Clam poaching and kitchen cleaning

Two recent intriguing articles

By Culinate staff

March 26, 2010

Pacific Northwest, the Sunday magazine of the Seattle Times, recently ran two unusual food-related articles — one an exposé, the other a how-to.

The first, an excerpt from a new book called Shell Games: Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature’s Bounty, reveals the skulduggery involved in geoduck poaching, or illegally harvesting giant clams in Northwest waters:

Every day, couriers boxed geoducks with gel packs and placed them on jets. Within 72 hours they bobbed in restaurant tanks in Beijing or Shanghai or lay in tubs of shaved ice in Tokyo. Everywhere the giant clams went they fetched fistfuls of dollars.

The second, by Culinate’s own Matthew Amster-Burton, is a briefer piece explaining the real secret to kitchen success: keeping your kitchen clean and tidy while you cook.

As Amster-Burton notes, “Making the perfect omelet? That’s nice. Having the omelet pan washed and put away seconds after the omelet hits the plate? That’s cooking.”