New England Clam Bake Reality

Ok, so as you probably know, my friends and I did a clam bake on Yoho Beach in Maine during our vacation. I had considered it an embarrassment that as a New Englander, I had never attempted such a thing. But then again I come from Massachusetts, and you can bet that the minute we started lighting a campfire on a Massachusetts beach the cops and fire department would be there handing out fines and making us put the fire out. But in Maine, well, we had no problems whatsoever.

Except perhaps for the cooking...

We began by getting all the food we'd need. Since there were seven of us, we assembled the following:

7 lobsters (a little over 1lb each)
4 lbs mussels
2 lbs clams (the people we were with liked clams over mussels)
1 bag of Russet potatos (this was an error as we shall later see)
7 ears of corn
1 bag of yellow onions
2 bags of match light charcoal

We began by digging the pit. It was about 2'x3' and almost 2' deep. We lined the bottom of the pit with grapefruit sized dry rocks (wet ones could explode), and lit the first bag of charcoal on top of teh rocks. Once those coals had become white, we dumped on top the second bag of charcoal.

In the meantime, the other three men in the group went and scavanged the beach for driftwood. And they found a remarkable amount (we were in a remote area, so if you're by a clean beach, you may want to bring your own wood with you). Over the next hour and a half, we burned the wood down to charcoal, being careful never to load too much wood into the pit as to let the fire escape. After an hour and a half, we thought that the pit must be hot enough, and so we began to assemble the bake.

Wet seaweed was collected, and we covered the charcoal covered rocks with a healthy helping of the weed. On top of that went the potatos, followed by the lobsters, onions, clams, mussels and corn. Wet seaweed was again used to cover the top, and a wet towel was placed over the entire bake. Finally the towel was covered with sand, and we waited.

We waited about an hour before people started getting impatient wanting to see how it was going. I should point out to you that lobster, steamed in a steamer, only takes 20 minutes or so. But this wasn't a steamer with an active flame. It was a clam bake on top of hot but cooling rocks. Nevertheless, we opened it up and surprise, it was only half cooked. So we covered it back up again and tewnty minutes later it had hardly changed. Having examined the situation, we concluded that the rocks were no longer hot enough to finish the job. So we packed everything up in a king sized steamer pot that we had, and headed home to complete the job in a steamer over open flame.

It's difficult to say precisely what went wrong. Some recipes we'd seen said to keep the fire going for a full three hours or until the rocks are "red hot" which seemed a bit much to us, but maybe that was what we needed, particularly in the cold, wet, sand beaches of Maine. I think we also laid too much seaweed down such that it started acting like an insulator at points, instead of being steamed into the seafood. The potatos were clearly wrong, as most recipes call for the little red potatos, not big ones - I don't know what I was thinking buying those. And I still think that we opened the damned thing up too early, letting all the accumulated heat and steam out that had yet to finish their work. Regardless, the effort was not a complete failure.

After returning to our beach houuse and completing the cooking job, we proceeded to eat. And I have to say, the results were delicious. The lobster was unlike any I'd ever had before, with a smokey/herby flavor that could only come from the combination of driftwood and seaweed that we'd used in the bake. The other foods had this taste as well, except for the potatos, which seemed oddly unaffected.

Overall, it was a great meal and a world of fun, even if we had to finish the meal in a conventional manner. I am anxious to try it again. I think that a real New England clam bake is a little like southern slow smoked bbq, which just takes time and patience to get right. Maybe next time there'll be no mistakes...