The Scallop Queen is Coming to the City
Dayboat Blue, a new Community Supported Fishery, brings Maine's Dayboat scallops down the coast.
Togue Brown may be the daughter of a Maine lobsterman, but she wants you to fall in love with scallops. She likes lobster, sure, but once she became a fisheries management expert at the Maine Department of Marine Resources things changed. She was given a choice — focus on lobster or scallops. Whether dad liked it or not, she decided on scallops. “Lobster is so dominant in seafood,” she said. “I chose scallops to help fisherman diversify, to become less dependent on lobster because at some point that bough is gonna break.”
Togue went about implementing a series of measures designed to restore Maine’s heavily depleted inshore scallop fishery. She cut the season in half, and brought down the catch limit from its previous 200 pounds a day, and established closed areas interspersed across the coastline to allow the scallops to regenerate. By the time she was done with her work, the inshore scallop fishery was healthy and bountiful, completely restored after decades of passive management.
Folks noticed the impact she’d made and started calling her The Scallop Queen. The title was nice and all but Togue wanted more than a crown. She wanted to share what she’d learned along the way.
In Downeast Maine, she explained, groups of small dayboat fishermen would cast off at dawn to fish Maine’s pristine waters, and head in at sunset with scallops, catching them inshore – within three miles of the coast where the state fishermen rule the ocean. Their day boat scallops were the best she had ever tasted. She found out why.
Most scallops from Maine’s waters are brought in from larger boats trolling federal waters, which start at three miles from shore and extend out to the ocean. In these big boats, the scallops sit on ice while they wait to come to shore, spending up to two weeks playing sponge — soaking up all that melting ice water, diluting their flavor and raising their price because their weight swells. (Here’s a neat animated video she made that explains the difference.)
What Togue found was that Maine scallops brought in from federal waters tasted nothing like the local Dayboat scallops she had gotten to know and love. The Dayboats pulled from Maine’s pristine nearshore waters had terrior – or as they call it when the terroir is the sea—merroir—similar to they way oysters taste differently when they are raised in different waters.
But how to teach folks about dayboats and how to get the Dayboat scallops their own market when they were tossed into the same buckets as the water-logged ones for distribution under the name Maine Scallops.
In 2011, she set up her own direct to consumer market Downeast Dayboat, to connect Dayboat Scallop fisherman directly with the scallop-loving public. She sold to chefs and local residents in Downeast Maine. Folks raved – her scallops, they found, tasted completely different from the “Maine Scallops” they’d tried before. The Dayboats were full of character, steeped in the cold brackish waters of the Maine coastline, they were briny, salty, buttery and bright.
Now’s she taking things one step further. In January, she introduced Dayboat Blue, a new Community Supported Fishery (CSF) model – think CSA but for fish! How cool. Her CSF prioritizes sustainability; championing dayboat fisheries, so you’re signing for seafood bundles from local Downeast Maine dayboat fishermen.
The popularity of the Community Supported Fishery has grown recently; depending on where you are in the country you can sign up for sustainably caught fish brought in by small boat fisherman at Fishadelphia in Philadelphia, at Seaforager, in San Francisco, Walking Fish in North Carolina, Cape Ann Fresh Catch in Massachusetts, Port Orford in Oregon, and Drifters Seafood focused on Alaskan catch.
Thanks to Togue’s new CSF Dayboat Blue, New Yorkers can now tap into a network of local small dayboat fishermen from Downeast Maine. These fishermen, listed by name on every package of scallops (mine were fished by a fellow named Alex), bring in scallops like you’ve never tasted – creamier, richer, purer, and with a more complex flavor that’s missing when brought in by the large vessels that catch the majority of Maine’s seafood. It’s wild to slice into a raw scallop that tastes as though its been sauteed in really good salted French butter, but is actually completely unadorned.
How your CSF works
For now, becoming a member of Dayboat Blue is easy and relatively affordable for as little as $100 a year. But it's not really a membership fee. The idea is that you pay for your "share" of seafood in advance, and those funds are then used to purchase seafood over the coming year. Choose from wild and sustainably caught Dayboat scallops, lobster meat, tuna, swordfish, halibut, pollock, American unagi and much more.
There are neighborhood pickups through local community partners in New York City, Boston and the Hudson Valley, with additional locations expected in the coming months. I pick mine up in Prospect Heights at Precycle, but there are Manhattan pick up locations as well. Check the listings here. I hope you’ll love it!
Jim here. You inspired me to join Dayboat Blue.