Anybody got any good clam recipes for the monsters we get down here? Most of the ones we find have huge shells so we shuck them and fry. Just thinking of trying something different. I found a few recipes for steamed clams in a wine sauce that look good, but again due to the shell size you’d only get 3-4 in a bowl. Thanks!
The big ones I only use for chowder. Shuck them open and dice up. Rently I have been cleaning out the stomach contents before dicing. This makes for a brighter white chowder! You can freeze them for later use; like winter chowder!
New Smyrna Beach, FL
Bringing this back from the dead.
I made a good creek chowder/stew recently by cooking down a lb of sausage with onion, carrot, garlic, celery, sweet potato, red pepper. I then steamed a mess of clams letting them dump their juice to form the base of the stew and diced them into small pieces. Once that was good and hot, I added some cream and about 1 lb of shrimp and a few chunked up spottail filets and let it roll until those cooked.
I commonly make varieties of this without the sausage for a pescatarian approach. In the USVI, I would substitute spiny lobster tails instead of clams/shrimp, coconut milk instead of clam juice and any firm white fish like mahi, wahoo, queen snapper, grouper instead of spottail.
I like steaming the clams first and saving the juice for a broccoli side dish, my favorite actually.
Take the saved juice, add some butter and minced garlic, bring to a boil and the reduce heat to medium.
Dredge the broccoli spears by hand (with tongs) thru the clam rue until they reach the desired consistency. Drizzle a tiny bit of citrus over and serve.
Then pour the juice back in the stew.
Yum
best trick i’ve ever learned- if you’re cooking with them in any way, put them whole in the freezer after you clean them off. At least a day or so later, put them in the sink in a colander and run warm water over them, you can pop the shells open without tools and scoop the entire raw animal plus all that good likker in one big lump, then you got a bowl full of meat and juice to do whatever you want with. I do that if i’m making a chowder the next day.
wife’s grandma taught me that one, she swore a couple weeks in the freezer tenderized them a bit too- seems plausible since we know that ice crystals can lyse tissue cells which might make them less tough
1 Like
Thanks b I forgot about the freezer trick
Does anyone have any luck finding the smaller clams near the surface close to big water?
I’d rather have them than the bigger ones buried in the mud up a creek