Clam festivals celebrate the bivalve and seafood cuisine with various cooking styles, including clam chowder cookouts and deep-fried seafood. They offer an opportunity to try local restaurants’ best dishes and learn new recipes.
Festivals are organized by many municipalities, often to bring people together in the community and encourage tourism. Most festivals have themes based on regional crops or specialties. Anywhere there is a shoreline or nearby body of water that produces clams, a clam festival is likely to occur. Clam festivals are a celebration of this tasty bivalve and seafood cuisine.
Clam festivals are renowned for the variety of presented ways to cook with clams. Each clam festival will have a clam chowder cookout where local and visiting restaurants and chefs cook up huge vats of their special clam chowder recipes. Visitors have the opportunity to try many styles of chowder, from the tomato-based New York style to the creamy New England version. Typically a panel of judges will taste all the submissions and award prizes to the winning recipes.
Clams are usually offered to eat raw from the shell. This is considered a delicacy by many people. They are usually eaten with lemon juice and hot sauce. Vendors will often be busy opening the clams as lines of fans wait for their clams on the half shell.
Deep-fried clams, calamari, and other deep-fried seafood are the standard seafood festival offerings. The air at every clam festival is filled with the smell and sounds of seafood turning golden in deep vats of boiling oil. Plates are filled with calamari, an Italian dish of fried calamari, which is served with tomato sauce to dip these battered fried rings.
Other booths offer seafood dishes of spaghetti with clams or seafood sauce and have huge tubs of tomato sauce loaded with clams, shrimp, and lobster. Although clams take pride of place at any clam festival, almost any type of fish or shellfish is available in some type of dish. Mixed seafood platters can be a great way for festival-goers to try new tastes.
One of the real benefits of a festival like this is that it gives the community an opportunity to experience the best that local restaurants and chefs have to offer. There are often coupons and other incentives offered to ensure those favorite dishes are tried again and again. People who love to cook often come up with award-winning recipes to try at home, because many chefs take pride in their creations and are willing to share their knowledge. These festivals can be culinary adventures.
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