Oh my! This looks amazing and can't wait to try this recipe. Wanted to share it with you This is an excerpt from Garden and Gun. Head over there for the full article and the recipe.

Chesapeake Oyster Stew

A Baltimore chef’s time-tested take on an Eastern Shore tradition

by Kim Severson October/November 2017 www.gardenandgun.com

photo: Johnny Autry via gardenandgun.com

Dylan Salmon bluffed his way into his first oyster job. The man whose name hangs over the little subterranean restaurant called Dylan’s Oyster Cellar in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood always wanted to be a chef, but he didn’t know how to get his foot in the door at a big-name restaurant.

“I figured if I said I could shuck an oyster, I would increase my chances,” he says.

The problem was, Salmon didn’t know the first thing about oysters. And didn’t even like them that much. “Honestly, I was always more into clams,” he says. A typical Baltimore kid, he grew up pulling them out of the sands of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

But a manager at Ryleigh’s Oyster had mercy on him and set him to work. “I got my butt kicked at first,” Salmon says, “but I stayed three years.” He got an education in the art of designing a daily raw bar and fell in love with oysters, learning the subtle differences between meaty, mild Maryland Choptank Sweets and supersalty Wellfleets from Cape Cod Bay.

After years of working in kitchens around Baltimore and hosting a series of pop-up oyster bars, he and his wife, Irene, opened Dylan’s Oyster Cellar in 2016. The emphasis is on nostalgic Eastern Shore traditions, like baked beans and coddies—potato cakes flavored with salt cod—and, of course, a wide range of clam and oyster dishes. In the fall, just when the weather starts to turn cold, Salmon adds oyster stew to the menu. It’s a dish he made thousands of times when he was a chef at Woodberry Kitchen, a much-loved Baltimore restaurant with a deeply local sensibility.

“I went through hundreds of ideations,” he says. Sometimes he would thicken the stew with grits or benne seeds and season it with celery salt. To add some texture, he might toss in sautéed slices of the carrot-shaped root vegetable salsify, which tastes a little like artichoke and which some people
call oyster plant. He’s even looked to the famous Grand Central Oyster Bar pan roast, with its hit of chili sauce and raft of toast, for inspiration. But in the end, he always comes back to the simple blend of cream, celery, and oysters that makes up a classic oyster stew. “I like the tried-and-true,” he says.

Head over to Garden and Gun to see the entire blog and this fabulous recipe.