baked oysters – Hungry for Louisiana

Fresh from the Gulf, Oysters, Southern, Super Bowl

Super Bowl Sunday: River Road Recipes’ Oysters Fitzpatrick Gets Saucy

Oysters are the perfect addition to the 2015 Super Bowl party menu, both as a nod to two seafood-centric coastal locales, New England and Seattle, and to our own Gulf oyster season still underway here in South Louisiana. For parties, I like to serve them baked or grilled on the half-shell, and for the Super Bowl in particular, adding bacon and barbecue sauce makes them festive and football-y. Pretty sure that’s a word this week.

One of my all-time favorite oyster recipes is Oysters Fitzpatrick from the Junior League of Baton Rouge’s 1959 food bible, River Road Recipes, but here I’ve reworked it with a locally made barbecue sauce, Jay D’s, made by my friend and fellow food writer/blogger Jay Ducote (BiteandBooze.com).

Fresh from the Gulf

I keep my oyster shells

One of my smarter moves as a home cook was holding on to spent oyster shells after my hubby John and I smoked several dozen with our next door neighbors one winter. We bought a sack of live oysters from Tony’s Seafood here in Baton Rouge, one of my favorite seafood purveyors, tossed the briny bivalves on the charcoal grill and waited a few minutes for them to open. Mildly sweet and smoky, they were a perfect communal snack on a still, cold night. At the time, I was playing around with the three recipes for oysters Rockefeller in River Road Recipes, one of the best selling community cookbooks of all time and published by the Junior League of Baton Rouge in 1959. I needed shells for my baked oyster experiments, and the ones from that night were perfect. I cleaned the living daylights out of them – soap, bleach, time, you name it. Health department officials may disapprove, but I keep those shells in their own plastic box and pull them out anytime I feel like making a baked oyster dish.