Unearthing a Legend
A monster clam lurks beneath the surface of Seattle’s Puget Sound. To go after it, you’d have to be insane, a local or, like one intrepid writer, really hungry.
© JOHN CLARK
Like all the best hunting and fishing stories, this one begins at the crack of dawn, up with the gulls over the Puget Sound. As the sun breaks the horizon, I’m rumbling south from Seattle in local chef Ethan Stowell’s cluttered blue Highlander, his trusty hound Cleo yelping in back. Our destination: geoduck territory, a 90-minute drive on down the coast.
A chill hangs in the air as we pull up on Eld Inlet. Trudging through the woods and onto the tidal flats, we open our eyes and ears in search of our prey. We’re not craning for colorful plumage. In fact, we’re looking down, not up, hoping for a glimpse of… seawater spit?
Geoduck (pronounced “gwee-duck”) is Nisqually Indian for “digs deep,” which sums them up nicely. Geoducks, not birds but mollusks, are the world’s largest and most elusive burrowing clams, making their home three feet deep in the muck, vanishing completely from view whenever the tides come in. Though these aquatic monsters — some call them “king clams” — range up and down the Pacific coast from Alaska to Baja, they’ve always been particularly abundant here in the Pacific Northwest. Washington is, in fact, one of the only places where the wild supply is suffi cient for them to be commercially exploited.
But the wild geoducks, usually found only in the deepest tidal tracts, aren’t the ones we’re here to see (particularly since they’re under five feet of tidal water this time of year). Since the mid-90s, when the techniques for breeding them were first perfected, whole stretches of coastline have been converted to geoduck farms. They’re planted like crops when they’re still just miniscule specks. The juveniles — known in the business as “seeds” — are transplanted from hatcheries, thousands upon thousands of them inserted into the sand every year encased in small plastic pipes, protected from predators by mesh nets capped on top.
They develop slowly, at a prehistoric pace. Though the pipes are removed after a year, it takes five years at least before they’re ready to harvest. By then, their long necks approach two feet or more, extending out from their bellies (also known as mantles) and poking on up through the muck like elephant trunks. In low tide you might spy the tips of those siphons, as they’re usually called, spewing out seawater like miniature geysers.
We’ve arrived in time to catch some of their staggered eruptions. But the clams they’re attached to are still too young to harvest. They have two more years before they’re coming out. Left to their own devices, they’d outlive us all. Geoducks are among the longest-living species on earth, with the oldest specimen recorded at 168 (scientists read the rings on their shells like rings on a tree).
But it’s early September, when the tides in these parts are approaching their weakest, leaving most of the fully-grown geoducks buried all day at sea. We’d need tanks and wet suits to unearth some for eating, which is how they’re generally harvested this time of year.
Even in the best conditions, geoduck farming is backbreaking work — knee-deep in the muck toting heavy equipment. The pros use a fat hose attached to a water pump, nudging the geoducks free by blasting the silt around the clams with pressurized water. “If I tried to hand dig them I’d dig up two or three clams in a day and I’d probably break them,” says Tom Bloomfield, the geoduck farmer who works this particular patch.
Still, hand-digging wild geoduck, for fun and sport, is a rite of passage for Washington natives. That arduous pastime is best during the low tidal months from April to August (we’d just missed our window). By law, recreational diggers can pull up three big clams a day from any of the public beaches along the Hood Canal and Puget Sound. You just look for a spout and then prepare to get dirty (see sidebar on page 58). Along with a shovel, many amateurs bring a wide plastic tube (a trash can with the bottom removed works well), which they sink into the ground around the geoduck to prevent the wet sand from caving in on itself.
It may seem a lot of trouble to go through for one ugly clam. But geoducks are big business — and very good eating.
These days most of the best commercial specimens are shipped off to Hong Kong, Shanghai or Tokyo, where they command exorbitant prices (in excess of $100 apiece). Since the 1970s, when a local shellfish entrepreneur began shipping geoducks east, the Asian market hasn’t been able to get enough of this stuff . The Japanese covet raw slices for sushi; the Chinese prize the meat for its supposed aphrodisiac qualities. But they weren’t always considered an international delicacy.
Bloomfield grew up around here, back when geoducks were still ground up for chowder or sold cheap as bait. Even then they were a source of civic pride and local humor. The clams with the funny name and odd phallic appearance inspired a song (“You can hear the diggers say… oh I gotta dig a duck, gotta dig a duck a day”) and, more recently, a scene in David Guterson’s bestselling novel Snow Falling on Cedars. They were the model for at least one man-eating alien (in the b-movie Slither), and are the official mascot for a local university (Evergreen State College, located down the coast in Olympia). And they’re making Washington’s shellfish business — which distributes some 4 million pounds of wild and farmed geoduck annually — plenty of cash.
To celebrate the geoduck bonanza, last June the biggest players in the giant clam business joined forces to throw a geoduck festival in the nearby coastal town of Allyn — the first of its kind since the 1930s. There were geoduck dishes from local restaurants and a geoduck derby where participants went out onto the flats to dig up their own. The festival organizers expected a turnout of 1,000, but three times that number showed up. “We ran out of geoduck by noon and had to bring in some more,” says Gifford Pinchot of Taylor Shellfish, our official guide through the region.
As a company, Taylor has done more than just about anyone to popularize geoduck locally (they were the first to farm them commercially). A few years back they began a serious push to get Seattle chefs serving them. “They were going to their restaurant accounts and asking, ‘Have you ever tried geoduck?’” says Stowell, a James Beard Award winner who recently opened his fourth Seattle restaurant. “They showed us how to clean and how to serve one. I don’t think anybody knew what it was.” Since then, geoduck has become one of Stowell’s favorite high-end menu items. “People think of it as just another clam,” he says, “but I put it more in the category of foie gras or truffles.”
The chef has promised me lessons in geoduck cooking and cleaning, but they won’t be happening if we’re relying on the tides this morning. Fortunately, Pinchot has brought us a couple of beauties, harvested by divers the night before and packed in a cooler on ice. For now, though, they’ll have to wait in the car while we stop off for lunch.
No visit to geoduck country would be complete without a meal at Xinh’s Clam and Oyster House in the county seat of Shelton. Travel Channel’s Andrew Zimmern dined there last summer when he came through looking for geoduck. Anthony Bourdain had been in before him, and so had the Food Network’s Jeff Corwin, who dragged the restaurant’s chef out into the mud while shooting his Extreme Cuisine program. They’re all there, in framed snapshots on Xinh’s wall of fame, just past the whiteboard announcing a special of geoduck pasta.
Xinh Dwelley, former five-time West Coast oyster shucking champion, worked for Taylor before they bought her this restaurant back in the 90s. “Oh, I should’ve made you egg rolls,” she coos, surveying our overstocked table, laden with pan-fried geoduck, stuffed clams, stir-fried oysters and curried mussels. She disappears into the kitchen, returning quickly with enormous homemade house special egg rolls. Dwelley’s food reflects both her Vietnamese heritage and her Washington home (she came over in the 1970s as the wife of a GI). For last June’s geoduck festival, she worked with a nearby ice cream parlor, developing the recipes for a lemon ice cream and a lime sorbet, both made with geoduck. They sold out as fast as everything else. But geoduck is really best, Stowell insists, when it’s not muddled with too many other ingredients.
Later, back in Seattle at his newest restaurant, Staple & Fancy — a casual Italian spot in the hip Ballard neighborhood — the chef sets out to prove it. In the restaurant’s big open kitchen he gets a pot of water boiling and drops in the clams we brought back from the Sound, leaving them to bubble for 30 seconds or so. “See how the skin’s starting to blister?” he says. “That’s what you want.” He grabs them with tongs and slips them into a big bowl of ice. “You’re not looking to cook them,” he says, peeling the skin off the siphon, quick like a stocking, stretching it out “like a really big condom.” The shell breaks off in shards just as easy, leaving an otherworldly big bulbous bivalve. Using his sharp Japanese knife, he separates the siphon and mantle, and discards the inedible guts. He hands me a slice of raw neck. It tastes of the ocean, is remarkably sweet, and has great snap and crunch. “Like candy,” says Stowell, tossing thin slices with cucumber, celery and “really good” olive oil — a geoduck salad he sometimes serves at the restaurant. “I like to use ingredients that accentuate the crunch,” he says.
In Washington, they say, the geoduck is best when you’ve unearthed it yourself. But does mud in your eye and a kink in your neck really make the clams taste any sweeter? I have my doubts as I watch Stowell tackle the mantle — which is softer and meatier and is most often cooked. The chef dips thick hunks of it in semolina flour and milk and then crisps them up quick in the deepfat fryer. Moments later, he delivers what he promises is the “best clam strip you’ve ever tasted.” It’s pretty close to perfect. The best geoduck, clearly, comes down to the cook.
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