I was sitting at the house of my soon-to-be in-laws tonight and something sort of came to me. There was a conversation going on around me and I think I even participated in it a little, but my mind was elsewhere, which seems to happen a lot for some reason. This particular time however, I was thinking about the stranger vinaigrettes that I have seen in my culinary wanderings. For example, some of the more interesting one’s I have seen are bacon, bone marrow, and oyster vinaigrettes.
in my little idea book, I had been toying with a chilled scallop dish and thought it would be cool to use one of these more unique offerings. As for the marrow, I didn’t really relish the thought of bone marrow and scallops. I also was doing this at 10:30pm, so I was pretty sure that I couldn’t go out and buy bone marrow. The bacon seemed more practical and would have gone great with the scallops, but since it was going to be a chilled dish, I was worried about the fat in the bacon vinaigrette solidifying, which would make a gross texture and also look disgusting.
This left me with the oyster vinaigrette. Oysters seemed like a good pairing with their shellfish cousin, the scallop (scallops can even be considered a type of oyster! They also have close relations to the clam), and I thought it would be kind of funny if I made a dish with oyster mushrooms and oyster oysters. Culinary humor at it’s best, am I right?
Also, before I begin, my phone was unavailable during the cooking process, so I had to wait until the end to take pictures. Sorry. On the bright side, My Fiancée, photography major at UW, took the pictures, so they turned out great!
I started out by poaching the scallops, since they were going to be chilled. I seasoned up the scallops a bit, but not too much since I had a pretty flavorful cooking liquid at hand, made up of water, rice wine, lime, salt, and a bit of butter for a touch of richness.
Next was the oyster vinaigrette. I am not really the type of person who makes super complex, many-ingredient recipes, so I tried to keep it simple. I got a few different kinds of oysters pre-shucked, all from willapa bay, which is where a lot of Washington oysters come from (Kumamoto and Pacific are just a couple of the more well-known ones). All I did for this was use my hand blender to puree and emulsify oysters, oyster juice, lime, and grape seed oil with salt to taste. It turned out really viscous, but smooth and pourable, which was exactly was I was looking for.
The mushroom salad was really easy as well. I heated a pan with a mix of grape seed oil and butter, and waited until it was smoking and threw in the mushrooms. After getting some nice color on them, I removed them from the heat and stirred in finely chopped garlic, shallots, and thyme, and seasoned to taste with salt. After that, I simply let them cool to room temperature.
The fresh baby greens were even easier. All I did was make vinaigrette of lime, rice vinegar, and olive oil, and tossed it with the greens.
The final step was garnish. And what better garnish for a cold, fresh dish than edible flowers? My Fiancée and I were walking by them in the store and she said, “Hey, that would be cool!” They were.
Anyway, Here is the final product. It was pretty tasty! I think that If I were to do it again, I would try to use wild mushrooms (black trumpets would be great!), but other than that I don’t think that I would change it a whole lot. The oyster vinaigrette was really subtle, but still a necessary addition to the dish. Perhaps next time, I will make it more visible and present on the plate( here, it’s under the mushrooms).
As always, thanks for reading!
You can certainly look forward to less of a wait for the next post!
-Tim
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