black gunk inside clam (restaurants, diet, coffee, butter)
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As others said you will be fine.
An old trick I learned is before cooking the clams sprinkle them with breadcrumbs, Ritz or something similar. Cover with wet paper towels and place in the fridge for awhile. The clams will eat and then purge, leaving a much cleaner clam. Of course rinse off the clams before cooking.
You’re sweet.. a final meal for the clams before execution.
I think the proper way to prepare is to soak live clams in clean fresh water, that gets them filtering the clean dirtless water and they expel what's in their system, sea salt water and some silt/dirt. Maybe it wasn't soaked long enough or that clam just wasn't sucking in and expelling water for some reason. Maybe it's a sign it wasn't a healthy clam to begin with or a dead/dying one. That's how they eat, filtering water.
That will kill them. You need to put them on fast moving salt water.
In all likelihood the OPs clam just didn’t get all the food out of its stomach at the depuration plant.
Not quite euryhaline, but like oysters they can live in brackish water. A lot of folks also purge clams using coarse corn meal as well. I know a commercial clammer that gets them from the Indian River and Banana river here in Florida.
Euryhakine means they can tolerate a wide range of salinities. So yes, most clams are euryhaline.
Whole belly clams always have a soft black inside to them, don't they? Is this what the OP is referring to?
Looking back at my first post, I see I did not make it clear that there were clams in clamshells on top of the chowder. The black gunk was the entire contents of one shell, no clam to be see anywhere in that shell.
My "not quite" was to indicate they can't live in fresh water. Just like fresh water clam can't tolerate salt water.
Freshwater clams are not euryhaline at all. They are stenohaline.
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