Meet the World’s Largest Burrowing Clam

This story originally appeared in our sister publication, Northwest Travel & Life.

Virtually anyone who grew up around the intertidal areas of Puget Sound is familiar with the geoduck (pronounced “gooey-duck”). But ask someone from Midwest if they know what a geoduck is and you’ll likely get a blank stare in return.

I saw the geoduck in fish markets all my life, but I had never tackled one in the kitchen. Until I met Xinh Dwelley, that is.

I met Xinh, years ago, at her restaurant in Shelton. I was there to interview her for a culinary travel story. She welcomed me with that generous smile of hers and invited me into the kitchen. She wasted no time retrieving an enormous live geoduck from the cooler, removing its rubber band and blanching it for a few seconds in a pot of simmering water to loosen the siphon skin. The task was obviously second nature as we chatted about her journey from Vietnam to the United States when she was 19 and what brought her to this corner of the Northwest. She wove cooking instructions into the stories of her emigration and her first years in the U.S., her accolades as a competitive oyster shucking champ and her work developing seafood recipes at Taylor Shellfish. I learned that, once peeled, the geoduck’s tender siphon (or neck) meat would be thinly sliced for sashimi, and that the meat from the inner body would become a hearty chowder.

Throughout Xinh’s career as a chef, cookbook author and community supporter, she amassed a loyal fan base, I among them. I would drive for hours just to dine at her Shelton restaurant.

Sadly, Xinh has since passed away, but her legacy survives, as does her philosophy allowing seafood ingredients to speak for themselves. Xinh’s recipes live on at The Fjord Oyster Bank, an oyster bar and seafood restaurant in Hoodsport, Washington, a town on the shore of Hood Canal. The Fjord feels like a well-kept secret you’re lucky to be let in on. Her dishes lean into freshness with ingredients that never upstage the seafood, which is always the star of the show.

Whenever I see geoduck on a menu (which is a rarity at most seafood restaurants, even in the Puget Sound area where they are native), I can’t resist ordering it. At The Fjord Oyster Bank, geoduck aficionados are in heaven with a foursome of Xinh’s original recipes on the menu: geoduck wontons with sweet chili and bang bang aioli, fried geoduck belly with house-made horseradish tartar sauce, geoduck ceviche with corn chips and geoduck chowder.

Recalling my first meeting with Xinh, she downplayed her skill in the kitchen and her own backstory to shine the spotlight on the local seafood she used in her recipes, which says more about her than the food. I learned much in Xinh’s kitchen that day, enough to prepare a geoduck in my own kitchen and make my own recipe for geoduck chowder. I find the meat to have a subtle sweet, fresh flavor, as if someone bred a clam with a cucumber.

Geoduck farms can be seen around Puget sound at low tide, visible by their distinctive PVC pipes stuck in shallow intertidal areas, each geoduck’s individual home. The cultivated clams reach maturity for market in four to seven years. In the wild, they can live for more than a century—179 years is the record. Similar to determining the age of a tree by counting tree rings, growth rings in the geoduck’s shell hinge area indicate the age.

Taylor Shellfish is an industry leader in geoduck production. The Asian market buys about 95 percent of Washington’s geoduck harvest, with five percent remaining behind for domestic consumption. Even though it is native to Washington’s inland fjords and waterways, the clam is considered a delicacy even on its home turf.