The clam dog

aka corn clam, aka clam penis

Hello, clowns!

Okay, everyone: Got a quick favor to ask of you. If you don’t already know, my day job is as a staff writer at a site called The Takeout. It’s part of a network of sites under a larger company called G/O Media, which includes The Onion, The A.V. Club, Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Kotaku, The Root, and Quartz.

The Takeout is part of The Onion, Inc. Union, which is a member of the The Writers Guild of America East. Our contract with G/O Media is about up—it expires next week.

We recently learned that our private equity ownership is openly looking to sell off the sites, which would essentially gut the network for its parts, and we could use your help securing a fair contract before that possibly happens. We’re seeking things like fair pay and artificial intelligence protection (and you all know how I feel about AI already).

All we need is a signal boost. If you could do me a favor, click on the link below and fill out the form (don’t worry, it takes like 30 seconds), which’ll send a letter to G/O Media's portfolio management team at Great Hill Partners, and show that we have your support.

Thanks for considering it, and the crew at some of your favorite websites will be forever grateful for your help. Onto the show.

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Do you know what a geoduck is? If you don’t, I’m ecstatic to introduce you to them.

A geoduck (pronounced “gooey duck,” no, I’m not messing with you), is a giant clam that comes from the Pacific ocean. They have the best shape, because essentially, they’re shaped like enormous penises. These things have a big fat belly and a long droopy neck, and they’re hilarious to look at. Many people consider them a delicacy, especially in China, where they’re often eaten in hot pot.

You know that I, too, find culinary dicks a delicacy, so I’ve basically been thinking of ways to use one for the newsletter. I told Davida that I was thinking about cooking one, putting it in a bun, and dressing it with Chicago-style hot dog toppings.

She said, “You’ve already played out the Chicago hot dog thing a million times! How about a corn dog? Wait. Clam dog!” I hung my head in awe of her genius, which actually means I was mad I didn’t think of this first.

I mean, corn dogs are already penile-looking. This was merely the next evolution of the corn dog. I could not argue with this suggestion. I had to make a clam dog. With a penis clam. (Technically, I could also call this a “corn clam,” but “clam dog” just has a better ring to it.)

My first challenge was finding one of these things. The last time I’d seen geoducks on display was at our local Chinese supermarket, 88 Marketplace, which is where I got those pork buttholes from that one time.

So I took the trek to Chinatown on a busy weekend afternoon. After poking around the fresh seafood counter, I realized that none of the shellfish on display resembled a penis.

I needed help, but it occurred to me that none of the elderly gentlemen behind the fish counter were native English speakers, so getting them to understand what I needed would be a challenge. I scratched my head for a second and came up with a bright idea.

I whipped out my phone, quickly searched for the most phallic photo of a geoduck that I could find, and awkwardly thrust it in front of an employee’s face, pointing at the screen.

The employee looked at the photo for a second, then at me.

“No!” he said, shaking his head.

Shit. I drove to another Chinese grocery store and pulled the same phone maneuver with another gray-haired Chinese employee at the seafood counter, but his response was a little different.

He looked at the photo, looked at me, and started laughing.

“No,” he said, chuckling.

I decided to give one last market a shot, and if I couldn’t find a penis clam, I’d have to shelve the idea. I strolled through the automatic doors of my last-ditch-effort grocery store and made a beeline for the seafood counter. And there they were, a dozen geoduck clams on ice, front and center. A not-gray-haired employee saw me admiring them, came around to greet me, and said, “Which one do you want?”

I nervously pointed at one of them. He confidently grabbed a completely different clam and bagged it up for me. When I checked out, the cashier said, “Your total comes to 42 dollars.”

That’s some expensive sea dong.

Before I continue, I’m going to warn you today that some of the photos in this edition of the newsletter are pretty gnarly. Whole seafood prep can get pretty messy, so I completely understand if some of you have to bail on this one. (I love you no matter what.)

There are a lot of firsts in today’s edition of the newsletter.

One, of course, there’s the whole geoduck thing, and two, I’d never made a corn dog from scratch before. It seemed pretty simple, all I had to do was mix a batter, skewer the clam’s shaft, dip it, and fry it up. How hard could it be?

The part I dreaded most was cleaning this thing.

I mean, even just touching the geoduck’s shell was stressing me out; I wasn’t sure how the fuck I was going to manage this next part. I watched an instructional video on how to disassemble a geoduck, and the chef in the video explains that you need to first slice the adductor muscles on either side of the clam that keep the shell tightly shut.

He suggested using a butter knife, which was fine by me; I figured I wouldn’t bleed too much if the thing slipped.

I managed to remove the shell without wounding myself, but I sure mangled the shit out of the clam, which now looked like a biology class dissection gone horribly awry.

At least I didn’t poke open the belly portion containing all the grit and algae, which would have been a gory disaster. I gently pulled on the kidney-bean shaped gut, and everything came out in one fell swoop. Apparently I should have been a penis surgeon.

Then there was the matter of the skin, however, which is something that can’t be eaten.

That’s why you’re supposed to dip the clam’s dismembered body in boiling water for a mere 10 seconds, then plunge it immediately into an ice bath.

This is supposed to loosen the skin.

I gave the clam’s neck skin a tug, and sure enough, it came off in one piece. I can hear some of you giggling. The chef whose video I watched says it’s like pulling off a sock, but I don’t think I’d use that comparison. (Condom. It looks like a condom.)

The next step is splitting the neck open to rinse out the sand and algae, and when you do that, the geoduck ends up looking like a whole different organ.

Isn’t nature amazing?

In most cases, after rinsing the hell out of the geoduck, you’re done with the main prep, if you’re a normal human being.

Then it’s all about slicing the neck meat into thin pieces, dressing them simply, and eating them raw, which I tried. After my first bite of geoduck, I totally understood why people go through so much trouble with these things, because frankly, they’re delicious.

The meat is very sweet, and it’s clean-tasting, mildly cucumber-ish, but still has an oceanic flavor to it. It also has a slight crunchy snap. I also took a slice of belly meat and ate that raw too. That has a much softer texture, but a more intense shellfish aftertaste.

I took a skewer and drove it through the dismembered neck to get it ready for the cornmeal batter.

If this was a part of a voodoo doll, there’d be some dude out there painfully grabbing his crotch.

Dipping the clam into the cornmeal batter I whipped up proved to be a bit of a challenge, because it the end result was so heavy it nearly snapped the stick, but I managed to pull it off.

Davida walked by, looking at the egregious mess I’d made while prepping the clam dog, and said, “This is just the most disgusting mise en place. Just various shades of…blegh.”

My least favorite version of cooking, deep frying, wasn’t much fun.

The massive geoduck, being from the sea and all, wasn’t exactly the most ideal food to fry, because all the moisture from it kept causing the oil to bubble and sputter. This caused a huge mess on the stove, and also burned me with little specks of oil.

Eventually I fished the thing out, and as you can see, I did a stellar fry job.

The clam dog was riddled with holes, the tip of the clam was poking out, and parts of the batter were really thick while small portions of it had burned a little.

I dressed the thing up with a healthy dose of ketchup and mustard, as one does with a big piece of penis clam, and bit into it enthusiastically.

I can’t say my jaws were quite prepared for how chewy the fried geoduck ended up being.

First off, I burned the shit out of my mouth as the hot clam juice burst into my mouth (heh). Then, rather than chomp straight through the meat, I had to tear at it sideways like an animal, and even my best efforts weren’t gaining much traction. The geoduck had turned into impenetrable rubber, which I sort of had a feeling would happen. And just like its skin after I blanched it, the breading of the clam dog peeled right off, but this time, not quite like a condom.

I now understood why many people opt to eat geoducks raw and in thin slices, and not the way I did, which made it impossible to enjoy. But the corn dog batter tasted good, at least, and I can now say I know what searingly hot clam juice tastes like.

But here’s the thing: When it comes to the belly meat, apparently a preferred method is also to fry it. And since I’d spent $42 on the geoduck, and the frying pan was still set up, I wasn’t about to waste the rest of the dick clam. After all, as the greatest food writer in all of history, I had to respect its sacrifice.

I grabbed some shredded cheese and some pickled jalapeños from the fridge and got back to work.

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Okay, clowns, that was a pretty labor-intensive version of Food is Stupid, so if you could do me another teeny-tiny favor and share it via social media, or by forward it to enemies of yours—including sharing it in work Slack, it’d do wonders for the newsletter:

And of course, if you can imagine, I’m feeling a little nervous about my job security. I’m not going to clobber you with the obvious, but don’t forget to upgrade your subscription to the full version:

If even half of you upgraded your subscriptions now, I’d have a fighting chance to make this my weird full-time gig. And next week’s continuation of the penis clam story is for paid subscribers only.

Thank you all for filling out that form letter earlier, by the way, and keep an eye out for me and my coworkers on the news if things keep continuing the way they are. You might just see that organized labor is worth the fight—especially when it comes to journalism these days.

As always, I love you all, and I’ll hop into paid subscriber inboxes next week.