With A Microwave Oven

In essence, the principle here is the same one we used when putting the oysters in a really hot oven.

Under heat, the oyster shell opens up, to relieve the internal pressure and let out any steam accumulated by the liquor evaporating.

1. Wash your oysters thoroughly
2. Arrange them bowl-side down in a microwave-safe dish, ideally with some support to prevent toppling when they open.
3. Set the microwave to high.
4. Cook for 1.5-2 minutes, removing oysters as they open, so as not to overdo it and cook the oyster till it’s chewy and rubbery.
5. When all the oysters are open, remove from the microwave and open as normal.

There is a similar variant in a pan of boiling water, which is akin to how you would normally cook clams.

By watching the oysters in the hot water, you should be able to see when the shells open – they won’t be cooked at this point – and you can remove them to serve however you intend.

How To Shuck Oysters With A Screwdriver

Strange as this might sound, there’s something about shucking oysters with a screwdriver that connects us to our primitive ancestors even more than shucking them with a knife, because the technique used with a screwdriver is more akin to that used by those first oyster fishermen.

They will have used more of a chisel system than a knife – pushing something into any gap they could find and either waggling it about if they had room, trying to achieve what we now think of as the ‘pop’ of the shell, or, more likely, hitting their wedge with another stone, to force the tip of their chisel-stone further in and open the gap further, until the hinge popped under the pressure of being wedged.

To do it in your less primal, more modern kitchen, the principle is similar, but rather more careful to avoid breaking the shell and getting chips of it in the flesh.

1. Carefully wash your oyster.
2. We’re back to needing some covering or protection on the hand that’s holding the oyster, so gather your oyster glove, oven mitt, or whatever else you use. This is necessary because a flat-head screwdriver has a cutting edge, rather than a blunt or squared off one. Any accidents while shucking oysters with a screwdriver are potentially painful ones that could even require a visit to the ER, so protection on the hand holding the oyster (the hand most likely to come into accidental contact with a screwdriver being moved with purpose) is vital.
3. Make sure your screwdriver is both flathead and clean.
4. If you try to do this with a cross-head screwdriver, the thing to do is to make sure you film it. Put the film on Youtube, and then use the click-revenue to buy yourself a top-of-the-line oyster shucker for future use.
5. If you try to do it with a dirty, stained or rusted screwdriver – well, that trip to the ER is all on you.
6. Find the hinge – it’s usually towards the sharper, narrower end of the oyster shell.
7. You can either try and insert the screwdriver close to the hinge, or directly into the hinge. With traditional oyster shuckers and other flat knives, some of which don’t have enough heft in the handle to take the job on, we would advise going in close to the hinge, but not at it. With a flathead screwdriver, given that they’re usually built to do relatively heavy work, you can go in at the hinge without much fear.
8. If you had a third hand or a well-supported oyster (up against the lip of a high tray or the like), you could now imitate our ancestors and take a small wooden mallet to tap the screwdriver gently, driving the blade into the hinge to part the halves of the oyster shell and achieve the ‘pop that means the largest resistance has been released.
9. Assuming you have neither a high-lipped tray nor a wooden mallet – after all, you don’t have an oyster shucker, so what are the odds? – here’s where you make like a bumblebee and get your waggle dance on. Once the blade of the screwdriver is wedged into the hinge, it should pretty much feel ‘stuck,’ as though the oyster is gripping on to it. Waggle the screwdriver gently up and down. There’s less likelihood of stabbing the oyster flesh here, because your screwdriver is wedged into the hinge, rather than to an area where downward pressure of the blade would make contact with flesh.
10. Try not to be too forceful with your waggle – that’s an easy way to simply snap the shell. If you’ve ever tried to peel an undercooked boiled egg, you’ll know that nothing good comes from this, as you then have to go section by section, and even when you finally achieve the reward of the oyster flesh, it feels a little like defeat because of all the extra work.
11. Waggle the screwdriver gently, increasing the gap until you hear the pressure release with a pop.
12. Whereas with flat-bladed knives, you would now be able to slide your implement along the dividing line of the halves of the shell to completely part it and fully ‘shuck’ your oyster, with a flathead screwdriver, it’s slightly more complicated. You may find you need to insert it into any growing gaps along the whole course of the shell-seam, to effectively break the seal at various points – especially if you want to avoid shell-shatter.
13. Alternatively of course, once the hinge has popped, you should be able to use any thin, flat-bladed knife to complete the shucking. 

How To Shuck Oysters With A Butter Knife

First of all, grab the right knife. Some people call the standard-length knives in an ordinary dinner set, butter knives, and use this all-purpose, often serrated but rarely dangerously sharp, knife for buttering their bread as well as a hundred other things.

A real butter knife though is significantly shorter, and has a more rounded head with neither a serrated nor a sharpened edge.

It has some chutzpah going about being called a butter knife, because about the only things it could cut are butter and pudding, and the largest part of its function is as a spreader, rather than a cutting tool.

But.

Importantly of course, you don’t need your oyster shucking tool to be especially sharp. It’s leverage and pressure that do the majority of the work in oyster shucking, not a sharp blade.

In fact, not having a sharp blade is useful when you’re shucking oysters, because it lowers the risk both of injuries to your hands and of damage to the oyster flesh.

Where the butter knife might well suffer in terms of a shucking tool is that its most vulnerable point is where the ‘blade’ meets the handle – which is also the most important part of the knife if you’re using it to crowbar open one of nature’s most notorious sea hermits.

If you have a cheaply-made butter knife with a poorly attached handle, when you try and use it to chuck an oyster, you might well find the blade does its job, and the handle snaps off in your hand.

Alternatively, if the handle and the blade are made of one continuous piece of relatively cheap metal, you might attempt a shell-waggle only to find the handle bending with you and the blade staying entirely still.

That would be undoubtedly funny, but it wouldn’t get you into your oyster.

With a butter knife, as with the flathead screwdriver, you don’t get many favors for going any distance away from the hinge, because the butter knife might not be able to deliver the leverage the further away from the point of fulcrum you go.

So:

1. Wash your oyster thoroughly.
2. Put it on the surface, bowl-side down, and hold it steady. As we mentioned, if you’re using a butter knife, similarly to a paring knife, it’s likely the worst injury you can do yourself is to scrape off a thin layer of skin cells, so the usual protective layer, while potentially always a good idea, is in no sense vital here.
3. Insert your butter knife into, or as near as you can get to, the hinge on the oyster.
4. Waggle your butter knife gently at first – remember, you’re trying to achieve a fairly delicate result, the ‘popping’ of the hinge on the oyster. You don’t want the shell to snap or shatter, and you also want your butter knife to still work as a butter knife when you’re done. So start your waggle gently, and gradually grow the size of your movements, the closer you get to the ‘pop’ of the hinge.
5. If your butter knife is long and sturdy enough, once you’ve achieved the pop of the hinge, you can use it as you would a standard oyster shucker or oyster knife and slide it along the line of the shell-seam until the top of the shell is free enough to simply prise open. One oyster, successfully shucked with a butter knife. Only another 11 to go before you have a full serving. 

There are, as we’ve seen, many ways of getting into an oyster, some of them more conventional than others.

While machines are useful in restaurants that need to deliver consistency and quality of results at speed, there’s little that can beat the traditional oyster shucker or oyster knife in the hands of either a professional or an experienced and enthusiastic amateur.

But if circumstances dictate you need to get into a lot of oysters in a hurry, and you either don’t have or can’t access your everyday oyster shucker, at least now, you won’t panic.

Boiling water, a hot oven, even a microwave oven can give you options on opening the tricky shells and letting you scoop out the oyster flesh and sea-liquor.

And if the inherent risk of oyster-explosion in those methods doesn’t appeal, there’s always a paring knife, a butter knife, or even an ever-faithful flathead screwdriver in moments of desperation.

The important thing to remember is not to panic. The oyster has been evolving its perfect protection for over a hundred million years – which is pretty impressive for a creature without a brain.

But you have the primate’s toolbox at your disposal – a big brain, an opposable thumb, the imagination to know what will happen if your oyster knife goes into your other hand, and the foresight to avoid that eventuality.

Stay calm. You will be victorious.

You will eat oysters tonight.