Island Creek Razor Clams in Olive Oil, Garlic, & Chili

Ingredients: Razor clams, olive oil, garlic, chili

- At Island Creek, we’ve been harvesting and selling razor clams as something of a side hustle for the better part of 30 years.
The temperamental, elusive nature of these knife-shaped bivalves is exactly what makes them such a perfect case study for the importance of a cannery within a food system.
New England razor clams are typically only harvestable during ‘Spring Tides’, or when the tides are lower than average, allowing diggers have better access to the mudflats where the clams live. These Spring Tides only happen a few times a year – so when it’s on, it’s on – and you dig for coin while the tides are low.

-Selling razors on the fresh market can be fun in its own way.
Historically, demand has only come from niche buyers in places like NYC and LA’s Chinatowns which puts you in situations where you’re hustling to move a highly perishable product before the tide turns or the market gets saturated.
It can also put you in other such situations (like racing through Manhattan in the back of a Ferrari and stalking through the backdoor of restaurants in Chinatown…for instance.
These days, live razor clams are becoming a bit more mainstream with both chefs and consumers which is cool to see.

- The problem however, is that the demand for fresh razor clams is still pretty limited.
Pricing can start out high at first but then quickly tank, leaving you stuck with a huge inventory of highly perishable product whose price is dropping like a sack of rocks off starboard. You might have more inventory to sell and harvesters eager to continue digging while the tides are good, yet the market has been saturated and your buyers are unwilling to pay.
So, wouldn’t it be nice to have a way for harvesters to still capture some revenue during these short windows of time, at a decent price, even after the fresh market is saturated?

- This is where the cannery comes in.
When the tides are right, we source directly from a steady roster of diggers, many of whom we’ve bought oysters from for years, if not decades.
Anything we’re not able to quickly sell on the fresh market, we are able to preserve via tinning at our cannery and then pass on a more affordable can to the end consumer once the market is tapped out and harvest prices drop. Economics or something.

- Razors are a bridge between domestic and European conservas traditions.
For avid tinned fish fans, you’re likely familiar with tinned razor clams from Europe. In fact, we’ve been selling tinned Galician razors ourselves for at least three years. Despite there not being much of a difference between Spanish and New England razor clams, (although some say the ones found in Duxbury are the best in the world), Europeans seem to have more of an appetite for weirder species like razor clams, allowing harvesters to fetch higher prices. In a way, American’s historical temperate interest in razor clams is what makes it one of the few things that we’re able to preserve more affordably here in the US.

- And at the end of the day, they just taste damn good.
Like littleneck clams, razors just take to the canning process really well. The texture and quality isn’t compromised under the insanely high heat of the retort, which is essentially a super powerful pressure cooker. Where other shellfish come out chewy or mushy in the can, razors come out tender and toothy. Where some clams leave the tin gamey, razors retain their briny sweetness and luxuriate their bath of golden olive oil and seasonings.

A toothsome bite perfect with crusty bread, on fresh pasta, or plucked from the tin with a fork.

Drizzle some high quality balsamic vinegar into the leftover oil from the tin, and serve with olives, crusty bread. A glass of Txakolina to wash it all down.

Consuming this product can expose you to chemicals including lead, which are known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. For more information go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.