St Jude Farms
We brought Chef Charles Matthews out to St Jude Farms for the day where he met with Micheal Kalista, Operations Manager, to go out to the oyster farm, get a little hands on experience harvesting oysters, a ride on a boat and a little talk about sustainability.
We asked Michael Kalista and Chef Matthews a few questions about what they do, theirs views on sustainability and sourcing locally.
Michael Kalista What types of seafood do you offer? What is raised and harvested at St Jude Farms and what is brought in from your fisherman outside of South Carolina?
Primarily we offer shellfish like muscles, clams, oysters and other types of shellfish like shrimp, crab and squid. We offer Fin Fish as well, mostly snappers and groupers, some corgis and other more obscure fish like types of perch - rose fish, scorpion fish or lion fish.
In the Ace Basin we harvest clams, muscles, oysters and shrimp. The majority of our fin fish comes from out of state North Carolina and Florida. South Carolina’s fin fishery is not as strong as North Carolina and Florida so we pretty much get the majority from our neighbors with a little smattering of South Carolina fish as they become available.
When it comes to getting fin fish locally we get groupers, black sea bass, mahi-mahi, swordfish and some local tuna as well. The majority of the snappers are coming from Florida and North Carolina, same with some of the other groupers like big black grouper most of that stuff is being sourced from Florida the Gulf Coast or the South Atlantic side of Florida.
Michael Kalista, what do you do at St Jude Farms? I am the operations manager here at St Jude Farms and in charge of the oyster farm, sourcing all of our products and the almost twenty people that work here at the dock. That includes drivers, operations staff - pickers that go and harvest our products locally, people that cut the fish, people that wash, sort, count and bag our shellfish.
I wear a lot of different hats here from coordinating with the sales people and helping get our sales orders out everyday, making sure they have accurate information and they know what we have on hand and what we can sell. A lot of the times what we expect to have we don’t always have. Sometimes we find out that we didn’t have as high as a yield on the grouper so we only have a little bit less than what we expected and we have to communicate to our customers. I act as the liaison between operations and sales and then also manage all the activity here and out on the water.
Charles Matthews What is your background as a chef? I’m the former Executive Chef at Scarecrow in Charleston, South Carolina. I’m from Indianapolis, Indiana and moved to Denver, Colorado where I’ve been cooking as a Chef at a few different restaurants for 15 years, after that I decided that I would take some time to travel. Went to San Francisco for a bit, then New York, then found myself down here in South Carolina.
Why is sustainability important to you? It’s important to everybody. If we’re not sustainable with our actions then we’re not going to have anything tomorrow. Taking care of the things that we’re working with within the industry within the farms, within the field, if we don’t take care of them now they won’t be there tomorrow.
Do you source your ingredients locally? Essentially it’s about quality. If we want to provide the best for our guests at the restaurants or provide the type of quality to ensure their return, I’m constantly looking for what the best that the market has to offer. And when you get the best you don’t really have to do much to it because the ingredient is already giving you the best it has at the height of it’s availability. So whether thats a plant that was just taken from the soil hours before it comes to the chefs kitchen or an oyster that has been cultivated hours before it gets to the raw bar… it’s important that the ingredient gives itself it’s best and offers up itself the best way it can so that the guest can experience the best experience possible.
Why St Jude Farms? The reason I keep going back to St Jude Farms is that I’ve found there’s a pocket of people here since my small time here in Charleston that I can rely on and who give me the best products. And St. Jude Farms is one of those.
St Jude Oyster Farm Our oyster farm is about a 20 - 25 minute boat ride from the dock here. We’re permitted for 750 cages, those cages are loaded with baby oysters from 5 millimeters all the way up to 3 inches. We’ve got a continual influx of oyster seed coming in and then oysters growing out in the Ace Basin.
Michael Kalista
Why is an oyster so expensive? If people only knew the work that we put into these oysters. We spend at least 6 hours a day out on the farm going through the cages, making sure the oysters are good and happy. Splitting them up to prevent biofouling, re-submerging them so they can feed and grow. Then bringing them in to reduce the densities. As they grow the oyster gets bigger, you don't want too many oysters in one bag at a time - the key is the more flow the more they grow, so you want to have a nice low density of oysters in the bag. Which means you have to monitor them as they grow, repeatedly bring them out, sort them, grade them, put the bigger ones together, put the smaller ones together, re-submerge them. Keeping that process going.
What are Charleston Salt Oysters? A Charleston Salts Oyster is a cultured oyster that grows in a floating cage out on top of the water column here in the Ace Basin which has some of the most pristine waterways in the whole country. Our water is very salty so there is a lot of flavor with our oyster - thats why we call it the Charleston Salt. You taste that oyster and you know what your getting at immediately… its like a punch in the face.
Thats something that we have here in the Ace Basin is that we have a very unique flavor profile, there is a lot of brininess, a lot of flavor right up front and it’s really pretty product too. I just love the unique visual you get with that long blade shape our cultured oysters are some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.
The Growing Process Our growing process starts them out as a 5 millimeter seed and over the course of 9 to 12 months they will grow from about 5 millimeters to 5 inches. Once the oysters reach 5 inches they are ready for us to sell.
The oysters are spawned locally in Beaufort, SC. To breed an oyster they put two oysters that are ready to breed together into a tank. Those two oysters then create millions of larvae. Crushed oyster shells are then added to the larvae that then connect to the crushed shell. As the oyster larvae start to grow they also start to grow their own shell. Once they are about 5 millimeters they come to us at St Jude Farms. we load them into submersible bags and put them out in the water. Then we just give them time to grow and make sure they are in a clean and healthy environment. It’s a long process but between 9 to 12 months the oysters are ready to harvest. What you end up with is a nice deep cut oyster.
Why have oysters historically only been unavailable during the months with the letter “r”? Since the Charleston Salts are a Cultured Oyster we’re able to manage the life cycle a lot differently than we would a wild oyster. One of the reasons you couldn’t sell oysters in the summertime until recently is because there hasn’t been much of an oyster farming industry here. We’re among the first to be doing it here in South Carolina, we aren’t the first but we’re among the first to bring a local cultured oyster to the South Carolina Market. The reason we can sell them in the summertime, since they’re cultured and they’re growing in these cages it’s so much easier to manage the process and manage the temperature controls.
The big concern in the summertime is Vibreio that is naturally occurring in all sorts of seafood and that includes oysters, it can be really harmful. Thats why DHEC wouldn’t let you sell it in the summertime. Now that we’re culturing oysters here in South Carolina we can control the environment and get a better temperature control on the oyster.
When it comes to wild harvest a guy goes out in his boat and he starts throwing oysters into his basket which takes a lot of time. The harvest time is the moment that first cluster of oysters goes into your basket. For a picker to go out there and harvest enough oysters for it to make enough money, that person is going to spend six to seven hours out there collecting oysters. That’s six to seven hours that those oysters are above the water cooking in the heat. Vibreio expands in the heat. It takes a lot of time for the wild harvest oysters to get them back to shore and get them in a temperature control environment. Since we have these floating cages we’re able to boat right up open up a cage, pull out the bags, throw them in an insulated vat with ice so that we’re temperature controlling from the moment we harvest and we’re able to get back to our dock within 25 minutes.
Michael Kalsita on Sustainability
I want to talk about sustainability I have to echo (Chef Charles Matthews) that I think we’re on the brink of crisis mode with our oceans and if we do not do something now to change that then then we’re just not going to have anything in 10, 15, 20 years or the landscape of the seafood products offered are going to be completely different. Your not going to see those beautiful Snappers and Groupers anymore, you’re mostly going to get shrimp and skate and other types of sea products that are a little lower on the food chain. We’re really at risk of over fishingyou have to do this responsibly. The commercial fishing business is at a cross roads because for so long it’s been accelerating in a bad direction so quickly.We’re all a apart of this we need to make sure commercial fisherman realize that there is an alternative to just going out there with a gil net and sucking up everything you can find. There are responsible ways to do things and there are responsible ways to make money and provide for your family that does not involve over fishing. You can target healthy fish stocks.
Today’s chefs I feel are using those under utilized fish like Black Sea Bass or Porgy because for one it’s cost effective but also because it’s a healthy fishery and you can feel good about it at the end of the day. I think it’s important what we’re doing here, we’re taking things in a new direction. I see commercial fisherman can go out there and maybe he can become an oyster farmer and do something sustainable, that will still be able to put food on the table for his family. At the end of the day he can feel good about himself because s/he will improving the water quality helping the health of our oceans. For those of us at St Jude Farms sustainability is number one for us here.
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St Jude Farms