How to Wash Oysters Before Cooking

Series Summary

Have you ever heard of a man named John D. Rockefeller, at one time the richest man in the world? If you have, then perhaps you’ve also heard of the delicious seafood dish bearing his namesake: oysters rockefeller. This famous dish was created by the son of Antoine Alciatore, the proprietor of the well-known New Orleans restaurant, Antoine’s. Purportedly invented when confronted with a lack of fresh snails to use, oysters rockefeller has since been copied many times over by other local New Orleans chefs. But the jury is still out as to whether they’ve ever gotten the recipe quite right, seeing as how it has never left the Alciatore family’s hands since its creation. Though other chefs can guess, there’s no way to beat an original; I recommend making the pilgrimage to Antoine’s as soon as humanly possible.

In the meantime, while your taste buds are aching for the authentic buttery richness of the Antoine’s dish, learn how to make a pretty darn good version of oysters rockefeller right here at ExpertVillage. Our chef will walk you through this recipe step-by-step, with special consideration for preparing the oysters, including instructions on how to clean and shuck them. Also get an ingredient list, learn how to prepare the vegetables, create the sauce, and bring it all together. Also get a quick recipe for an oyster stew.

Bon appetit!

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to shuck an oyster and how to prepare them a couple of different ways. Alright, the first thing you're going to want to do with your oysters is clean them off. Because you'll see, these I just got these from a local market and they look pretty clean on the outside, but when start running water over them, you'll see a bunch of like dirt and mud. As you can see on my fingers right there comes off of them. You don't want to serve anybody dirty oysters 'cause that's just gross. One other thing I recommend, is when you go to buy these oysters, only get them from reputable sources. I wouldn't really buy them at the grocery store. I'd go to a specialty, like a seafood market, or if you have like a high-end, like a gourmet grocery store near you, I'd recommend something like that. So, clean these off. It's pretty simple. And you still see, I've still kept them on ice the whole time. You want to keep them as cold as you possibly can until the point you're going to use them. So, sit them in the sink here and start running some water over them. And I've got a brush here that I keep pretty much for oysters and potatoes. There you go. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to take this brush and brush the outside of each one. You see the water is turning a really, pretty nasty color. You don't have to scrub too much. You want to scrub enough to get all the really nasty stuff on the outside. There's a couple of different kinds of oyster out there. A couple of thousand different breeds of oysters. Specifically, there's four major types of oysters and, of the four classes of oysters, all of them fit into three categories. Three different classes. There's one oyster called the kimono oyster, which is from Japan originally. It's grown on the West Coast here now, in California. But that one occupies a class all its own and those are pretty much the best oyster you're going to get and they're really expensive. They're about three or four dollars a piece, if you're lucky. I've seen them as high as eight dollars a piece, depending on availability and seasonality. So you can see, there's a whole lot of this silt and mud and something else out of these oysters. So what I'll do now, I'll put them back in here and give them another rinse just to make sure I got everything off the outside, and we'll move on to shucking them."