Al Dente

The Lee Bros. Indoor Oyster Roast

We spent almost 18 months on the road pimping The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, teaching cooking classes, lecturing, signing books all over the United States. We met about three thousand people during that time, and most of them told us exactly which recipe in the book was their favorite: Sweet Potato Buttermilk Pie might be near the top of the list, with Butterbean Pate coming in close behind. Not a soul mentioned our recipe for an Indoor Oyster Roast (page 415). Do people skip the recipe because it just sounds like too much work? Oysters are expensive, but so much less so in the shell. Maybe we romanced the outdoor, open-fire, creekside oyster roast so much that an indoor oyster roast seemed dreary in comparison? Is it that difficult to find oysters in the shell in Duluth? Wherever we happen to be, we do this a few times a year, and especially around the holidays. It’s one of the best casual parties you'll ever throw--there's a disarming, messy element in the oyster shucking, a flicker of risk with those sharp shells and blunt oyster knives, and an incredibly delicious and naughty sense of indulgence, all at the same time. Sing for your supper, y'all! We’re going to give you some snapshots from our kitchen to show you how simple, easy and safe an indoor oyster roast truly is.

Here are three sources for outstanding mail-order oysters:

Are you closer to the west coast?:
Farm 2 Market:  http://www.farm-2-market.com/products/oysters.html

Closer to the East Coast?:
North: Cotuit Oyster Company: http://www.cotuitoystercompany.com/
South: Rappahannock River Oysters: http://www.rroysters.com

Extra reading: Consider the Oyster, by oyster-shucking world champion, Patrick McMurray, contains an ocean of oyster advice and wisdom.

If you’d like to share some tips on roasting or sourcing oysters, we’d love to hear them. Visit our cookbook website, www.mattleeandtedlee.com, to keep tabs on our cooking class and event schedule.

Indoor Oyster Roast for 8 People
Time: 45 Minutes

100 to 120 unshucked oysters, scrubbed clean
6 small lemons, cut into wedges
Tabasco, or other pepper sauce
Oyster knives
Oyster gloves, garden gloves, or kitchen towels for shucking

1. Heat oven to 475 degrees. Working in batches, arrange oysters in a single layer in a 12-by-16-inch roasting pan fitted with a flat rack. Pour 1/3 inch of hot tap water into pan, and bake for 7 minutes, or until oyster shells have begun to open.

2. Using gloves or tongs, transfer oysters to a table covered in newspaper for guests to shuck, garnish and eat while next batch cooks. Add water to pan as necessary, and repeat roasting until all oysters have been served, about 45 minutes. Serve with lemon wedges and hot sauce.

Above: The oyster-shucking table, ready for guests and oven-roasted oysters 
(Note: heavy-duty dishwashing gloves, another option for hand-protection)

Above: Oysters on a flat rack in the roasting pan. Pour in a half-inch water and into a preheated 475-degree oven they go!

Above: Down the hatch!

--Matt Lee and Ted Lee

Check out Matt Lee and Ted Lee’s favorite kitchen products in the Kitchen & Home Gift Guide.

The Lee Bros. Bourbon Ball Ice Cream

In the Introduction to our first cookbook, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, we encouraged readers to be as creative and restless as we are in the kitchen, to invent their own variations on our recipes. In the two years since the book’s been published, we’ve been thrilled to hear about the riffs that cooks came up with when they took our advice to heart. One such example is Bourbon Ball Ice Cream, which takes our recipe for cayenne-spiked Bourbon Balls (those super-easy-to-make candies somewhere between a cookie and a truffle; pp 490-491) to a whole new level, allowing us to use them in a completely new way.

We owe this innovation to Scott Jones, the food editor of Southern Living. That magazine was running a story about a Christmas party we threw in Charleston, and they wanted to include our bourbon ball recipe in the article. The test-kitchen at Southern Living happened to be testing our recipe on the same day they were testing a vanilla ice cream recipe for another article. Jones, a C.I.A.-trained chef and an adventurous eater, happened to taste both recipes back-to-back and got an idea: he chopped up a bourbon ball, mixed it into the ice cream…Eureka!

Bourbon Ball Ice Cream kicks butt--similar to a Chocolate-Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream, but with drunken-holiday spice! And it’s super-easy: just quarter about 8 to 10 bourbon balls so you’ve got a cup of bourbon-ball pieces, and then fold them into a quart of softened vanilla ice cream so they’re evenly distributed throughout the ice cream. If you make your own vanilla ice cream, more power to you. But it’s just as easy to buy a quart of high-quality store-bought vanilla ice cream. Let the ice cream stand in its container outside the refrigerator to soften for ten minutes. Then scoop it from the carton into a bowl, add the bourbon ball pieces and fold them into the ice cream using a wooden spoon or rubber spatula. You can then serve it immediately, or pack the ice cream back into the pint and return it to the freezer until you’re ready to scoop.

Here’s our Hot-Spiced Bourbon Ball recipe. It makes about 30 bourbon balls, so freeze the leftovers in a tight-fitting container and use them for future batches of ice cream or defrost them to serve with after-dinner drinks.

If you have any variations on other recipes in our book that you’d like to share, we’d love to hear about them. Visit our cookbook website, www.mattleeandtedlee.com, to keep tabs on our cooking class and event schedule.