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Warm Cotuit Oysters with Chorizo Butter & Gouda Gratin

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Serves 1 or 2

Ingredients

  • 1 2-ounce chorizo sausage
  • 1/2 pound butter (2 sticks), softened at room temperature
  • 6 fresh, chilled Cotuit oysters
  • 3 ounces Byebrook Farm aged Gouda, thinly sliced

Method

  1. In a heavy-bottomed pan over medium-low heat, slowly cook the chorizo. Be careful not to brown the sausage. Let cool, then remove the casing.
  2. Add chorizo and butter to the bowl of a food processor, and purée into a fine paste. 
  3. Arrange shucked oysters on a plate. Put ½ teaspoon chorizo butter on each shucked oyster. (Leftover butter will keep, covered and refrigerated.) 
  4. Top the butter with a small slice of cheese, then brown the oysters under a broiler. (The cheese will brown quickly.)

The way RiverMarket owner Glenn Vogt tells it, the idea of topping oysters with sorbet wasn’t much of a stretch. “We wanted to bring fall in the Hudson Valley to these oysters,” he explains. “Fall” takes the form of sorbet: a mulled, reduced, cider version using juice from Thompson’s Cider Mill in Croton-on-Hudson, not far from Vogt’s Tarrytown restaurant. The oysters are sweet but briny Cotuits, harvested around Cape Cod. “The supplier comes here straight from the dock, stopping at only a couple of other restaurants on the way,” Vogt says. A warm preparation, featuring aged Gouda from Byebrook Farm in the Catskills, also is a hit.

Hudson Valley Restaurant Week is back this October 28 to November 10!