Marinated Oyster

Oyster has been something that I used to prefer raw with some bread and butter on the side. There's nothing as enjoyable as the taste of sea water with something enjoyable and fairly neutral-tasting next to you. As you can imagine from my description I kind of went in panic mode at the suggestion that I would create an oyster dish that demanded preparation beyond just chucking the oyster and serving it with bread and butter, but as the first course and also the course of which I already had a lot of ingredients ready, I couldn't help but try it out. 

The first thing you had to do was to chuck the oysters, separate the sea water from the meat and let them marinate in salt water, as I did there: 


After that you have to mix a few ingredients into a bowl. For me, the resulting mixture looked like this: 



A somewhat tricky part is the creation of the sesame emulsion, in which you mount a mixture of miso, rice vinegar and lemon juice with a mixture of oils. Those who have already tried to create their own mayonnaise should already know how the procedure has to work. Here's the finished product together with some scraped daikon radish: 

Lastly you have to make a tempura of shiso leaves. I think that the problem that I had was that I put in all the leaves in the batter directly into the frier, which caused them to get cluttered and not to fry evenly. If I were to retry I'd definitely take this into account. 

This is the finished dish: 

I got to say that I really liked the finished product. The oyster is filled with strong salty, spicy and umami flavours and the tempura and daikon do help to reset the pallet after taking a bite of one oyster and getting all the rich flavours in your mouth so that it doesn't become overwhelming. Not the thing that will dethrone the simple oyster with bread and butter, but this has a charm that the simple oyster doesn't quite have. 

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