The World Is Their Oyster - Widow's Hole

In Greenport, N.Y., about 100 miles outside of New York on Long Island, Mike Osinski farms oysters on the upper reaches of the Peconic Bay. His bivalves, called Widow's Holes after the pond outside of his house, end up on the menus at some of the city's best restaurants. One of these, the Mermaid Inn, organized a trip to Widow's Hole earlier this week to shed some light on "Everything Oysters": how they're farmed, harvested, shucked and, most importantly, eaten.

Osinski, a former computer programmer who started his Widow's Hole Oyster Company in August 2004, proved an amiable and knowledgeable guide, regaling his students with oyster history while his three Labrador retrievers lolled about near empty oyster cages and the Shelter Island ferry cut a lazy swath through the Greenport Bay waters once home to no less than 30 oyster companies.



Though oysters are commonly perceived as a delicacy available only to a relatively select and affluent few, this wasn't always the case. Far from it.

"A hundred years ago, people ate more oysters than beef," Osinski says. Sold from pushcarts on city streets, they were eaten for nutrition -- thanks to the algae that make up the oysters' diet, they're full of calcium and high in zinc and vitamin B12. And, of course, their wonderful briny flavor didn't hurt, either.

But thanks to a confluence of environmental problems like overfishing, pollution and disease, as well as the bankruptcy of two of Long Island's largest canneries in the 1960s, oysters had all but disappeared from the area by the 1980s.

Seeing how much work goes into oyster cultivation, which Osinski says "is more like gardening than farming," it's easy to understand why they eventually end up selling for around $3 a pop. Osinski's oysters -- the Crassostrea virginica -- are grown for 18 to 30 months before they're ready to sell.

After buying his oyster seeds (which number about 5 million), Osinski cultivates them in PVC containers that he houses in cages sunk 5- to 15-feet deep in the bay. Each cage holds about 2,000 oysters, which grow quickly.

While most restaurants like their oysters to be big and fat, some, such as Le Bernardin (another of Osinski's clients), like smaller and more delicate ones, so Osinski grows them to varying sizes -- the big ones are around 3 inches in length.

To harvest them, he pulls on a pair of rubber overalls and big boots and takes his small boat out to hoist cage after cage out of the water, sorting through the thousands of oysters until he finds what he wants. He harvests and delivers the oysters on the same morning, and cleans and dries their cages every three months.

And while many equate summer with a plate full of crisp, cold oysters, Osinski begs to differ.

"I don't like to sell summer oysters," he says. Warm weather means spawning, and when an oyster spawns, Osinski says, it can lose 40 percent of its body weight to released egg and sperm. "I like to wait until August or September to sell." he says.

Though eating a summer oyster won't necessarily make you sick (particularly because many restaurants now have access to oysters from cooler climates), be wary of those that come from water hotter than 80 degrees -- aside from having an unpleasant texture, they're more likely to leave you with equally unpleasant digestive problems.

Like so many other misconceptions about oysters, Osinski was quick to dismantle the myth that shucking them involves some kind of otherworldly superpower bestowed on a lucky few. If you have a shucking knife and an opposable thumb, you're golden; take a look at this video to see how easy it can be.

Of course, one way to avoid shucking altogether is to light up the grill. As Laurence Edelman, the Mermaid Inn's chef, demonstrated, one of the best ways to enjoy oysters is hot and smokey from the coals, their shells popped slightly ajar, beckoning you to sample the delirious delights hidden inside.