How to Shuck Oysters

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. Now, I'm going to show you how to shuck an oyster. So, what you're going to want is get a couple of towels you don't mind getting messed up. If you have access to an oyster knife, that would be ideal. If you don't, you could also use a flathead screwdriver, which works very, very well. Butter knives typically don't work too well because they flex a little bit too much but, if you have an incredibly sturdy butter knife, I would recommend that as well. Also, if you're scared about stabbing yourself in the hand, as you may well should be, you might consider wearing a glove to stop stabbing yourself quite so vigorously in the hand. So, I'm going to take my first towel that I don't care so much about and set it down here. I'm going to pick out an oyster, I'm going to go with this one. You see this where the hinge is on the oyster on the back here. This is the front. You would think you would go just like this, but it doesn't work that way. It won't open that well. So we're going to hold it, put one towel on the bottom, one towel on the top, exposing just the hinge. And we got lucky, this is an easy one. We're just going to stick our oyster knife down inside there like this and we're going to twist it this way. So watch. Did you hear it pop? And you can see that, we've just popped that oyster. Now what's going to happen is inside there, you can't really see it very well, but there's a connective tissue that connects both halves of the shell to the oyster. So you're going to want to run that knife right along that connective tissue. Sometimes it's easier than others. Sometimes it comes right out. You'll see it like right there. We're just going to scrape that part out, leaving this part just like this. And what's going to happen is you'll see the oyster has a little bit of moisture around it. The longer it sits around, it'll start weeping out the moisture. Don't rinse that off, that's actually really tasty. So, we'll move along to our next oyster. I can find one that's a bit more of a challenge. This looks like a good tough one. Same thing, we're going to take our towel right on top. Take your knife, stick it right in the hinge like that and a wiggle to work it in there. Give the knife a twist. Wow, this one's really hard. There we go. Here we are. Okay, this one's being really difficult to get out of the shell as well. Alright, whoops, some of that stayed in there. Something a lot of people don't know also, which maybe might diminish the amount of oyster eaters in the world, is that oysters are living until you cook them. So, if you're eating raw oysters, and you're eating good raw oysters, which means from a reputable place, they're alive.

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