Grilled Oysters with Spicy Garlic Butter

A super treat for the Superbowl–Wellfleet or Bluepoint, you’re supporting the hometeam

I recently enjoyed an evening with family to take advantage of the New York City Restaurant Week. Most of us being avid seafood lovers from the Gulf Coast, we decided to head to a lobster joint with an oyster bar where we could get the most bang for our buck during this celebration of food around the city. As we slung back the oysters with our preferred sauce (I’m always a fan of ketchup, Tabasco and horseradish), we were impressed with the size and saltiness of the available Northeast stock this season. When you have great ingredients locally available, I wondered about what other amazing dishes could be prepared. Today, I would like to feature a recipe from Chef John Besh using these tasty bivalve mollusks from brackish waters:

Grilled Oysters with Spicy Garlic Butter

This butter works the best when it’s prepared ahead. Let it soften at room temperature, then season it, place it in plastic wrap, and roll it into a tight cylinder. Then chill it until it’s hard. When it’s chilled, it’s easy to cut the spicy butter into disks to top each oyster just before grilling. You can also use this seasoned butter on just about everything, from pasta to sautéed shrimp.

1 pound unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 clove garlic, minced

1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

1 teaspoon fresh chives, chopped

1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves, chopped

1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

2 dozen oysters, shucked and left on the half shell

1. Beat the butter with the garlic, pepper flakes, chives, thyme, and lemon juice in a mixing bowl with a wooden spoon or in the bowl of a food processor until well combined.

2. Using a rubber spatula, mound butter onto a wide sheet of plastic wrap. Drape one of the wide ends of the plastic wrap over the butter, then roll the butter into a cylinder about 1 inch in diameter and twist ends tightly. Refrigerate butter until hard.

3. Prepare a charcoal or gas grill. Unwrap the spicy butter and slice it into disks about ½ inch thick. Put a disk of butter on each oyster, then put the oysters butter side updirectly over the hot coals on the grill. Grill the oysters only until they start to curl and bubble around the edges and the butter melts. Serve them hot!

Once you have these hot off the grill, your beer of choice could always work–especially for this weekend’s Superbowl game. If your palate is geared towards the vino, then my suggestions would be a Sauvignon Blanc, Chablis or Champagne. Some ideas on the bubbly side from our IWM wine experts are Hubert Paulet Cuvee Risleus’ Brut Premier Cru or Billecart-Salmon Extra Brut NV. So serve up your favorite drink, gather a group of friends around the grill and enjoy!

Go-To-Wine Tuesday

Cascina Barbatella Noè 2006

Having the opportunity to taste a white wine with a little bit of maturity is a special thing indeed. Most whites produced these days are meant to be consumed young, usually one or two years from the vintage for maximum vibrancy and freshness. While these wines are great when new, they don’t have the guts to stand the test of time.

This past weekend I had a great experience with a five-year-old white from Piemonte, Cascina Barbatella Noè 2006. It’s made of a fifty-fifty split of Cortese (the grape of Gavi wines) and Sauvignon Blanc, and prior to opening the bottle, I wasn’t sure what to expect because these two grapes don’t generally age well in the bottle. To my delight, I found the wine to be a beautiful golden yellow, a hue indicating some signs of age. The nose was very complex, slightly nutty and loaded with concentrated fruit flavor. This wine was in excellent shape!

To be quite honest, it was football Sunday and the only thing I could pair this wine with were crinkle-cut kettle chips with some sour cream and onion dip. Let me tell you it was awesome! The freshness of the wine cleansed the palate of the tangy sour cream, while the herbaceousness of the Sauvignon complemented that of the dip. Before I knew it, a bottle of wine and a bag of chips were gone, and the Giants had lost one of their most important games of the season.

The Cascina Barbatella Noè , though, was a sure winner.

Blaming the Sulfites, Unfairly

A cool scientific look turns up some surprising results

“I can’t drink reds because of sulfites.”

Being immersed in the wine business, I hear this a lot. Often when people have reactions to drinking red wine—usually headaches, sinus issues or other adverse reactions–they name sulfites as the cause. However, that causality is up for debate, and I thought I’d chime in. As someone who was a science major in college, I know a lot about sulfites; they’re in a class of compounds that I researched extensively back in the day.

Sulfites, at the core, are preservatives. You can find them in hot dogs, cold cuts, dried fruits and, of course, wine, just to name a few oft-consumed items. Sulfites have a special chemical property that makes them bind to oxygen molecules rendering them non-degenerative. For all the life that oxygen gives, it can also easily take away life, and we see this in perfectly matured wine, red and white. However, sulfites in everything work the same. Therefore, if you really do have an issue with sulfites, and you might, you’d get sick when you ate your bologna sandwich at lunch, that gorp while hiking on a trail, or that midnight box of cookies. If you don’t have a reaction to these foods, you probably don’t have an issue with sulfites.

You probably have an issue with polyphenols.

The point that I want to make is that reds already have a natural antioxidant built in. It is what makes red wine red, and it also gives you that astringent feeling in your mouth when you drink it. This built-in antioxidant is called polyphenols. Whites, unlike reds, have very little if any polyphenols, which means they have no way of protecting themselves against oxygen. This is another reason why white wines tend to have less longevity than reds. The upshot is that if you have a reaction to red wine, but not to white wine or that shrimp cocktail you ate while drinking it (sulfites often appear in frozen fish and seafood), you probably have an issue with polyphenols. Don’t blame the sulfites.

Being a Wine and Spirit Education Trust diploma student and having concentrated on the technical side of winemaking, I’ve really opened my eyes to the connection between science and wine. One more point to bolster my claim: whites generally contain a lot more added sulfites than reds because they don’t have ready and waiting naturally occurring preservatives. If you’re allergic to sulfites, you’re far more likely to react to drinking that glass of Vermentino than that glass of Barolo.

This is only my opinion based on some general wine facts, but I believe that most people who say their allergic to sulfites are not allergic to the sulfites but to the polyphenolic compounds of red wines.

But, hey, I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV. If you really want to know, get a simple allergy test, and you’ll know for certain. In the meantime, have a nice glass of Chianti and relax.

Go-To-Wine Tuesday

San Giuliano Roero Arneis 2010

As a young woman living in a tiny apartment with two other young women, I rarely cook, but when I do, I make sure to indulge all of my friends. Before moving to the city I would have friends over for elaborate dinner parties, creating a multitude of appetizers, a decadent entrée, and of course ending with a sweet desert. However, given my confinements, I have had to alter my way of entertaining, but I believe it is only for the best.

Now when I have friends and family over I stick to appetizers and small plates. This is not to say they are any less elaborate as any main course I would compose, but the result provides a more casual and less formal atmosphere in which we can enjoy each other’s company. Still, no gathering of small plates and appetizers would be complete without a wonderful bottle of wine.

These summer months I have been making dishes that are lighter, such as fresh salsas, grilled shrimp, and other easy-going fare. One wine I find goes beautifully with all of the dishes I’ve been serving is the San Giuliano Roero Arneis 2010. This light, crisp, elegant wine provides just the right acidity and flavor to complement the fresh ingredients of summer dishes. I always have a few bottles tucked away in case of last minute guests arriving because it can either stand alone or mold to a multitude of dishes. I tend to enjoy this wine slightly chilled, for it can warm quickly while indulging in the small plates when lost in engaging conversation. It’s a lovely wine, in perfect tune with spur-of-the-moment gatherings and summer’s lighter meals.

Go-To-Wine Tuesday

Bisson Bianco Marea Cinque Terre 2009

Local really is best. My wife and I were married this past May, and in the months previous to the wedding we said no to lots of events and happenings in order to save up for the wedding. To treat ourselves post-wedding, we decided to spend the night about 35 miles due north along the Hudson and have dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, where Dan Barber and his team of chefs have the unfair advantage of having their restaurant at the center of a meticulously kept and breathtakingly beautiful working farm. The quality of the ingredients and the techniques used to showcase them yielded an incredible meal, certainly one of the best I have ever had. From the rotating pastures technique of the livestock to the scrupulous care the workers put into the vegetables, this place not only demonstrates how food is supposed to be grown, but it exemplifies how certain foods are supposed to taste. I find it incredible that most of the ingredients used have never been transported.

This food experience led to me thinking about regional Italian cuisines and the uncanny similarities between dining in Italy and my meal at Blue Hill. When you go to a good quality restaurant in Italy, it is highly unlikely that the food has travelled more than just a few miles. When radicchio starts showing up in the Veneto markets in Northeast Italy, salads, soups, risottos, and pizzas start taking on a purple color and an elegant, slightly bitter taste from this delicious little chicory. This is just one example of literally thousands of items that are used at the peak season throughout Italian regional cuisine.

My wife and I constantly buy what is freshest and best at the local green markets. Yes, it does take a little extra planning (and walking) but it is well worth the effort to know where your food comes from and who is growing it. This past Sunday I cooked with the vegetables that we purchased at Stone Barns on Saturday and I paired the meal with Bisson Bianco Marea Cinque Terre from the 2009 vintage. Enoteca Bisson was born in 1978 when Pierluigi Lugano fell in love with the wines of the Ligurian coastline. It really does take a heroic effort to cultivate vines on these steep slopes perched high above the Mediterranean Sea in the heart of the breathtaking Cinque Terre region.

The Marea Cinque Terre is made from a blend of several traditional local grape varieties: Bosco, Vermentino, and Albarola. The result is a full-bodied, earthy wine of immense character, with a deeper golden tint to its color than is found in his other whites. This wine was an excellent choice as its deep, almost saline quality of the wine really gave the perfect vegetables a great boost in flavor; the wine cleansed the palate beautifully to make each bite taste great. I urge you to not only try this wine, but eat locally and to know thy farmer.

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