Clams are a common and popular seafood ingredient, making them a popular choice for soups, steaming, and stir-frying to create a variety of delicious dishes. Just one extra step before cooking can enhance the flavor of clams!

Tips for a Richer and Sweeter Clam Recipe

Before cooking clams, allow the clams to remove the sand before they’ve been spitted out. A secret trick for enhancing the sweetness of clams is to add honey, which is rich in glucose, to the salt water used to remove the sand.

“Soaking clams in salt water is to remove the sand, and adding a drop of honey to the salt water will enhance the flavor!”

To prepare clams for spitting out the sand, in addition to preparing a salt water concentration of approximately 3% similar to seawater (for example, add 15g of salt to 500ml of water), add 100mg of glucose per 1L of water to the salt water. This will nearly triple the succinic acid content of the clams.

Succinic acid is a component found in shellfish like clams, and it’s responsible for their sweet, umami flavor. The higher the succinic acid content, the richer and sweeter the clam’s flavor will be!