Food
In his taste-fueled travels around the globe, Bizarre Foods television host and chef Andrew Zimmern has eaten everything from camel hump sausage to pit viper ice cream, rooster comb, jellied moose nose, stuffed porcupine, cane rat and donkey salami. And last summer, after beginning a countrywide exploration of America’s most unusual foods, he added raw geoduck from Bow’s Taylor Shellfish Farm to his list of edible accomplishments.
Bill Dewey, a shellfish farmer and biologist who’s also the director of public policy and communications at Taylor, says Zimmern and his team spent a day in late July filming various aspects of geoduck farming in southern Puget Sound. He’s not sure what will be included on the episode that will air Feb. 6 on the Travel Channel, but says Zimmern was privy to the steps involved in raising and harvesting the enormous clams—from getting seed from the nursery to stomping nursery tubes, planting baby geoduck, harvesting and, naturally, eating them.
Dewey reports Zimmern was fascinated by the growing process, and says they had a great dialogue about the uniqueness of the clams themselves—most notably that the bivalves are capable of reaching great sizes and ages (the largest on record weighed in at a whopping 16 pounds, and they can live more than 150 years in the wild).
During the course of the day, Dewey says they also ate the saltwater samplers on the beach in the form of sashimi. After setting up a propane burner and boiling water to clean a couple of the geoducks, they sliced them thin and offered up soy and wasabi for dipping purposes.
“He told me that geoduck was one of his top five favorite foods,” Dewey says. “I took that as a pretty significant compliment from someone who has eaten as many different foods as he has.”
While geoducks were the ones getting the on-camera close-ups last summer, Dewey wants people to know that the Taylor family—who have been farming shellfish in Southern Puget Sound since 1890—has expanded the company to be the largest producer of farmed shellfish in the United States. In addition to the half million pounds of geoducks they produce each year, they grow multiple species of oysters (about 35 million total), 1.5 million pounds of mussels and approximately four million pounds of Manila clams.
“The Taylors work very hard at leading by example and setting trends for the industry,” Dewey says. “The company/family is committed to environmental public policy advocacy and has a long-term vision of prosperity for their family, their employees and for the communities where they live and work. It is a pleasure and an honor to work for them.”
[RECIPE]
Xinh’s Geoduck Ceviche
—From the Taylor Shellfish Farm website
Ingredients
1 pound geoduck neck meat, thinly sliced
2 medium-sized limes
1 stalk of celery, thinly sliced
1 small carrot, julienned
1 medium cucumber, thin-sliced lengthwise (skin on)
¼ cup chopped onion
2 tbsp sesame seeds
1 clove of garlic, minced
2 red chili peppers, chopped
1 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp brown sugar
1/3 cup peanuts
Let geoduck meat and juice of one medium lime marinate for 30 minutes. In a large bowl, combine celery, carrot, cucumber, onion and sesame seeds. In a small bowl, combine the juice of one lime, garlic, pepper, fish sauce and brown sugar. Combine ingredients from both bowls with two springs of mint chiffonade and geoduck meat. Serve on a plate garnished with mint and peanuts.
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