How To Shuck Oysters Without An Oyster Knife<\/strong><\/h2>\nIf 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\nYou 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
How To Shuck Oysters With A Microwave Oven<\/strong><\/h2>\nIn essence, the principle here is the same one we used when putting the oysters in a really hot oven.<\/p>\n
Under heat, the oyster shell opens up, to relieve the internal pressure and let out any steam accumulated by the liquor evaporating.<\/p>\n
\nWash your oysters thoroughly<\/li>\n Arrange them bowl-side down in a microwave-safe dish, ideally with some support to prevent toppling when they open.<\/li>\n Set the microwave to high.<\/li>\n 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.<\/li>\n When all the oysters are open, remove from the microwave and open as normal.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nThere is a similar variant in a pan of boiling water, which is akin to how you would normally cook clams.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
How To Shuck Oysters With A Screwdriver<\/strong><\/h2>\nStrange 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\nCarefully wash your oyster.<\/li>\n 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.<\/li>\n Make sure your screwdriver is both flathead and clean.<\/li>\n 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.<\/li>\n If you try to do it with a dirty, stained or rusted screwdriver – well, that trip to the ER is all on you.<\/li>\n Find the hinge – it’s usually towards the sharper, narrower end of the oyster shell.<\/li>\n 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.<\/li>\n 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.<\/li>\n 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.<\/li>\n 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.<\/li>\n Waggle the screwdriver gently, increasing the gap until you hear the pressure release with a pop.<\/li>\n 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.<\/li>\n Alternatively of course, once the hinge has popped, you should be able to use any thin, flat-bladed knife to complete the shucking. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\nHow To Shuck Oysters With A Butter Knife<\/strong><\/h2>\nFirst 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.<\/p>\n
A real butter knife though is significantly shorter, and has a more rounded head with neither a serrated nor a sharpened edge.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That would be undoubtedly funny, but it wouldn’t get you into your oyster.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So:<\/p>\n
\nWash your oyster thoroughly.<\/li>\n 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.<\/li>\n Insert your butter knife into, or as near as you can get to, the hinge on the oyster.<\/li>\n 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.<\/li>\n 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. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\nThere are, as we’ve seen, many ways of getting into an oyster, some of them more conventional than others.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Stay calm. You will be victorious.<\/p>\n
You will eat oysters tonight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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