Oysters with Tomato Salsa Recipe

If I were going to eat one food until I was so stuffed I couldn’t eat another bite, it would be oysters.  Cooked or raw, I can eat my weight in the sweet, salty, slippery mouthfuls.  At Blog Her a couple months ago I was treated to dinner at Nobu in San Diego.  The food was amazing, but my absolute favorite was the oysters with Nobu salsa.  When we recently stayed in a cabin on the beach near Oysterville, I whipped up a batch of my own salsa based on what I had at Nobu. My server at Nobu was kind enough to tell the ingredients in the salsa that I loved so much; sweet onion, tomato, ponzu, chili sauce and orange juice.  Although I didn’t know the exact amounts, I was excited to play with them to find the perfect flavor combination.

I had a few tomatoes and onions from my garden.  Nobu uses Maui sweet onions but I used a Walla Walla sweet onion.

For the ponzu, you need to know the difference between ponzu and ponzu sauce.  Regular ponzu is a citrusy vinegar, while ponzu sauce has soy sauce in it.  The color difference is obvious, but if you have trouble finding plain ponzu, you can buy my favorite ponzu online.  If you have an Asian grocery store by you, it should be much cheaper there.

For the chili sauce, I used my favorite spicy condiment, sriracha!

I made the salsa in advance in a jar and kept it refrigerated until we had our oysters. this really allowed the flavors to blend together nicely.  But if you’re making this last minute, you can use the salsa fresh no problem.

Whether you eat your oysters raw or fresh, this salsa is AWESOME!!!  The recipe will probably make more than you need but it keeps for a couple weeks in the fridge and is good on pretty much any seafood.

Shucking the oysters is the hardest part of this recipe for me.  We bought an oyster knife in Oysterville, but it wasn’t sharpened!  So I used a paring knife to get a spot open wide enough to slip the oyster knife in (which is sturdier than a paring knife).  If you’ve never shucked oysters before you can watch the video below which helped me out a couple years ago.

I put my hand in a potholder, rest the oyster on one towel and use another to hold the oyster so there’s lots of protection between the knife and my hand. I’ve yet to stab myself but if I did the extra layers would keep me from getting seriously hurt.

Have you ever shucked an oyster?  Do you like them raw or cooked?