Cultivating a French Oysterevolution
November 12, 2006 - brandchannel.com
The tradition goes like this: a couple of times a year, my buddy and I pile into a car in Paris on a Friday evening and make tracks for his folks’ place on the Ile de Ré, an island off of the west coast of France. Hours later, we pull up in the pitch black and drive 50 yards past the house to La Digue—the seawall where, along with the sound of crashing waves, is a stunning, beautiful, and nearly overpowering smell that’s like inhaling vitamins.
It’s seaweed, seawater, fish, dead birds, and a million species that live on the sea floor, which may have baked in the hot sun if the tide was out during the day. It’s kind of repulsive the first time you smell it, but after a few breaths of it, you’re hooked.
Like oysters, it can be an acquired taste—and this is the environment where the oysters of the Ile de Ré spend most of their life.
This summer, the French oyster industry underwent a bit of its own shell shock. Oysters from the southwestern coastal town of Arcachon were linked with a pair of deaths, and though the bivalves were later determined not to be the cause (as of press time, the French Agriculture Ministry has not released any further details), the damage was done.
The deaths also brought into light the quaint system used to make sure the oysters are safe for consumption, where liquid drawn from sample oysters is injected into a mouse; if the mouse survives, the oysters are approved for sale.
There’s hope that a generations-old industry can be brought up-to-date in the same way newer brands adapt and modernize. Along with eliminating the mouse test, there are several technological developments helping to ameliorate both the quality and quantity of French oysters. The damage control also puts an emphasis on product standards.
“When the quality gets better, you can’t lose,” says Eric Marissal, who is a regional representative for the CNC—the Comité Nationale de Conchyliculture—the committee of French shellfish farmers. “My goal is to make the customers happy, not the big-box stores.”
Marissal also runs Grainocéan, a firm at the forefront of oyster technology that functions as a nursery for notoriously hard-to-raise baby oysters and also produces what are known as triploid oysters—those with the genes of two fathers and one mother.
The major advantage to triploids is that they do not reproduce, which means they don’t have the “milky” flavor traditional oysters acquire in the summertime, which most gourmands find unpleasant.
Triploids are also far more common than you’d expect for something with such a crummy moniker, and Marissal talks about them as though he’s come up with a new, champion strain of roses. As soon as I raise my eyebrow at the genetic thing, he cuts off any questions.
“That orange juice you drank this morning?” he says. “Triploid oranges. Farm-raised salmon and trout? Triploids.”
Marissal estimates that 20 percent of the oysters consumed in Europe are triploids that he raised.
One in five?
“Five or six.”
So anybody who has eaten a good number of oysters in Europe has eaten his oysters?
“If they were good, yes.”
Triploid oysters also allow the island’s oystermen to continue selling their bivalves year-round. For many of them, their prime market in the high season is on the French mainland. In the summer, this changes to the droves of well-heeled tourists who flock to the island.
“There are 100 million tourists on the French coast in the summer. It’s crazy that we’re not selling to them,” says Marissal, who adds that he’s glad that the summer market has grown steadily for the last five years.
He’s also a firm believer that the industry has room to grow.
“World oyster production is 4 million to 5 million tons, but there’s 700 million tons of salmon,” he says.
All tastes being equal, that’s a lot of room for growth.
Marissal is also a pioneer in raising baby oysters, also known as spats or naissins. It’s notoriously tricky to get them to reproduce at sea, where the oysters simply spit out a cloud of eggs and hope they’ll latch on to something—then they’ll need to somehow avoid things like predators and being baked in their shells by the sun.
Instead of leaving it to chance, Marissal starts his spats in screen-bottomed buckets in the island’s marshes. Reaching through the flow of water that is pumped over them, he pulls out a handful of what look like translucent, glinting pebbles. These are the babies that he will eventually put out to sea in suspended cages to grow until they’re about an inch and a half (3.81 centimeters) in length.
“In this nursery”—he runs three—“there are 100 million oysters,” he says, “They’ll go on to produce 5,000 tons of oysters.”
With all his eggs in three baskets, Marissal is extremely attentive to them.
“I work seven days a week—you’ve got to pay tons of attention,” he says. “If they start dying in the nursery, they all die.”
Tony Berthelot is one of about 100 oystermen on the island and he’s completely sold on the idea of buying from a nursery. He also uses modern techniques to make sure the quality of his offerings doesn’t decrease as the years go by.
“The nurseries are allowing us to renew [the strength of our stock] and make sure we’ve got oysters with great characteristics,” he says. Asked if he’d consider raising them from scratch, he looks at me like I’ve got two heads. “A nursery is an occupation in itself,” he replies.
Hacking away at clumps of oysters with a medieval-looking hand tool to break them apart before selling them, he explains that one of the biggest challenges for the island’s oysters is that they become more homogenous, and eventually bland-tasting.
To get around this problem, he spreads his oysters across several plots around the island, which allows him to both rotate his stock and give his customers what they want.
“You’ve got to be able to adapt—you’ve got to listen to the customer and make sure you respond,” meaning that the oysters need to be both tasty and good-looking.
“Up to ten years ago, we were constantly working from the same genetic pool,” he says, drawing a diagram of the island and how, like a town full of inbreeds, the oyster populations’ quality went down as they continued to procreate without moving around. “Over time, we had products that were less and less interesting.”
“Now, we’ve learned that it’s more important to have quality.”
Though Berthelot doesn’t yet use triploids, he’s considering at least a partial changeover within the next couple of years to take advantage of their desirable shape, durability, and clean, non-milky flavor.
On the tide flats outside of the town of Loix, Lucien Thaunay, a third-generation oysterman, shows that technology can take him only so far. Using a wooden dowel the size of a Billy club, he whacks the crap out of the wire mesh pouches his oysters grow in, obliterating any that have grown between the grates and separating those that are stuck together on the inside.
“You let them grow wild and they take on funny shapes…bananas, revolvers, telephones,” he says, picking one off of the leg of the metal table that the pouches are attached to and chucking it into the incoming tide.
“I’ve done this all my life,” he says, hacking away with glee. “My parents and my grandparents did this. I love this.”
At about the hour most French schoolchildren are tucking in to an after-school brioche, I’m starving and have a seemingly unquenchable thirst. I ride my bike back to town, get a can of beer, buy a dozen of Berthelot’s finest, take them to the seawall above some of his parcels, pull out my Laguiole pocket knife, and dig in.
It feels a bit macho, shucking and eating them next to where they were raised, but I don’t care. They’re ridiculously good.
I nick up my hands a bit and realize I’ve wiped them on my jeans so much that I’m going to smell like a fish on the train tomorrow but, again, I don’t care.
They seem to get better and better as I gain momentum and by about number seven or ten, I reach a sort of bivalve nirvana. I also realize I could blow off the research part of things and eat two- or three-dozen more.
And the taste? They have a beautiful evolution of flavor: first, it’s like a mouthful of seawater, then I chew and it gets sweet and that flavor lingers long after I’ve swallowed. The experts say they taste hazelnuts or sweet seaweed, but I don’t. I taste La Digue.
Joe Ray is a food and travel writing specialist based in Europe. He can be reached via his Web site, www.joe-ray.com.
