From Seabed to Stovetop
The lights along the Provincetown harbor warmly glow long after the sun has set on another picturesque day along the outer Cape. The day may have ended, but the work continues for the crew of the F/V Nemesis as she sidles up to the town dock at the end of MacMillan Wharf. It’s well after 8pm, and the off-loading continues after a long day of fishing Cape Cod Bay. “When we’re fishing the bay, we’ll head out around 3am,” Captain Mike Van Hoose says. “When we’re fishing off Scituate, we’ll head out at 1am.”
Van Hoose is working the hydraulic crane as it lifts massive totes filled with one of Cape Cod’s most identifiable foods: the clam.
Surf Clams (Spisula solidissima), or sea clams, are just one of the many types of clams familiar to consumers. At one end of the size spectrum available commercially (excluding the even smaller count necks), you’ve seen little necks sitting on a bed of ice in a raw bar. At the other end of the scale, sea clams can grow to nearly nine inches in diameter. These are the behemoths that make up the chopped clams found in the famous chowder people travel near and far to enjoy. They also are sliced into the strips ubiquitous on clam shack menus across Cape Cod and beyond.
This is the fifth straight day the Nemesis has been out working the waters off Cape Cod. Van Hoose and his two-man crew of Sam Jones and Mike Otowchits will be back at it in a few short hours after they hose down the deck, stow the crane, have a bite to eat, and grab some shuteye aboard the boat. “We eat a lot of ice cream,” Van Hoose chuckles. “We’ve been doing a lot of frappes lately.”
The Nemesis, along with her sister vessel F/V Midnight Our in Harwichport, are equipped with hydraulic dredges to pull the clams from their sandy beds. A hose several inches wide jets water with a force of 70 p.s.i. (pounds per square inch) into the seabed. The two thousand gallons of water per minute dislodges the clams and the dredge scoops them up. The boats can actively fish from a half-hour before sunrise to a half-hour after sunset to reach their quota of 200 bushels per day. Some of the clams harvested are destined for processing facilities off Cape, but much of what is caught is headed to Chatham and the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) certified processing facility owned and operated by Jesse Rose.
THE JOURNEY OF AN ICONIC BIVALVE
Rose has been fishing since childhood and purchased his first commercial boat 18 years ago. Around the same time, Jesse got a clamming license, although he hardly used it. He was fishing for other more lucrative species such as cod and scallops. When the pandemic hit, restrictions were eased for commercial boats to be able to sell their scallop catch directly from the dock. This proved to be a boon for boats…while the quotas lasted. Scallops are one of the most sustainable fisheries due to regulation. A rotation of available fishing grounds closes some areas to allow them to replenish their stocks while others are open for boats to work. Another way to control scallop population is a sliding scale of yearly quotas. When dockside sales began in 2020, the catch limit for each boat was 60,000 pounds per year. Now, the limit is less than half that, which forces boats to go after other species. For Rose, he began fishing for mussels in Chatham underneath Chatham Light. There was a carpet of them lying on the floor of Chatham Harbor. Red tide rolled in and closed the grounds, so he and his team turned to sea clams. “We were scalloping for a few years, but scalloping is down,” he explains. “We changed to clamming, and here we are. We still get scallops, but we’re in clam overdrive right now.” For clams, a steady supply is needed to make the business work. This is why both the Nemesis and Midnight Our are equipped for clams. “We’d still be scalloping if we could, but we made some right moves. There’s a lot of clams out there, and not a lot of people doing it,” Rose says of the change. Of the thirty-four clamming permits that are owned, only nine are active. Rose owns two of them – one for each boat. In an interesting regulatory twist, owners of the non-active permits need to actively clam for four years before being allowed to sell the permit.
Rose realized that it was important to create a way to process the catch on the Cape, so he has built his own processing facility in Chatham. This ensures the freshest product for his wholesale and retail clients and also provides good paying jobs for the local fishing community. Rose employs fifteen people full time, with another dozen in part-time/fill-in roles.
The Cape Cod fishing community is truly tight knit. It’s common for both crew members and captains alike to jump aboard other boats to help on trips if their boat is idle at the moment. For Rose’s facility, it’s almost like an open-door policy for anyone in the community to stop in and pick up some hours shucking to make a nice day’s pay. “I got one guy who likes to come in at 5am. He opens the place up, and shucks until nine or so in the morning, and that’s his day. Lobstermen, gillnetters, it doesn’t matter.” Rose says. On a recent visit, a team of shuckers provide a near metronome of “clacks” as discarded shells hit the ever-growing piles as the clams are shucked. “All commercial fishing is repetitive,” Jim Bergstrom says, flipping a clam from its shell. “It’s all piecework.” Sometimes, Rose will have up to six people shucking at once. Tragedy struck the Midnight Our Seafood family earlier this year when one of Rose’s part-time employees, Edward Footer, died when the truck he was driving was struck by another vehicle that had crossed the center median on a notorious stretch of Route 6 in Brewster. He was 57 years old. “Yeah, Eddie, he was one of my guys,” Jesse softly says. “He had his own boats. He dug clams, and he’d come in here and shuck. Good guy.”
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this operation is the turn-around time. Last night’s catch came in around 2am. By the end of the day, all the clams will be shucked, processed, cleaned, packaged and ready to ship. Large plastic bags carrying up to 1500 pounds of clams each are broken down into manageable blue totes for workers to move around. The shuckers go to work with hands that are a blur. “A lot of tired hands at the end of the day,” Rose points out. The clams are shucked into buckets which become coated with sand as the clams are dropped into submerged mesh totes inside. This is the first of five washes the clams will receive. The totes of clams are moved to a sorting/separating room where workers like Lucy Munhoz break down the clams into parts: The abductor muscle (or “eye”), the foot (or “tongue”), and the “snout”. Each is placed in separate submerged totes to further wash the sand from the clams. The remaining bellies are not wasted, as they’ll be ground up and frozen into blocks. They’re used as bait for catching sea bass and whelk. The snouts and eyes are ground up to make the chopped clams used in chowders, as a pizza topping, added to pasta, and many more dishes.
It’s interesting that there’s not more of a widespread market for the “eyes” or abductor muscle. Sampling one raw out of the shell, it has the look, texture and taste of a scallop, which is also an abductor muscle. “We have some people that want some, so we’ll package up a few pounds,” Rose says. “Clams are a great cheap, local, and abundant protein.” For the Midnight Our Seafood operation, volume is what drives the day because of that low-cost price point. It is far more economical to grind them up with the snouts to make thousands of pounds of chopped clams for their retail and wholesale customers. “Yeah, if we get a demand of a few thousand pounds,” Rose laughs at the idea of selling the eyes separately.
The tongues are run through a slicer, and these will be the clam strips found in rolls and fisherman’s platters on menus all over. “Unlike the big guys (large processing facilities) who slice up huge amounts at a time [causing smaller, misshaped strips], we hand feed individual clams through the slicer the long way,” Jesse says as he demonstrates the process. The clam drops through the slicer and nice, long strips fall out to the waiting collection bucket below a moment later. From there, the strips are fed through a funnel and into a water bath for one final rinse.
Jesse devised his own version of an Archimedes screw to remove the clam strips from the bath. Greek mathematician Archimedes invented a way to draw water from low-lying bodies of water to higher elevations around 234 BC. The concept is still widely used today, as the threads of an enclosed screw pulls the water up through a tube. In Rose’s adaptation, the tube is made of metal mesh so the water falls away, but the clams climb up out of the bath and onto the stainless-steel table above.
From here, all the clams, chopped and strips, are packed into bags and buckets to be sold fresh or freshly frozen – which doesn’t take long at all inside the freezer set at -14 degrees Fahrenheit. The products are sold to restaurants across the mid, lower, and outer Cape, such as The Pheasant in Dennis, Pate’s in Chatham, and PB Boulangerie and PJ’s Family Restaurant in Wellfleet. Fish markets include Mac’s Seafood locations, Hatch’s in Wellfleet, and Cape Tip Seafood Market in Truro. The Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance purchases the chopped clams to be used in the organization’s clam chowder (sales of which help feed hungry fishermen and keep them fishing). Also, through Massachusetts state grants, Midnight Our Seafood supplies non-profit organizations with their clams to be used in meals for others with food insecurities.
Almost nothing of the clam is wasted in Midnight Our Seafood’s operation. Every part of the meat is accounted for, and the empty, discarded shells are collected in a waiting trailer outside. These are destined to become the shell driveways familiar to Cape Codders. Jesse’s wife, Abby Our, will take them to her family’s facility (Robert B. Our Company) and have the shells crushed and aired out. Smaller 30-pound bags of the shells are available at Agway for gardens and walk paths.
The one part of the clam yet to be captured in this process is the juice, but they’re working on it. “Part of our expansion will be a pasteurization room. We’re going to collect the juice, and pasteurize it and sell it,” Rose explains. “For every bushel of clams, there’s a gallon of juice.” As with every step in the clam processing procedure, documentation and control of environment are vital. Pasteurization adds another layer to that. “It’s a lot of science, but today’s equipment can make things easier. We’re learning what we’ll need to do, and we’ll get there.”
For Rose and his team at Midnight Our Seafood, this operation was born out of the necessity to change. As witnessed in the fishing industry time and time again, adaptability is crucial for survival, and success. One doesn’t have to choose between doing well by your business and doing good for others. Providing an economical, abundant source of protein for all to enjoy, and a means for fishermen in the community to earn a living, extra income, or just fill in the gaps of an otherwise busy and successful career on the water, leaves all involved – from the products’ producers to end consumers – happy as a bunch of… oh, you get the picture.
Along with being co-publisher of Edible Cape Cod with his wife Cori, Larry Egan is a New England Associated Press award-winning writer and commentator and host of the talk show The Handyman Hotline on Saturdays from 1-3 pm on 95.1 WXTK-FM. When not enjoying freshly-shucked clams first thing in the morning (while researching this story), he can be found most afternoons on the trails of Cape Cod being worn out by his personal trainer: their Portuguese Water Dog, Archie.
Midnight Our Seafood | Cape Cod Sea Clams
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