Every inch of me, at least the parts not covered with waterproof gear, has become soaked with rain. My jeans, my shoes, my socks, my will to live. The drizzle barely qualifies as a storm, but as we take a small boat into the Black Narrows just off Chincoteague Island, the rain strikes cold and hard. It pelts my face with knitting-needle drops.
Yet the semi-heavy weather doesn't faze Eli Nichols and Raymond Jones, the nursery manager and farm hand, respectively, for Rappahannock Oyster Co. They've strapped on waders and jumped into the cold waters to fetch a few mesh bags submerged in floating cages, not far from the causeway into Chincoteague. They will spend the next 30 minutes or so picking through the bags to select about 150 shellfish for an informal reception the following night at the Rappahannock Oyster Bar inside the District of Columbia's Union Market.
The reception would prove to be a homecoming party of sorts: a chance to toast the Chesapeake Bay scallop's return to the dinner table, if only for the evening. The bay scallop has not been commercially viable in the Chesapeake region since 1933, when a combination of disease and a Category 4 hurricane devastated the shellfish's sea grass habitat on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The scallop industry along the Chesapeake, which produced nearly 2 million pounds of the sweet delicacy in 1930, has never recovered, despite multiple attempts.
"The scallop is no more in the Chesapeake," says Ryan Croxton, co-founder of Rappahannock Oyster Co. "It seemed like a perfect place for us to jump in. Whether it works, who knows? We're definitely not mortgaging the house to do it."
Rappahannock may be the perfect company to take on the reclamation project. Cousins and co-owners Ryan and Travis Croxton have already conquered the challenge of Eastern oysters in the Chesapeake, a commercial industry that had nearly collapsed in the early 2000s. Rappahannock was an early adopter of oyster aquaculture in Virginia. The company raised its first crop of 3,000 oysters in 2002. Today, Rappahannock harvests 180,000 oysters a week, shipping bivalves all over the country as well as to Asia and Canada.
As Rappahannock adopts another type of shellfish aquaculture, the company's economic strength may be just as important as its experience hatching, growing, harvesting and shipping oysters. Rappahannock's healthy bottom line means it can afford to experiment with bay scallops - and see if the company can produce enough of them to help revive a dead industry in the Chesapeake. It's a risk: Bay scallops are much more temperamental than Eastern oysters. Just as problematic, the modern Chesapeake scallop farmer has precious few resources to mine for guidance. The published literature is scant, and commercial scallop operations died out generations ago.
The Croxton cousins have relied heavily on experts with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William & Mary to launch their scallop operation. Among other groups, the institute's Eastern Shore Laboratory in Wachapreague, Va., has been working periodically since the 1970s to restore sea grass and bay scallops in the Chesapeake. The institute has catalogued every step along the way, compiling some of its research in manual form. The Rappahannock team regularly relies on a slim volume, "Bay Scallop Culture," which the institute published in 1998.
What the experts and the manual will tell you are the same: Bay scallops are the hothouse flowers of shellfish. They're finicky creatures that don't like extreme water temperatures. They don't grow well in low-salinity waters. They don't like muddy waters, either. They hate rushing currents, and they require a lot more space than oysters. As if that weren't enough, bay scallops can suffer other indignities: During spawning season in summer, oyster larvae may affix themselves to a single scallop, which will soon disappear under a bouquet of oyster shells.
During their early development stages, scallops "hate the sediment, but they hate having you rinse them off. They don't like to get cold, and they don't like to get hot. They're just the wimpiest little things," says Mark Luckenbach, professor of marine science at the Virginia institute.
The Rappahannock crew received an early lesson in bay scallop fragility. The Croxtons bought about 50,000 larvae from a hatchery in New York. As part of the painstaking process to transition the scallops into Chincoteague waters, the Rappahannock team placed the larvae in an upweller system, where the embryonic shellfish are fed nutrients and given a safe space to grow until they're ready for a natural environment. At least that's the theory. But a water pump broke on one of the upwellers, and a farmhand didn't check it for two days.
"We lost a ton [of scallops]. That was just stupidity," says Ryan Croxton. "That was an easy lesson: Just don't do that again."
More lessons are still to come as Rappahannock moves forward with its scallop production. Among them are the best methods for harvesting scallops - "typically we don't harvest in the boat," says Ryan Croxton - and shipping them across country. The scallop's fragile shell makes it difficult to pack the creatures for transit.
Then there's the marketing side. Part of the reason scallops haven't recovered in the Chesapeake, says Luckenbach, is that there hasn't been a consumer market developed for them. The key, Luckenbach adds, is whether diners will be willing to eat scallops on the half shell, with the stomach, intestines and mantle folds visible, looking like an oyster on the half shell that dressed up for a Goth convention. (Typically, only the adductor muscle - a clean ivory nubbin of flesh - is served as a bay scallop.) When eaten on the half shell, a bay scallop tastes like a cross between a sea urchin and the larger sea scallops found in the world's oceans.
If diners won't accept scallops on the half shell, there will be little reason for Chesapeake aquaculture farmers to adopt the shellfish. After all, they wouldn't be able to compete with the major bay scallop producers, whether in Chile or China, who can sell seafood much cheaper.
"It doesn't really make sense for us" to shuck bay scallops down to the adductor muscle, says Ryan Croxton. "We've got a limited number out there. For us to shuck that out, we'd have a pint jar and then we'd be done. . . . Plus, you're throwing out so much good stuff."
Rappahannock faced a similar issue when the company entered the oyster business, which was devoted to the shucked market, given that gourmands considered Chesapeake Bay oysters on the half shell inferior compared to those in other U.S. regions. But Rappahannock convinced chefs - starting at the top with Eric Ripert at the four-star Le Bernardin in New York - that its Chesapeake oysters on the half shell were a cut above, Travis Croxton says chefs are already expressing interest in Rappahannock's scallops, even though the company is not in a position to start selling the product.
Both Jose Andres (Jaleo, Zaytinya, Minibar, many others) and Jamie Leeds (Hank's Oyster Bar, Hank's Pasta Bar) say they would happily put Rappahannock's scallops on their menus. And neither restaurateur would think twice about introducing diners to a whole scallop on the half shell, guts and all.
"When you eat the stomach and the liver and everything else, it's so good and so tasty. Why would you want to throw it in the garbage?" says Andres. "If the [Rappahannock] guys are successful and they can produce them, hopefully in quantities one day, it can be good news for the bay."
But those days lie far in the future. Rappahannock still faces numerous challenges before it enters the wholesale scallop market. For starters, the Croxtons want to develop their own hatchery, so they don't have to deal with the hassles of introducing scallop larvae from outside waters into the Chesapeake. Then they have to figure out workable systems for growing, harvesting, shipping. Even pricing. They're not yet sure how much they might charge for a Chesapeake Bay scallop, although one of the Croxtons is already seeing dollar signs.
"We're still not necessarily thinking about this as a huge revenue stream," says Ryan Croxton.
To which his cousin, Travis, immediately retorts: "I am."
About the Author
