Any of you guys roast oysters? My brother and I have started planning for our annual Thanksgiving feast (which probably deserves it’s own thread… we’re currently expecting 79 adults and kids). I’m trying to get ideas for how you roast/steam your oysters.
In the past we’ve used:
Gas grill with aluminum pans and burlap (that grill is gone)
Ugly Drum Smoker (we had a hard time getting enough heat by the grates)
Webber grill w/ aluminum pans and burplap (struggled with throughput because the pan/s don’t fit the grill well)
Our latest solution is a pair of stainless steel plates that I’ve had cut to fit in a Webber charcoal grill. We just set one on top of the existing grate to cook while we pre-load the second plate. When the first one is done, we just lift it off and drop the second one on. While it helps our throughput, one of our problems now is that the last handful of oysters in each batch are cold by the time someone gets around to shucking them.
Thoughts? What do you use? Steel plate? Steamer? Direct on the grill grate?
64 adults and 15 kids. My brother and I will fry 2 turkeys, some french fries and oysters, steam 300 or so clams, and roast 150 or so oysters. That’s all the outside cooking. We always like to add or tweak something every year.
Let me know if you have any other ideas of food to add. I’ve smoked fatties before. They were well received. But running a grill, a steamer, and a fryer is enough trouble. I don’t need to have a smoker going, too.
Holy fuck Claude…go down to fourth cousins thrice removed on the invite list?
No help from me on the oysters I’m afraid, thought the idea does have me thinking it’s something to look into (for all six that I’ll be hosting … counting my four…
Beer recommendations are wholly dependent on the audience.
Stout: Hardywood GBS, just came out, Costco has a ton 7.99 per bomber./Barrel Aged Ten Fidy just hit the shelves this week.
Cheap drinkers: Yuengling, Lite Sam Adams, Corona
Craft Beer Drinkers:
IPA: Falcon Smash, if you can find it in Growlers.
Jai alai: Pretty available in cans
You could go to Commonwealth and see if they have any decent IPAs.
Pretty sure Benchtop might not have cans yet.
Saison: hit up O’Connor
Bells Oberon tends to appeal to the mid tier craft drinker.
Pretty fantastic. Ended up with 87 people coming by. We had lots of turkey leftover. I overcooked my fried ones. I’m always scared of undercooking…
Clams were super easy and went fast. Fries were great. The fried oysters were done this year with an egg wash before dropping in the flour. The egg wash was pretty much the only mistake all day.
The roasted oysters went really well, too. I think the key difference this year was putting enough coals in the grill to get the plate super hot. A full batch was coming off every 7-8 minutes. We went through 200 oysters with ease. In past years, we’ve started with 200 and only used a little over 100… maybe 150.
