The Grand Seaside (or Backyard) Version

The Efficiency Apartment Version

Whatever you think of the contemporary American culinary landscape, it’s hard to deny that the last ten years have seen a great and productive reawakening of interest in the country’s regional cuisines.

We have been trying humbly to contribute to that movement, alongside others who have helped lift up New England food and many other styles, like Cajun, Low Country, Appalachian, and Chesapeake cuisines, as well as the broader and cross-cultural contributions of the African diaspora, Native Americans, Latinxs, and many others who have shaped what we eat.

All of these different cultural niches share one commonality: the feast, where families, friends, and whole communities come together to break bread. To name a few of these feasts: the Cajun boucherie (pig butchering and all-day roast) and crayfish boil; the Low Country oyster roast and barbecue; the Appalachian pig roast; the Maryland crab boil; and cedar-planked salmon roasts in the Pacific Northwest.

Which brings us, of course, to New England’s contribution: the clambake.

At its grandest, a New England clambake is a warm, loud, boisterous gathering of family and friends around a smoky and steamy heap of seaweed. The shellfish and fixings hiding underneath are basically picked from the fire and eaten right away, steps away from the ice-cold North Atlantic. The details of the experience vary only a bit from the sandy beaches of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island to the rugged, rocky coastline of Maine.

The reality is, the same guiding principles can be used at any scale, in any place, including your home kitchen.

THE GRAND SEASIDE (OR BACKYARD) VERSION

Pulling off a classic clambake steps from the ocean is pure memory-making, not just because of the setting and the delicious food, but because it takes a family and friends to pull off. Everyone has a job, from gathering seaweed, to tending fire, to setting a beautiful table, to sitting off to the side, drinking and making unhelpful comments. And, of course, there’s the viscerally pleasing experience of eating with your hands surrounded by people you love. It takes a little planning and a little fussing, but it’s really a simple pleasure. We’re going to show you how.

THE BASICS

The first thing to understand is that clambake is really a misnomer. If it didn’t sound so awkward, a clambake would more accurately be called a clamsteam, because introducing a little moisture to the cooking equation frees shellfish from their shells and produces the most succulent results.

When we do clambakes, either at the restaurant or seaside, we add a base of sea or salted water to ensure consistent steam, but in many traditional clambakes—like those of southern New England, cooked in pits dug in the sand—people rely solely on soaked seaweed to provide the necessary moisture to produce the steam that cooks the shellfish. Seaweed is probably the single thing that holds the whole tradition together because it provides that critical moisture and imbues everything with a cohesive, umami-rich seaweed flavor.

THE EXTRAS AND ACCOMPANIMENTS

While clams, potatoes, and seaweed are a must in a clambake, you’ll see an impressive variance by locale. In Rhode Island, where clams are king, god forbid you try to fit lobster into the equation. In Fall River, Massachusetts, which has a large Portuguese population, you are likely to find chouriço sausage in the mix and Portuguese sweet bread served on the side. In Midcoast and northern Maine, lobster is requisite, and you may also stumble across the otherworldly red snapper, also known as the state hot dog of Maine, from time to time. Here in southern Maine and at Eventide, our platter includes potatoes, salt pork, steamers, mussels, lobster, smoked sausage, eggs, and corn (when it’s in season). But we also like to add rock crabs, wild oysters, periwinkles, or anything else we might gather along the shore. Every single version, no matter what, includes copious amounts of butter.

We love this basic formula, but we’re also restless chefs, and we can’t leave well enough alone, so we like to have a little fun with the fixings served with a clambake. Along with seasoned drawn butter, we serve bracing, spicy, and acidic condiments to dress the shellfish, pork, and potatoes. Those little touches include Salt Pork Sambal (this page), Nori Vinaigrette (this page), Maitake XO Sauce (this page), any type of hot sauce, and Eventide Steamed Buns (this page). And don’t forget the egg, which is said to have become part of the tradition for an ingenious reason: as a timer. Lore says that when you crack the egg and it is perfectly hard-boiled, you know the rest of the bake is done. However, we’ve found that using a cooler see (this page) helps everything turn out more evenly in the end. Along with that bit of wisdom, here are some other clambake mantras to keep in mind as you prepare for the adventure.

Observe fire safety. If you are building a fire outside, please don’t start a forest fire. Please understand and comply with local and state fire regulations. Please obtain a fire permit, if required. We like to do our clambakes below the high-tide line, so the tide puts the embers out, but if you aren’t below the tide line, please put the fire out with the kind of fanatical overkill that would make Smokey the Bear proud.

Choose a sturdy cooking vessel. Here are some of our favorite types of vessels:

• Custom 4 by 3-foot stainless steel tray: Our welder friend made us these monster trays for large-format catering events. They are the sturdiest and best of all the vessels we’ve tried, but they probably aren’t realistic for using (much less storing) in a regular apartment or house.

• Roasting pans or 2-inch-deep hotel pans: These come in a variety of widths and are a good alternative for smaller-scale clambakes at the beach or at home.

• Lobster pot or other large pot: Pots usually limit how much stuff you can fit in, but you can use a pot to get good results.

Aim for the perfect experience, not perfect cookery. We’ve done thousands of clambakes in the restaurant, on the beach, and almost everywhere in between. Trust us, it’s virtually impossible to achieve evenly cooked perfection with so many different things firing at once. Steamers and lobsters just don’t cook at the same rates. That’s not the point, anyway. Clambakes are meant to be casual, familial, and abundant, focusing on the beauty of nature and breaking bread with loved ones, rather than the flawless execution of every little morsel. Don’t get us wrong, our process is calibrated to deliver delicious results, but the mussels might be cooked further than your anal retentive foodie friend might like. If someone complains, confiscate their butter or send them off to gather seaweed.

Provide starch. Serve some steamed buns, sticky rice, or flatbread with the meal, so people can stack, wrap, and combine ingredients. Making little composed sandwiches with funky and spicy sauces is a great twist to add to the feast.

Have a blast. Particularly if you’re doing the outside version, you might as well swing for the fences. There’s a bunch of down time, and you can really stretch things out as much as you want. Anything that you’d bring to a car camping trip or beach day—fishing rods, cribbage, Frisbees, guitars, slack lines, ingredients for s’mores, cannabis (if it’s legal where you live, of course), camp chairs, footballs—are welcome distractions and good ways to make the best of the day.

Carry in, carry out. If you’re doing it outside, have respect for your surroundings, for the love of all that is sacred. Carry out your trash. Leave no trace. Don’t be a goon.

With all that in mind, you’re ready to go!

GETTING IT DONE THE DRAMATIC WAY

There is nothing like cooking a clambake over an open fire on a breezy summer afternoon. While doing so steps from the water may feel like the most appropriate way, you can do it anywhere under the sky. As long as you do it safely, it doesn’t matter if it’s Uncle Jimmy’s backyard, the sandy bend of a river, or a gravel parking lot.

Scope is the most important question when planning for a clambake, because the headcount will determine the cooking vessel size. If forty people are rolling through, you’re going to need a pretty large, specialized vessel. If it’s a more intimate setup, like a romantic, beachside dinner for two, a large pot will do. The only real key for our purposes is that the vessel be able to hold at least a couple inches of water and withstand some serious heat from the fire.

Here are our instructions for a clambake, starting with the tools and equipment you’ll need to make it all happen:

• Enough firewood and/or charcoal to keep a fire going for a couple of hours (and beyond if you’re hanging out for a while)

• A sturdy cooking vessel see (this page)

• Mesh shellfish bags, which when filled with smaller items like steamers or potatoes, make removal easier and should be available at most seafood retailers (only necessary if you’re cooking for a large group)

• A lid for your vessel or, in its absence, a large piece of soaked burlap or a soaked clean bedsheet to drape over the vessel and trap some of the steam

• Small bowls or ramekins for all of your butter and sauces

• Enough heavy-duty pot holders, fire gloves, or kitchen towels to lift your vessel safely off the fire

• A bucket of water, preferably seawater, but if not, then salted enough to taste like it

• A regular-size trash barrel (clean, of course) of waterlogged rockweed—a type of stringy and sturdy seaweed found on both coasts—preferably pulled from rocks on the beach around your cook site. If you’re not on a beach, your seafood retailer should be able to procure it for you. The companies that ship lobsters and oysters will also sometimes ship seaweed if you ask nicely.

• A clean cooler for holding cooked food

And of course, no Eventide clambake would be complete without a giant white cooler brimming with ice and an assortment of tasty beverages. When stocking the cooler for a clambake, we tend to reach for crisp and crushable options that will pair well with the impending seafood deluge. You’re likely to see cans of Bunker Brewing Company’s Machine Czech-Style Pilz alongside go-to beers like Allagash White. For wine, we gravitate toward food-friendly whites like fresh, young Grüner Veltliner or briny, lip-smacking Picpoul. A proper summer celebration practically screams for bubbles, and so we always make sure to lay in several bottles of bright and lively sparkling rosé. We also can’t think of a better opportunity than a clambake to try out our Tea with a Twist (this page).

GATHER YOUR INGREDIENTS

Next, it’s time to think about ingredients and scale them for whatever size party you’re having. Here’s a handy rule of thumb:

1 (1¼-pound) live lobster per person (and a couple extra if you want lobster rolls the next day)

½ pound live mussels per person

½ pound live steamer clams per person

1 ear of corn per person (optional, unless it’s in season locally, in which case it is mandatory)

1 egg per person, plus a couple extras to use as timers

3 to 5 small potatoes per person (no more than 1 inch diameter)

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter per person, melted, clarified, or browned

Salty swine of your choice, like a big hunk of Salt Pork (this page), sliced thick; thick-sliced slab bacon or cured ham; fresh or smoked sausage; whole hot dogs (we like red snappers, as mentioned, but any hot dogs will do); whole, fresh Spanish chorizo or its many cousins (like chouriço), or something else cured and delicious

Nori Vinaigrette (this page), Salt Pork Sambal (this page), Maitake XO Sauce (this page), or the hot sauce of your choice, as well as plates of starchy accompaniments like Eventide Steamed Buns (this page), crusty bread, flatbread, or sticky rice

½ lemon per person, arrayed around the table with the sauces

SCOPE OUT AND PREP YOUR SITE

If you’re throwing a clambake seaside, make sure to research the tides! The incoming tide is relentless and unsympathetic to your culinary aspirations or your schedule. Beyond that, your first and most important challenge in setting up your cook site is ensuring that you can safely hold your cooking vessel—which will be significantly heavier when full of water and product—on a level plane 4 to 6 inches above a fire. This can be accomplished in a number of ways. If your party, and therefore your vessel, is small, then you can set up on a Weber grill in your backyard. If your party and your vessel are really large, and you’re on a beach, grab four large rocks and place them under the corners of your vessel, then shift them around until the setup is sturdy and level. Cinder blocks and fire bricks work well here, too. You may be waiting for us to call for digging a trench in the sand, but in Maine, that’s rare. Our beaches are rocky, which is a pain for sunbathing and in-ground clambakes, but a pretty good thing for setting up a sturdy above-ground clambake.

Once you’ve leveled the vessel and feel confident it won’t move or fall during cooking, pull it off and put it aside.

It’s worth noting here to keep a sharp eye on the wind. If it is really cutting across the beach you’re cooking on, you’re looking at problems that include a fire going out, a fire turning into an inferno, or a vessel overturning in the wind. You can arrange more rocks around the edges of your vessel or even build a ring of wet seaweed piled around the fire to block some of the wind. Be careful, in any case.

BUILD YOUR FIRE

Once you’ve prepped your site, you must now summon and flex your bushcraft skills. Whether you’re doing your clambake on a grill or on the beach, you need to build a fire robust enough to boil water evenly and consistently. You can accomplish this by having an even bed of coals that is at least the same diameter as your vessel. Our guidance here is to start a base fire that is a little bigger than your instincts say it should be, so when it burns down to embers, you have enough to spread to the edges under your vessel. You just want to make sure it’s ripping hot and loaded up to burn for a while. It’s not a bad idea to get a bag of charcoal to throw on top of the embers to make the fire burn longer and more consistently.

Once you have your fire going, you should be heading out to gather your seaweed, if that’s the route you’re taking.

ASSEMBLE YOUR CLAMBAKE

First, put an even 1 to 2 inches of seawater (or fresh water salted to taste like seawater) in your vessel. Lay 3 to 4 inches of seaweed in the bottom of the vessel. Next, lay in your bags of potatoes, pork product, corn, and eggs in an even layer. Cover those with several inches of seaweed. Next, lay down your lobsters, steamers, and mussels. Make sure to put a loose egg on either side of the vessel, buried in the seaweed with the upper layers of food. Cover with enough seaweed so you can’t see any of the ingredients below. Put the lid on if you have it, or lay the soaked burlap or cloth over the top.

LOAD IT UP

Lift the clambake onto the stones (this may be a two-person job), so it sits 4 to 6 inches above the fire, and ensure that the whole thing is sturdy and sound so it won’t tip or fall off. While it’s cooking, you’re going to need to attend to other things, but make sure that you don’t take your eyes off the prize. A few things to watch for:

• Be sure you have a strong-enough fire to boil the water and produce consistent steam. After you’ve had the pot over the heat for a little while, you should see steam starting to escape from the top of the rig, and it should feel hot to the touch. If it doesn’t, load a bit more wood or charcoal under the rig.

• Make sure your system doesn’t run out of water. If the fire is too hot, it can boil off the water completely and scorch the seaweed, which will produce a really unpleasant taste. Periodically check the corners of your vessel to make sure there is plenty of water. If you see, smell, or feel like your vessel is low on water, just add a little by lifting the lid and pouring it over the top or just pouring it over the burlap or cloth.

• If your vessel is really wide, make sure the heat is evenly spread underneath, so that all the food gets cooked evenly. There’s nothing worse than pulling a clambake off the fire and finding out that only half of the food is cooked.

POUR A DRINK AND GET READY TO FEAST

Prepping your table doesn’t have to be complex, and you should do it the way you like it. Here are some of the steps we take:

• Grab and stage a folding table, a wooden picnic table, a piece of wood stretched over sawhorses, or another improvised table.

• Lay newspaper or butcher paper over the top of your table.

• Set out enough butter for each person to have their own tub (small bowl) to luxuriate in. If you need to melt butter without access to a stove, put butter in a lidded glass jar and set it in or on top of the steaming seaweed while your clambake is cooking.

• Set out enough pairs of Joyce Chen’s scissors or Shanghai crab scissors or something similar for each person to cut open the lobster shells cleanly (trust us: you’ll never use lobster crackers again) and provide a shell bucket or bowl for every two to four people for spent shells.

• Drop a pile of lobster bibs on the middle of the table.

• Keep paper towels nearby for the eating, and wet naps or wet towels handy for cleaning up after.

• Put out cups or bowls of warm seawater for dipping the steamers in (to remove grit) before dunking them in butter or sauce.

• Lay out small bowls of different sauces for dipping all the food.

UNVEIL THE CLAMBAKE

We wish we could give you a hard-and-fast time for how long to cook. But we know from experience that when working with varying conditions, fuels, and ingredients, you’re going to have to rely on intuition and a few pieces of good advice to know when your clambake is finished. Don’t even think about checking for doneness until you see that vigorous steam has been coming off the top of your cooking vessel for at least 20 minutes, and it is very hot to the touch. When you’re ready to check, take a peek at the lobsters. They should be red. Not reddish or mottled red. You want bright, beautiful, Ferrari red. Next, crack the two eggs that you put on the top on either side of the vessel. The whites should be fully set and the yolk should be set. Make sure your clams and mussels are all open, and give a potato a poke with a knife to make sure it’s tender. If some of the items are done but others aren’t, you can use your heat-resistant gloves to pull those items off the bake and hold them in your clean cooler, which will keep them nice and warm until it’s time to plate up. We call this the Down East crutch because it’s our version of the Texas crutch—a means by which the cook balances the demands of service against the technical demands of food service. Once everything is done, you’re ready to plate up!

TABLE AND ENJOY

Wearing your heat-resistant gloves, pull the whole shebang a safe distance from the fire and remove the covering to reveal the bounty within. You can either put everything in your cooler to hold until presentation, or we think it’s great to just pull all the food directly out of the vessel with the gloves and lay everything out in the center of the table on top of the table covering. The only thing to note is to make sure things are spread out enough so everybody has access. Encourage everyone to take a bit of this and a bit of that, put it on a bun and sauce and butter it. Bragging rights go to those who find the most intriguing flavor combinations. This is not the time for niceties; there should be lots of eager reaching and perhaps even the judicious use of elbows. If you’re not getting your hands dirty, you’ve got the wrong approach.

MAKE IT LAST

Having eaten your fill, it’s time to let languor set in and enjoy the company around you. Push on into the night, or don’t. Whiskey can help in clarifying the position.

THE EFFICIENCY APARTMENT VERSION

Is it the middle of winter? Are you quarantined in your Brooklyn walk-up? Does that dreamy summer vibe in Maine seem too far in the past or too far in the future? Not to worry. We promise that you can use all the same principles described in the Grand Seaside Version and still pull off a killer little clambake in your home kitchen, even on an electric stovetop.

THE BASICS

You’ll have to make peace with the fact that some of the princely elements of the seaside clambake will be missing here, but other things remain constant. Foremost is the fun of it all. You’re going to surprise your dinner guests with this simple offering, and the hands-on, family-style nature of it will by definition pull people closer together. That’s why we do it every summer on the beach and why we felt compelled to serve this version of it at Eventide.

In terms of execution, the formula is also basically the same: combine the freshest, best ingredients you can find with steam, sweat the details a bit, and everything will work out stupendously.

THE EXTRAS AND ACCOMPANIMENTS

The clambake we serve in the restaurant includes potatoes, salt pork, steamers, mussels, lobster, smoked sausage, eggs, corn, butter, and Nori Vinaigrette (this page). Feel free to add a few extra Eventide twists like Salt Pork Sambal (this page), Maitake XO Sauce (this page), any type of hot sauce, and Eventide Steamed Buns (this page) to dial up the flavors and textures and give people some room to explore different combinations. You don’t have to follow that approach exactly, but just look for ways to bring acidic, spicy, funky condiments and a carb wrapper of some kind to the table for that extra kick.

The vessel you choose to cook in is also important in this format. We suggest using a 12-inch bamboo steamer basket with a lid, set over a wok with a small amount of water in it to create steam. Woks are useful for this because their curved sides allow a steamer to sit inside but not touch the water in the bottom of the pan. You can use a straight-sided pot, too, but you need to make sure it is of the same diameter as the bamboo steamer so the steamer sits snuggly atop the pot. If you have a pot with a perforated steamer insert, you can just build the clambake right in the insert.

And we’ll reiterate this again, to hammer it home: aim for the perfect experience, not the perfect cookery. It’s virtually impossible to achieve evenly cooked perfection with so many different things firing at once. Our process is calibrated to deliver delicious results, but it’s inevitable that one thing or another will get a little overdone. Try to keep that one thing or another from being the lobster and don’t sweat the rest.

GATHER YOUR INGREDIENTS

If you do go the steamer basket route, each basket serves two people comfortably. If you need to serve four or six people, you can just stack multiple baskets on top of each other during steaming. Once you get to four baskets and beyond, it’s best to set up multiple woks and split up the load.

For a single basket, here is your ingredient list (scale up as needed):

1 (1- to 1¼-pound) live lobster, or 2 fresh or thawed frozen (uncooked) lobster tails

½ pound live mussels

½ pound live steamer clams

1 ear of corn, shucked and cut in half

2 hard-boiled eggs (but not too hard)

10 Confit Potatoes (this page) made with baby new potatoes or fingerlings

1 (2 by 2-inch) piece Salt Pork (this page), sliced into ½-inch planks

¼ cup (½ stick) unsalted butter, melted, for serving

½ cup Nori Vinaigrette (this page) for serving (optional)

½ cup Salt Pork Sambal (this page) for serving (optional)

½ cup Maitake XO (this page) for serving (optional)

4 Eventide Steamed Buns (this page) for serving (optional)

For drinks, the same stuff that works for the Grand Seaside Version works here. Get light, crisp beers like a Pilsner (e.g. Bunker Brewing Company’s Machine Czech-Style Pilz) or a wheat (e.g. Allagash White). For wine, we like fresh, young whites like a Grüner Veltliner or briny, lip-smacking Picpoul. Bubbles, like a sparkling rosé, are outstanding accompaniments, as are cocktails like our Tea with a Twist (this page).

GETTING IT DONE

If you get a live lobster, place it on a clean work surface and dispatch it humanely by thrusting a sharp knife between its eyes. Pull the claws and tail off the lobster. Wash the mussels and clams. If you have it, lay the rockweed in the bottom of your steamer basket to create a bed for the shellfish. Put your lobster claws and tails atop the rockweed (save the bodies for Lobster Stew, this page), in the middle, and arrange the mussels, clams, corn, egg, potatoes, and salt pork tightly around the lobster, keeping like ingredients together (mussels arrayed with mussels, clams arrayed with clams—you get the picture). Make it look nice so when you open the lid for your guest, it has that “wow” factor. Cover the basket with its top. (If you are stacking multiple baskets, you need to cover only the top basket.)

While you won’t have the time or space in this version to sit languidly around the fire as the food cooks, once you have the basket(s) loaded, there’s a nice opening for a drink with your guests. If for some reason you are worried that you may lose track of time after many pops, place the whole basket with the lid on in the refrigerator, where it will be fine for several hours.

When you’re ready, fill your wok with 3 inches of water and a big pinch of salt (it should taste like seawater). Bring it to a boil over high heat and carefully place the steamer basket in the wok, so it sits sturdily above the water. Set a timer for 12 minutes. In the meantime, get your melted butter and any other sides and condiments set out on the table.

When the timer goes off, take the lid off the steamer basket and check the ingredients. If the lobster is bright red and all the mussel and clam shells have opened up, carefully remove the basket from the heat and set it on a cutting board or a large plate or platter, bring it to the table, and dig in.