Glenn Vogt, RiverMarket Bar & Kitchen / Photos by Simon Feldman
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
- 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.
- Add chorizo and butter to the bowl of a food processor, and purée into a fine paste.
- Arrange shucked oysters on a plate. Put ½ teaspoon chorizo butter on each shucked oyster. (Leftover butter will keep, covered and refrigerated.)
- 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.