How to open an oyster

The Staff Canteen

In this video, I'm going to show you how to open an oyster. The oyster we are using today is a Pacific rock oyster from Porthilly down in Cornwall, so we need a good kitchen cloth to protect our hands, put the ice on the cloth, then with a nice knife you’ve got the two main area’s that keep an oyster together just a little clasp here, then there’s a muscle, so using the cloth to hold the oyster to protect our hands burrow into where the clasp is and just release the shell.

Then keeping the oyster steady so that we don't lose the juice, come through that muscle I was telling you about, and the shell can be easily removed, Into a bowl tip off that oyster juice because we’re going to keep that you can either poach oyster in that or it’s delicious in sauces, then just gently release the oyster from around the muscle and let it drop out, with the muscle then that gets cut out of the shell and then the shell we will use for presentation. The oyster itself gently make sure there's no shell on it into a bowl, then with the juice, we passed the juice over the oyster through a fine sieve and there we have it our oyster and oyster shell.

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The Staff Canteen

The Staff Canteen

Editor 18th May 2017

How to open an oyster