How to Serve Raw Oysters at Home

Oysters on the half-shell are my go-to move whenever I'm hosting a cocktail or dinner party, since they're the perfect party-starter. Oysters are light and bright, briny and sweet, and they pair really well with bubbly. They also require very little prep. When I first started pretending to be an adult, hosting those first-apartment-not-in-college-anymore dinner parties, I would burn myself out preparing elaborate passed hors d'oeuvres that friends would fill up on before the actual meal. Now that I'm older and definitely lazier (if not wiser), I buy some nice cheese, a little charcuterie, and a bunch of oysters. I cut some lemons, make a quick mignonette, and then all I have to do is get shucking.

Do you hate the awkward small talk script that you have to run through a few times as the first guests trickle in? Shucking oysters gets you out of that. For whatever reason, when people see you with an oyster knife and a bunch of shellfish, they generally stay out of your way, and offer to get you a cold beverage of your choice. If you don't know how to shuck, that might be enough to convince you to learn, right?

I first started to really learn about oysters at my first restaurant job. I worked at a fine-dining Italian restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that served buck-a-shuck oysters every Monday in the restaurant lounge. Like everyone else, I started out as a prep cook, and part of that initiation process involved cleaning and shucking eight hundred Island Creek oysters. We opened for service at 5:30 p.m., and we'd usually sell out of oysters by 7:00. It was brutal, but I got to be pretty good at shucking, and I've picked up some more knowledge on the subject in the years since.

Serving raw oysters at home can seem intimidating to people who don't have a lot of experience with the process, but it's actually pretty manageable once you learn the basics. In this guide, I'll share my experience and teach you the finer points for your next festive occasion (or an oyster-fueled night alone, if that's how you want to relax). Here's how I go about storing, cleaning, garnishing, and serving oysters on the half-shell at home.

How to Store Oysters

Whenever you purchase oysters, it's important to understand that you are taking home living organisms, and that you want to keep them alive up until the moment you are ready to eat them. So how do you go about that? First and foremost, keep them cold. If you are buying them from a seafood shop, make sure that's the last stop on your shopping trip before heading home, and that you can keep them cool in transit. This may seem like common sense, but I have watched professional cooks do some truly confounding things when it comes to handling shellfish, so I've learned not to make assumptions.

If you went the mail-order route, remove the oysters from the shipping container they arrive in. Depending on the number of oysters you buy, you may find a paper "shellfish tag" attached to the mesh bag they come in. These tags are a food safety measure mandated by the FDA that gives information on the provenance and harvest date of shellfish, which makes it easier to pinpoint the source in the event that some kind of food-borne illness situation arises. Restaurants and seafood purveyors are required to hold onto these tags for ninety days, and it can't hurt for you to do the same, on the off-chance that you eat an off oyster. They're also a fun way to keep a record of the different varieties you slurp down over the years.

Before popping the oysters in the fridge, give them a once-over to make sure that you don't have any that are dead-on-arrival. Toss any that are open or have broken shells. If you smell anything bad, find the source of the malodor and get rid of it. The best way to store oysters in your fridge is to spread them in a single layer, cupped side of the shell down, on a rimmed baking sheet between two layers of damp (not soaking wet) kitchen towels. Do not store them in or directly on top of ice: oysters are saltwater creatures, and melted fresh water will kill them. Only put oysters on ice once they have been shucked and are ready to be served.

If you don't have the fridge space for a rimmed baking sheet, you can store oysters in a bowl, covered with a damp kitchen towel. It's also a good idea to store them on the lower shelves (not the drawers) of your fridge so that you won't starve them of air, or have any shellfish juice inadvertently spilling on other food items. When stored properly, oysters that have been harvested within the last 24 hours can keep for up to a week in the fridge. If you are purchasing oysters in a retail setting, it is worth inquiring about their harvest date. Your seafood purveyor should be able to provide you with that information by checking the shellfish tags I mentioned earlier.

Give Them a Good Scrubbing

At some point before shucking, you will need to give the oysters a scrub-down to remove any dirt, mud, sand, shell fragments, or other crud that you don't want to end up slurping down. I like to get that cleaning step out of the way as soon as I get the oysters home. Start by clearing the area around your kitchen sink in order to avoid cross-contamination. Turn on the cold water and let it run until it's as cold as it'll get, then transfer the oysters to a colander and place them in the sink. The colander will ensure that none of them end up sitting in fresh water, which, again, would kill them.

You will need an abrasive material for scrubbing that you won't mind tossing afterward, or turning it into a shellfish-only cleaning tool. A stiff vegetable or wire brush will work, but my favorite cheap tool is a heavy-duty scouring pad. Regular sponges are too soft for this task, but I also don't recommend using steel wool, as the metal wires can get caught in the oyster's hinge or rough edges, and you can inadvertently garrote a finger. I've done it, and it's not fun.

Working quickly, scrub the oysters one by one under the stream of cold water, paying particular attention to the hinge where you will be inserting the oyster knife to open them, as well as around the edges where the top and bottom parts of the shell meet. They don't need to be spotless, but you want to remove as much sandy grit as possible. As I mentioned earlier, store the cleaned oysters on a rimmed baking sheet between two damp towels (this is why I like to clean oysters as soon as I get them, so I am not putting clean oysters back into the fridge between towels that are covered in grit from when they were initially stored). It's important to work as quickly as possible so that you minimize the amount time that the oysters are out of refrigeration. If you are cleaning more than fifty oysters, or have a really warm kitchen, work in batches so they don't sit out for too long.

Prepare the Garnishes

When it comes to serving and eating raw oysters, I'm a purist. For me, it's all about tasting the burst of bright and briny oyster liquor as you knock back a dozen bivalves, paired with a glass or two of bubbly. I like to hit them with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice—a little acidity balances their natural salinity—and if I'm eating a bunch of oysters I might garnish a couple of them with a spoonful of mignonette, but that's it.

A minimalist approach to preparing and serving oysters doesn't mean phoning it in. Yes, on the one hand I am just saying, "Cut up some lemons, combine a little vinegar with minced shallots and black pepper, shuck a few oysters, and plop all that down on crushed ice." But simple preparations still require consideration and sound cooking technique. If anything, flaws in execution are more glaring when there aren't any bells and whistles to cover them up. It's easy to hide a poorly shucked and mangled oyster under a horseradish foam dispensed from an iSi siphon, but at the same time you are camouflaging rather than complementing the flavor of the oyster, which goes against the whole point of eating them raw. None of the following techniques are complicated, and they are worth the tiny bit of extra effort. Here's how, and why.

Mignonette

Flash back again to my experience with Oyster Mondays. Along with cleaning and shucking eight hundred oysters each week, I was responsible for preparing three different mignonettes to accompany the bargain bivalves. One of the three was always a classic mignonette made with shallots, chardonnay vinegar, and coarsely ground black pepper. What went into the other two was left up to me. Here I was, fresh out of culinary school, but I was getting to create stuff that people were paying to eat. It was exciting and intimidating, and I took it way too seriously. In reality, diners were coming in for the cheap oysters and after-work drinks, and they didn't pay much attention to the the three metal bullet ramekins of mignonette that usually came back to the dish pit untouched. But I cared, and I was lucky enough to work under a sous chef who appreciated my over-eager enthusiasm and decided to take me under her wing. She started by showing me how I was completely ruining the classic mignonette.

On my first Oyster Monday shift, I had found a restaurant shorthand recipe for the traditional mignonette scrawled on my prep list: "1qt chard vin, 2c minced shallot, TT cracked BP." When you start out as a cook in restaurants, you are a foreigner who has to quickly learn a new language, and unfortunately there is no Duolingo course to help you get up to speed. But I was pretty sure I could handle this recipe. One quart of chardonnay vinegar: check. Next up: two cups of minced shallots.

I peeled a handful of shallots, and began mincing them with my chef's knife as I had been taught in culinary school, using the same basic technique that you would employ for dicing an onion, just in miniature. My knife cuts seemed pretty even, but there were a few longer, straggler pieces from where my knife hadn't cut close enough to the root-end of the shallots. I decided to "run my knife over" the pile of minced shallots, right when my sous chef walked by to check how the FNG (kitchen lingo for "f***ing new guy") was doing. "No!! Stop!" She was aghast, but instead of yelling at me, she collected herself and explained how my rough treatment of the shallots was crushing their cell walls. This produced way too much of the sulfurous allium aroma we associate with chopped onions, which would take over the flavor of the mignonette.

Biting into one of the bigger shallot pieces I had been trying to get rid of with my second pass of the knife would also ruin the flavor of a raw oyster, so she showed me this more exacting method for the fine brunoise that a mignonette requires. Most of the time I don't think that the ultra-precise, tedious, and slightly obnoxious knife cuts of fine-dining restaurant kitchens need to be used in home cooking, but this is a case where it is worth the trouble. And because the amount of mignonette you'll need to make is so small, it's really not much trouble at all.

Start by using a sharp, smaller knife, like a petty or paring knife. This will give you more control and precision while working with smaller vegetables, like shallots. On that note, use the largest shallots you can find. The number of shallots you will need depends on the number of oysters you plan to serve. One large shallot will be enough for mignonette for up to two dozen oysters. Four shallots will be enough for a cup of mignonette, which would be enough to garnish a hundred oysters. As you can see, you won't be toiling away for hours here; a little bit of nicely cut shallots goes a long way.

Trim both ends of the shallots, leaving the inner root end attached, then halve them from pole to pole (lengthwise), and peel and discard the skins. Remove the core pieces of the shallots and reserve them for another use (butter-basted steak perhaps, or a simple vinaigrette that doesn't require perfectly even knife cuts). This will leave you thin, petal-like layers of shallot. Using your knife, slice the shallot petals into thin strips from pole to pole, starting the tip of your knife just below the root end in order to keep them attached.

Rotate the petals ninety degrees on your cutting board, and cross-cut them into evenly-sized brunoise pieces. With a properly sharpened knife, you shouldn't need to exert pressure to cut through the shallots. You definitely don't want to hear a crunching sound as you work, or see a puddle of shallot juice on your board; those are clear signs you are crushing their cell walls. Once you have finished dicing up your shallots, use a bench scraper to transfer them to a small serving bowl (or sealable container if you are making the mignonette ahead of when you plan to serve your oysters). Immediately cover the shallots with vinegar to halt the funk-producing chemical reaction, and to lightly pickle them as well.

What type of vinegar you use is up to you, but I recommend using a mild white wine–based vinegar like chardonnay or champagne vinegar. Distilled white vinegar is too harsh and neutral to use in an application like this, while balsamic or sherry vinegar are too assertive and sweet. How much vinegar do you need to use? I generally go with a two-to-one ratio of vinegar to shallot by volume (there is absolutely no need for gram-level precision here). So if you have two tablespoons of shallot brunoise, you will need a quarter cup of vinegar.

The final component of the mignonette is cracked black peppercorns. To highlight the spice's floral notes, start by toasting whole peppercorns. Again, the amount you need will vary depending on the amount of mignonette you want to make, as well as your personal preferences. The "TT" unit of measurement from that recipe scrawled on my prep list is the universally vague "to taste," which speaks to the way most professional cooks season food by tasting and adjusting as they go, trusting their palates. I like mignonette to be punchy, so I use two teaspoons of peppercorns for every quarter cup of vinegar. Once the peppercorns are toasted, let them cool to room temperature, and then crack them to release their volatile aroma compounds. To do this, use a mortar and pestle, a mallet, or even the bottom of a saucepan.

You are looking to lightly crush the peppercorns, not grind them into a coarse powder. Cracked peppercorns lend their piquancy to the mignonette subtly, whereas ground pepper takes over the condiment and makes it muddy in flavor and texture. For this reason, I actually prefer to crack the peppercorns using one of the methods described above, rather than in a spice grinder or pepper mill. Once you've combined all the ingredients, cover the bowl, and let the mignonette hang out at room temperature for at least thirty minutes to allow the vinegar to do its work on the shallots, and for the flavors to marry. As you can see, the way the shallots end up suspended in the vinegar makes the evenness of the knife cuts more visible than when they are just piled in a bowl on their own. If you have some wonky pieces, fish them out.

You can refrigerate the mignonette until you're ready to serve the oysters, where it will keep for a few days before the shallots get too mushy. When it comes to serving, I like to give people the option of treating the mignonette as either a sauce or a condiment, by setting out both small spoons and forks. Using a spoon, you end up garnishing the oysters with more of the vinegar, whereas if you choose to use a fork it's more about the pops of pickled shallot and black pepper.

Lemon Wedges

My favorite way to dress raw oysters is with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. The bright acidity of fresh citrus pairs perfectly with the briny ocean salinity of raw oysters. What I don't want is a bunch lemon seeds to end up in the mix, which you then have to fish out of the oyster shells, spilling and wasting delicious oyster liquor in the process. I also don't like serving haggard looking lemon wedges as a garnish. Call me crazy, but garnishes should look nice.

For clean, seedless lemon wedges, I start by cutting a lemon in half lengthwise. Some people like to cut the ends off of their lemons before halving them, but for this application I prefer to leave them on, in order to keep more of their natural shape. To me, that goes hand-in-hand with the appeal of eating oysters on the half-shell—enjoying nature, raw and barely touched (is it obvious that when you're stuck shucking 800 oysters in an hour and a half, your mind can really obsess about the tiniest details?).

I place the lemon halves cut-side down, and cut them each into four wedges. I then use my knife to remove the white membrane that runs through the center of each lemon and ends up on the the inside edge of each slice. Use the tip of your knife to excise the seeds as well. As with the shallots, a smaller knife will give you more precision and control for this task. Cut lemon wedges as close to serving time as possible because they will dry out and deteriorate in quality over time.

Crushed Ice

Oysters on the half-shell should be served chilled. The best way to do that is to serve them on a bed of crushed ice. Most of us don't have an ice machine at home that can churn out crushed ice on demand (at least I don't). But if you have a food processor, you're in business. If you don't have a food processor, you can try crushing ice in a blender or by hand with a mallet, but I find that these methods yield inconsistent results. Alternatively, you can serve oysters on a bed of rock salt, or you can make a wet mixture of lightly beaten egg whites and kosher salt to perch the oyster shells on top of.

For the food processor crushed ice method, start by picking out the serving bowl or platter that you want to serve the oysters in, and pop it in the fridge. A chilled bowl will help to keep the ice from melting into a puddle when you get to serving up your shucked oysters. You can also pop the bowl and blade to the food processor in the fridge for a few minutes as well.

Work in batches so as not to overwork the motor of your food processor. Fill the bowl halfway with ice cubes, and secure the lid. Warn everyone in your vicinity that things are about to get loud, then pulse the ice a few times until it is broken down into pebble-sized pieces. Some of the ice will be more processed, with a snow cone–like texture, and that's fine. You just don't want to over-process the ice as the motor of the food processor will get too warm and you'll have a meltdown situation on your hands. Transfer the ice to colander set inside a large bowl, and pop the bowl in the fridge while you process more batches of ice, until you have enough to fill your serving vessel a couple of times over. This colander set-up ensures that you won't be serving oysters on a mound of slush; any ice that melts in the colander will drip into the bowl below.

Once you have the crushed ice ready to go, it's time to pack it into your serving bowl. Retrieve it from the fridge, and line the bottom of the bowl with a folded paper towel. This is a little restaurant trick that keeps crushed ice from shifting around in the bowl when serving. You don't want to lose any oysters in transport, or slosh crushed ice all over your guests. Pack the bowl with crushed ice, smoothing it into an even layer that is flush with the lip of your serving vessel. It's now time to shuck.

ShuckWithMeYouKnowIGotIt

Oyster shucking takes practice, but once you get the hang of it, it's a lot of fun. (I liked to assume shucking alter egos on those restaurant Oyster Mondays, alternating between Shuck Norris, Shuckille O'Neal, and Shuck Pépin.) If you've never shucked oysters before, check out Kenji's step-by-step guide to see how it's done. I've shucked a lot of oysters in my day and my main piece of advice is that opening oysters is all about getting proper leverage with your knife at the hinge of the oyster.

You should never be stabbing or forcing your knife in, as this is a sure-fire way to pop the belly of your oyster or stab yourself. You want to pop oyster bellies in your mouth, not a knife into your hand. If you're just starting to learn how to shuck, you will definitely pierce some oyster bellies, and that's okay. When that happens, you can flip the oyster over in the shell so that it doesn't look mangled when you serve it. Some people like to flip their oysters no matter what, but again, I prefer to keep them in their natural position as much as possible.

Whatever you do, make sure no shell fragments or grit gets into the cup of the oysters. There's nothing worse than shooting back an oyster, only to bite down on a piece of shell. Well, serving and eating a bad oyster would be worse, but it's pretty hard to miss a bad oyster; they smell like absolute death, and should be thrown out immediately.

As you shuck, nestle finished oysters on top of the prepared serving bowl of crushed ice, with their hinges facing inward, leaving enough room for a ramekin of mignonette and a few lemon wedges. If you are planning on shucking a lot of oysters, serve them in rounds to keep them as fresh and cold as possible. While your guests enjoy the first platter of oysters, you can keep shucking.

Line a rimmed baking sheet with a piece of scrunched up aluminum foil, and place shucked oysters on top of the foil, which will keep the shells from tipping and spilling their delicious oyster liquor. Once people have polished off the first round of oysters, dump out the semi-melted crushed ice in the serving bowl, and replenish with the extra crushed ice you processed earlier. Transfer the second round of shucked oysters from the sheet tray to the bowl of crushed ice. Rinse and repeat until you're out of oysters. Pat yourself on the back. You are a cocktail party hero.

Read More

• Classic Mignonette Recipe
• How to Shuck an Oyster