I'm taking a break from my usual wine beat for the next few posts to tell you about some foodie treasures I found on the California coast last week. Abalone has been prized in Asia for centuries. Its iridescent shell is beautiful; the firm-textured fresh meat inside is delicious in everything from a stir fry (baby abalone) to a meaty full-size steak (a six-year-old abalone). Every part of the abalone is used--the shells for jewelry and furniture and guitar inlays, the viscera in pharmaceutical research, and of course the meat for food.

When The Abalone Farm was founded off of California's central coast in 1969, researchers hadn't even studied the abalone's life cycle in enough detail to discover that they would soon have a serious underpopulation problem on their hands. Abalone was once plentiful along the west coast, but harvesters and researchers didn't know it can take up to five years for a single abalone to reach full size. Overharvesting and pollution caused the eventual ban of commercial wild harvest, but there's still high demand for abalone, says Brad Buckley, sales manager at The Abalone Farm, mostly in the U.S. for sushi and steaks. The company raises more than 1 million abalone each year, but because abalone take about four years to reach full size, the Farm has around four million abalone in various stages of production.

There's a lot of talk about sustainable seafood versus farm-raised, but with abalone, you don't have to choose the lesser of two evils. The Abalone Farm is a part of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium's Sustainable Seafood Watch program, where it's rated a "Best Choice." I had a breaded and fried version while there, but some say the ultimate expression of abalone is in sushi, raw, crunchy, and tasting of the sea.