The oysters, aphrodisiac and gourmet seafood par excellencearrive at our Christmas tables in abundance, as is usual with other marine products that present their best time of the year during the winter.
The famous topic of choose the months with erre to savor the highest quality seafood It is also fulfilled with this bivalve, perhaps the most elegant and exclusive of all, and that will surely land in more than one Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve dinner this year and boast origins such as Castropol (Asturias), Fal (United Kingdom) or French towns from Arcachon and Belon, two of the most renowned origins of this shellfish.
However, when we talk about oysters, all that glitter are not wild oysters and the reality is that 75% of the oysters that are marketed are farmed oysters, that is, they come from aquaculture and generally come from France, a country that has been specializing in oyster farming for more than half a century.
To avoid discussions between brothers-in-law to find out who claims to be right when differentiating oysters without having to try them —a very old trick—, there are several clues that can indicate when are we facing a farmed oyster and a wild oyster Although, as we are telling you, the most common thing is that they are cultivated.
The reasons are simple: they are more accessible and durable, because of the two most common oyster species in our country, there is one that has the ability to survive out of water for up to four dayswhile there is a more delicate species that rarely exceeds two days once removed from the water.
French oysters or Spanish oysters: does nationality matter?
As you will see, We are not going to talk about Spanish oysters and foreign oystersbecause the reality is that both in Spain and in France or Ireland (the countries from which we import the most oysters) they resort to two species that differ quite well, but in no case does their ID have to do with differentiating a wild oyster from a farmed oyster.
Sometimes they talk about the size or the flavor, the second barometer being the really interesting one to try to distinguish oysters, but the reality is that the best way to know when an oyster comes from aquaculture and when an oyster has been caught wild is its shell.
For this we must present two species. On one hand, the Crassostrea gigascommonly called the Pacific oyster or Japanese oyster and which, despite its name, is the queen of farmed oysters because it is durable, grows faster and has allowed democratize the consumption of a mollusk that has traditionally been prohibitively expensive and that we can now easily prepare with recipes such as Rockefeller oyster gratin.
On the other hand, we have to talk about the ostrea edulis, which by habitual name we baptize as common oyster and which, unfortunately, has less and less in common. Originally from the coasts of the eastern Atlantic Ocean, from Morocco to Scandinavia —what includes the Iberian coast, the French coast and the British Isles—, this oyster has been losing ground at the expense of plagues and invasions of the Pacific oyster.
Finer and not so salty, it is not necessary to eat a common oyster to see the differences with the Japanese oyster —which, we insist, is present in European aquaculture and is the most common in the markets— and to know that a wild oyster is going to to be generally of the species ostrea edulis, while those of cultivation are the Crassostrea gigas.
How do we know this? Well, because of the type of shell. The common oyster, sometimes wrongly called the Galician oyster or flat oyster, has one of its shells that is much more polished and straight —hence the word flat—, while the Crassostrea gigas has a much more concave and rough shell, which makes it easily recognizable. Also, the flat oyster is wider and straighter, while the Japanese oyster is narrower and more curved.
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Is it always going to be a flat wild oyster and a rough farmed oyster? Not necessarily, but the former are less expensive, less abundant and more difficult to work in aquaculture, while the latter are more profitable, larger, cheaper and easier to work with, which is why most of the oysters that you are going to see in your day to day are of this species.
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