Articles - Snippits

The New England clambake is a great method of cooking foods, fresh seafood such as lobster, mussels, crabs, clams, and quahogs. The seafood is often supplemented by sausages, potatoes, onions, carrots, corn-on-the-cob, etc. A New England Clambake is usually held on festive occasions along the coast of New England.

In order to have a New England Clambake, you must first gather seaweed. To keep it fresh, you need a container that can hold both the seaweed and a substantial amount of sea water. You will also need several round stones, or even cannon balls, which will be heated in your pit and then used to create the heat for the steaming process.

Lastly, like most other methods of cooking by steaming, a cover is necessary to allow the trapped heat and steam to thoroughly cook the food. Canvas tarps or potato sacks soaked in sea water are often used for this purpose, they allow air to escape while also maintain much of it so it may cook the food thoroughly.

Steaming lets all the flavors from the ingredients emerge and blend slowly so that a harmony of flavors it's achieved. All while not over cooking the ingredients, something very important when cooking mollusks since they tend to vary on cooking times. Usually fish takes much less time to cook than squid, and shrimp takes less time than fish, by using the steaming method, one is allowed to cook all kinds of ingredients with much less opportunity to overcook others.

To make the clambake worthwhile, it is desirable to use fresh seafood. The New England Clambake barely differs from the Cape Cod Clambake. Both clambakes use very similar ingredients and the methods used for preparing the Cape Cod Clambake are the same as those used to prepare that made in New England.

To many, there is nothing gastronomically better than a clambake and although I tend to argue about culinary preferences, I have no rhetoric to say about a clambake being one of the best eating experiences a seafood lover can have.