DAVID: I love this quote from Jonathan Swift.
He says, "He was a bold man that first ate in oyster."
Mm!
Whoever did actually opened the world up for us,
because now we can have them too.
Oh my god, wow. Look at that one.
DAVID: Everything about it is delicious in its own way,
even the seawater water that's just nestled in the shell.
[woman laughs]
Those are a very different texture.
DAVID: I think that its taste of an oyster
is so complex.
I mean, I'm stumbling over ways of describing it.
[Woman In Restaurant] Like a tender cooked vegetable.
I think it kinda tastes like cucumbers.
I get the impression of deep water.
It's all fruity.
Or a melon ball.
Sea spray kinda smell.
They have a crisp, almost crunchy texture to them.
And then has this wonderful lingering
umami savoriness that kind of stays on the palette
after you eat it.
Yeah, I can definitely taste the sweet.
Metallic, intensely briny,
just kind of washed all over your tongue.
NARRATOR: This talk may seem, well, esoteric.
But it's all part of the language of oysters.
It's kind of part of the life in the Northwest.
Because an oyster has such a rich sense of place,
literally what you're eating is that place.
I know that sounds poetic, but it is in fact true.
I just love oysters.
NARRATOR: David George Gordon is one of these
sharp-shelled invertebrates' biggest fans.
It's saltier and then it has a little more
an earthier flavor, I think.
Yeah.
DAVID: Oysters are intimately associated
with their surroundings.
It is the very end of a long, deep estuary,
so it makes sense that it's gonna have a lot of earthiness.
Yeah, right.
They're filtering all this water, 50 or 60 gallons of water
per day goes through them.
Whatever's in that water is passing through that oyster.
I can't think of any other animal
that has that intimate a relationship with its environment.
NARRATOR: There's even a word
to describe this phenomenon.
Merroir is a word, sort of a play on words,
from the French word terroir, which refers to how wine,
grown in certain soil, in certain regions,
takes on the flavor of that place.
So the basic concept is the flavor of place.
NARRATOR: Travis Oja and Rita Welch
are oyster farmers on Netarts Bay.
It is an animal, but it is a lot like a produce crop.
We plant our seeds and we don't have to water our plants
or feed our plants nutrients
because the ocean does all of that for us.
We treat 'em like their little pets or our little babies.
That's me hugging the oysters.
NARRATOR: Before they get that tender, loving care,
though, Travis' and Rita's babies do take a few hard knocks.
That's just a cluster of oysters.
There's probably like 25 oysters there.
This is what we'll break in and hammer 'em up.
And the individuals.
Then bring 'em back out.
Sprinkle 'em on the ground and let 'em grow
a little bit more.
These are oysters that we broke off clusters
probably two months ago and dumped them back on the bottom
here to give 'em a chance to heal up.
So now we're sorting through and anything that's still alive
and has a nice enough shape to go to market,
we're basketing these up.
And these are going to town.
NARRATOR: Tightly sealed inside each one
comes the flavor of its home bay.
RITA: In Netarts Bay,
there's very little freshwater influence.
Whiskey Creek is the only freshwater influence.
It's a small bay and it's quite shallow as well.
The bay almost completely drains and refills
with every tide.
So it creates a very fluctuating system.
Whereas other bays, like Tillamook, for instance,
has a large freshwater influence
because of all of the rivers that feed into it.
That's what gives them those unique flavors.
NARRATOR: Rita can taste a difference
even within Netarts Bay.
Oysters from the West Side,
where there's more saltwater influence taste--
Saltier and have a more complex flavor.
NARRATOR: While the East Siders have a--
RITA: More earthy or oystery flavor.
NARRATOR: To be clear, we're not talking about
different kinds of oysters.
Here's some background.
The Northwest's native oyster is a relatively small guy
known as the Olympia.
Olympias flourished in bays all along the West Coast
and were a staple food for native peoples.
Early European settlers feasted on the tasty mollusks
almost to the point of extinction.
It took an Asian transplant
to save the industry from collapse.
Pacific oysters were actually brought to north America
in the 1920s from Japan.
And they became sort of the oyster of choice for farming,
because they grow a lot faster than our native species here.
NARRATOR: Pacific oysters have become the most
intensely cultivated oysters in the world.
But grow this single species in a particular environment
and its flavor becomes unique.
Here's a few examples,
starting with the South Puget Sound area.
Case Inlet is at the end of a long estuary
producing earthy, even mushroom-like flavors.
Totten Inlet's algae-rich water
makes for some of the strongest flavored oysters.
Nearby, Eld Inlet's lower salinity
gives the oysters a milder flavor.
But coastal Netarts Bay produces Pacifics
with a distinctive briny taste.
And to make things more interesting,
it's not just where an oyster grows that matters.
It's also how it's grown.
Some grow in bags that hang suspended in the water.
And the ones that are in the floating bags,
they have a different taste to 'em
and it's because there's different algae species
in the water column,
along with different levels of salinity.
So what the ones on the ground are getting is different
than the ones in the bag.
NARRATOR: These lines of floating bags
not only keep the oyster suspended in the water column 24/7.
They also shape their shells.
The tide's doing the work for us,
so the bag we'll flip one way,
and then when the tide goes out, it'll drop.
And that tumbling action breaks off the new growth
around the edges.
Breaking off that growth stimulates the oyster
to grow deep, so it develops this nice deep cup
and has a good meat content.
So these pretty shells are appreciated
by the person eating them, but more so the chef.
This is a gorgeous oyster.
NARRATOR: They are also alive.
They are living creatures.
Oftentimes you can see a heartbeat.
Did you see that?
There's a heartbeat right in there.
NARRATOR: We'll take his word for it.
Oh and most people don't want to discuss that either.
Ooh it moved.
[laughing]
NARRATOR: All kidding aside, oysters are animals,
and typically, they're raised in a hatchery.
Like this one at Whiskey Creek, also on Netarts Bay.
This is our algae room.
And about 60% of the work we do is just growing food
for the oyster.
And it's just like growing plants in your garden.
We add nutrients, light, all the things that plants need.
These were started today so they're very light in color,
and then if we're doing our job right,
three or four days later they're nice and dark.
NARRATOR: The maturing algae are then transferred
to larger tanks, bathed in light and pumped
up on a nutrient-rich diet.
So this is the last step in the process.
This tank's a couple of days old,
it was inoculated with maybe four or five
of those dark bottles.
And now we have, you know, on the order of trillions
of algae cells in this tank
that we can pump out to our larvae.
NARRATOR: That would be oyster larvae,
who are also carefully nurtured,
starting with their parents.
We've babied these guys and fed them a lot of food
and warmed up the water for 'em and played some soft music
to get them ready to spawn.
Right when they're ready, I stick a knife in 'em
and shuck them.
This one's probably only got 30 to 40 million eggs
inside of it.
Really over half of the mass of this animal is eggs.
We take eggs and sperm from mature, ready-to-reproduce
animals, fertilize them,
and then add 'em to our hatchery tanks.
NARRATOR: For the next few weeks,
the larval oysters will feast on all that
carefully cultivated algae.
And in this process, it's the survival of the fattest.
These guys are about eight days old
and so if they don't catch on this 85 micron screen
they go in the garbage.
Just part of the process, it's sad, we cry a little bit,
but a lot of our job is throwing larvae away as well.
NARRATOR: Once strained, the spat,
as these juvenile oysters are called,
gets one final examination.
These guys are looking pretty good, pretty active,
and I'm able to measure them here on the microscope
to get an idea of how big they are.
If they would hold still.
NARRATOR: For now, these larvae are free-floating
wigglers, but all that mobility is about to come to an end.
As they reach the end of their larval period,
there's a couple of cues that we use
to know these larvae are ready to set.
For one, they grow a foot a lot like a snail's foot,
and they also grow a eye spot
that allows them to sense dark and light
and that's another signal that they're almost ready.
NARRATOR: This finished bundle contains millions
of mature larvae that will only be mobile for a few days,
so getting it to growers fast is crucial.
And we do a lot of FedEx shipping here
and it goes out overnight to a grower.
Dumps 'em in a tank full of oyster shell
and we did our job right,
the next day they'll be attached, so.
NARRATOR: Spat that's not shipped out is fostered here
at the hatchery.
They're only about three or four days old,
but these tiny specks on the shell,
each one of those specks is an individual oysters.
NARRATOR: Whiskey Creek grows baby oysters
for dozens of independent operators.
Including Travis and Rita.
But not all will stay in Oregon.
Our state's relatively straight coastline
makes for just a few oyster-friendly bays,
while Washington's rugged shore, along with Puget Sound's
numerous fingered inlets make it possible
for large operations to dominate the industry.
MAN: So Taylor Shellfish Farms is a fifth-generation
family-owned company.
We've grown now to be the largest producer
of farmed shellfish in North America
with over 500 employees,
and we have about 20 different farm sites.
NARRATOR: But even on this massive scale,
the finer points of merroir still apply.
Merroir is the basis for how oysters are marketed.
And so when you go into an oyster bar
and it has 10 different Pacific oysters on the menu,
each one will have a name that's associated
to generally where they come from.
This is Totten Inlet oyster farm.
On this farm we grow single oysters on the bottom.
On this beach, though, we typically grow Pacifics,
Olympias and Virginicas.
This one's perfect for harvest size
so let's shuck it open for ya and--
So I'll just enjoy this one right now.
Mm.
30 years ago, 80% of the oysters that Taylor produced
were shucked for meats,
and about 20% were sold live in the shell.
That's completely flip-flopped in the last 30 years
where now we're selling over 80% of our oysters
live in the shell.
And that really I think is indicative of sort of a trend
in the marketplace, that you see oyster bars
popping up everywhere, a lot of really fine restaurants
are putting raw oysters on their menu.
It's a trend that we expect to see continue.
NARRATOR: A 2012 US Department of Commerce report
called aquaculture the fastest-growing
form of food production in the world.
And with oysters already accounting for $136 million
worth of that yearly production,
you can expect words like merroir to become more common.
Rita and Travis are happy
with their small slice of that growth.
And it's a lot of work, lots of steps from seed to table,
but at the end of the day, it's worth it.
When people stop in and are like, I love your oysters,
they're the best oysters I've ever had, Netarts Bay
is so nice and clean, it really does,
it makes you feel good to know that you're doing something
local and sustainable.
And you have that niche market of having such a clean,
fresh oyster, and people love that.
Yummy.
It's really a good feeling.
I feel accomplished.
TRAVIS: Delivering the oysters to the chefs on Friday,
they really appreciate the fact
that I'm not sending somebody else,
I'm actually handing them their bag of oysters every week.
So there's a connection.
What's up, buddy?
Good morning.
I put a lot of work in,
now it's time to reap the rewards rewards.
Reward!