Super Baby Nursery Dibba

[Clide Birkner]

TiffanyEslick

[00:00 - 00:09] I think that you should shuck an oyster for us, please, and tell us how to do it. I mean, I know that in Spinneys, you can just ask the fishmonger to shuck them for you, but it's always good to know what's going on.

Devina Divecha

[00:39 - 00:54] And I'm Devina Divecha. This is a space where we hope to nourish your heart and soul. On this show, we chat with leading players in the food community, from farmers to foodies, as well as health and well-being experts. It's all about engaging conversations and fresh ideas.

Devina Divecha

[01:12 - 01:24] But that doesn't actually deter us, does it, from grabbing all the gear and heading outside? And that's what we did for this episode. We went to the Umm Suqeim Fishing Harbor to visit a UAE classic, Dibba Bay oysters.

Devina Divecha

[01:34 - 01:54] Yeah. I mean, I am not entirely sure that I like oysters that much. I have to be convinced or brought around to your side. But we are speaking today with the founder of Dibba Bay, Remy Murray. And there's a lot of little nuggets about the right way to store, shuck, and eat oysters.

Tiffany Eslick

[02:02 - 02:20] Yeah. You made a very swift exit. This episode is also about records. You'll hear about the guy who holds the Guinness World Record for oyster shucking. The number is 39. And we'll also set a new record for the number of times you'll hear the word shucking on a podcast episode.

Tiffany Eslick

[02:26 - 02:47] Yeah. So I actually visited with the commercial team from Spinneys. A few weeks ago, and I saw this huge mound of oyster shells. And I, you know, I was asking Remy, what is this for? And then he explained, you can't actually see the reef project other than to see the mound of oyster shells, but the rest of it's under the water. But it's amazing what he's doing. Yeah, no, it sounded impressive as well when he was talking about it.

Devina Divecha

[02:47 - 03:03] But of course, this isn't Remy's first venture. He's someone who has grown up in the UAE and has run a few businesses as well before starting Dipa Bay. There was a design agency, a solar energy company as well. Until about 10 years ago, when he decided he was going to explore food production.

Ramie Murray

[03:03 - 03:42] It's quite simply from an entrepreneurial point of view of we're in this vastly prosperous and expanding country and we're importing, I don't know what the latest figures are, but it's something like 80% of all the food we're consuming. So I thought that would be something good to get in on. And I've always had an affinity with the sea. And then I find a wonderful stat about the percentage. The percentage of seafood that the UAE people eat per person, and it's one of the highest in the world. Right. And we're surrounded by the ocean on both sides of the country, yet still importing

[03:42 - 04:19] 80% of all the seafood we were eating. So I felt if I was going to go into food production, aquaculture would be the best way to go. It was quite, well, totally undeveloped at the time. I think there was one fish farm in existence, otherwise nothing. So un-developed. Unexploited as an industry. The government was talking about supporting food security, et cetera. So it seemed like the time was right. And I came at it, I mean, I'm not a qualified marine biologist. I didn't study aquaculture. So I was coming at it purely from an entrepreneurial business point of view.

[04:20 - 04:58] And I decided that if I was going to farm something, I wanted to do it as environmentally positively as possible. I wanted to do it. I wanted to do some sort of sustainable farming. And so because I was coming at it just fresh, I could pick what I wanted to do, what I thought was going to work. And so I landed very quickly on shellfish farming because it's one of the few forms of farming in the world, which is actually environmentally net positive. And it's not just oysters, like mussels, scallops, everything. As they grow, they're sequesting carbon in their shell and you don't feed them an artificial feed.

[04:59 - 05:38] They're naturally in the ocean on the phytoplankton levels. Plus they're super healthy and they're a gourmet food. So they're a high value food that could be branded and could be enjoyed in all the amazing new restaurants that were popping up in Dubai. So I landed on shellfish. I did my research and found that according to the literature, Chrysostryus gigas, which is Pacific cuptoys. It's a plant that's grown in Japan, which account for 90% of the world's farmed oysters. There's lots of different species, but this particular one, this is native to Japan and

[05:38 - 06:13] the coast of China, but has been introduced all over the world. And so it actually accounts for the vast majority of oysters coming out of Europe. So all of these different brands of French oysters, it's the same species, just with a different brand. Now, I'm not saying they're all the same. That's the wonderful thing about oysters is that they're very localized. And it's the same as in the wine industry. When you talk about the terroir of a wine, you can take the same vine from Burgundy planted in South America that will produce a Chardonnay grape, but the wine will taste different or

[06:13 - 06:52] the grape will taste different because of the nutrients and food that the vine is taking out of the soil. Oysters are the same. They're entirely a product of their area because they are filtering the water. And they're taking all the minerals to build their shell, and they're feeding on all the phytoplankton to build their bodies. And so they become very much a product of the environment. So our oysters are pretty distinct. They've got a lovely white shell. That's due to the mineral levels in the water from the Hadjar Mountains, those lovely limestone cliffs. And the taste is quite unique as well.

[06:52 - 07:07] But that's the same across most oysters. They can come from even the same bay and taste and look slightly different. They can be completely different from one side to the other because there's maybe a river coming in and there's different salinity levels. So there's different food growing, different wave actions, etc. Wow.

Ramie Murray

[07:11 - 07:23] The merroir. Is that your term or is that like an actual term? I cannot take credit for that. Oh, I thought that was your term. No, no, no. I didn't invent it. It's not a fully mainstream term, so I'm trying to make it mainstream. So I'll take credit for that. Yeah, yeah.

Devina Divecha

[07:25 - 07:41] And how did you pick the location though? Because you know, you're talking about... Well, merroir. But yeah, location clearly matters. So why does... Yeah. So talking about the environmental tolerance of this species, what I could see was that

Other speaker

[07:41 - 07:53] according to the literature, this species fell within the environmental tolerances of the east coast of the UAE. Arabian Gulf is different because it's shallower, so it gets a lot hotter. It gets way more saline.

Ramie Murray

[07:53 - 08:13] Whereas across in Fujairah, that's the tip of the Indian Ocean. And so it's got really, really deep water. And so you get upwellings of nutrients and cooler water. And so it's a different environment. And so these fall within, of course, the upper range, but they fall within the environmental tolerances of the environment in Fujairah.

Ramie Murray

[08:25 - 09:02] And there is a difference in temperature. There's a difference in taste between winter and the summer oysters. And this is entirely down to the fat content. So during the winter, there's much higher levels of phytoplankton in the ocean. And so they're busily building up their stores, their glycogen stores. And the fat or glycogen stores is what gives the sweetness, the sweet taste to an oyster. And so when you are tasting an oyster or tasting anything, the human palate, we can only taste a few things. It's salt, sweet, umami, and acidity. Everything we taste is a combination of this.

[09:02 - 09:39] And so oysters have this natural brininess from the ocean. And then, especially in the winter, they'll have a high sweetness from the fat levels. Our oysters particularly have a high umami because we've got these big muscles inside them. So it's almost like a scallop, the adductor muscle. Because we grow them offshore, they're underwater all the time and they're getting buffeted a round by the currents and the waves. And so they're opening and closing and opening and closing and they develop this big muscle. So there's a couple of grams of protein in each individual oyster. So this contributes to the umami levels.

[09:39 - 10:16] And then the only thing you're missing is acidity, which of course leads to the traditional squeeze of lemon or vinaigrette. So what we're looking for, what I look for, where I enjoy an oyster the most is when you get that balance. Because it absolutely is transformative of the whole taste and experience when you get a lovely balance between the acidity, the salt, the sweet, the umami. And so in the winter, because you've got that higher sweet level with the fat, we have a much more acidic vinaigrette, which we use.

[10:16 - 10:52] And then in the summer, we have less sweetness in the oysters because there's actually less phytoplankton over the summer period. So the oysters are then burning their fat reserves over the summer. Which brings down the sweet level. So we like to balance that with our summer sauce, where we use a pomegranate molasses in the sauce. I love the fact that we're using pomegranate because of course that's in season over the summer in this part of the world. So we're using this lovely in-season fruit and we're using the molasses of it. And it's just, look, it's marginal, like it's just this slight sweetness, still with the vinaigrette. But again, it helps just with that balance.

Ramie Murray

[10:56 - 11:35] I like them both. Eat oysters every day. What I do find is in the winter, they can get really full, which a lot of people prize and really like that. However, it does start to unbalance it quite a lot and they'll be quite sweet and quite full on. Whereas in the summer, they're not as meaty. They're not as juicy. They're not as fat. But you can actually start tasting lots of other things going on and they're feeding on what algae they are feeding on in the summer. It's a different species that they're feeding on.

[11:35 - 11:40] You get little grassy notes in the summer and you start picking that up and that's kind of hidden in the winter.

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