How To Make Clam Chowder

New England clam chowder done properly is not the thick white paste that comes out of a can. It is a broth chowder that happens to have cream in it: loose enough to move in the bowl, briny, faintly smoky from the pork, with potatoes soft enough to break under a spoon and clams that still have some bite.

Difficulty is easy. There is no stock to build and nothing to puree. About an hour, most of it hands off.

The one thing that separates a good chowder from a disappointing one is not the cream and not the potatoes. It is sand. Clams live in it and they hold it, and a single gritty spoonful ruins the whole pot. Everything in the method below about purging and straining exists for that reason, and none of it is optional.

This makes four servings.

Equipment

Two pieces do the work here, and I stock both.

• 5 Quarts Round Dutch Oven with Lid. You steam the clams in it, then build the chowder in the same pot. The lid matters as much as the pot, since steaming clams open needs trapped steam.
• Two-Tone XL Cutting Board, 18 by 12 Inch. Potatoes, onion, celery, salt pork, and then chopping the clams. Even potato dice is what makes a chowder thicken properly, and you cannot cut evenly on a small crowded board.

You will also need a fine mesh strainer and a few layers of cheesecloth or a coffee filter, a ladle, and a wooden spoon.

Ingredients

For the clams

• 4 pounds littleneck or cherrystone clams, scrubbed
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 cup dry white wine

For the chowder

• 4 ounces salt pork or thick cut bacon, cut in small dice
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
• 1 large onion, diced
• 2 ribs celery, diced
• 1 1/2 pounds Yukon gold potatoes, cut in 1/2 inch dice
• 1 bay leaf
• 3 sprigs fresh thyme
• 1 cup heavy cream
• Salt and black pepper, to taste
• Fresh parsley or chives, chopped, for serving
• Oyster crackers, for serving

Method

Before you start

Set up your mise en place. Dice everything, and set the strainer, cheesecloth, and measuring cup by the stove. Once the clams open you want to move quickly, because clams held in hot liquid keep cooking.

Check that the clams are alive. Tap any clam that is sitting open. A live one closes. Throw away any that stay open and any with cracked or broken shells. Commercially harvested shellfish also carry a dealer tag identifying the harvest water and date, which is worth keeping for a few days after you eat.

Purge the sand. Sit the clams in a bowl of cold salted water, about 1/3 cup salt to a gallon, for 20 to 30 minutes, then lift them out rather than pouring them out so the grit stays behind. Never use fresh water, which kills them slowly. Scrub the shells before they go in the pot.

Steam the clams and save the liquor

Steam them open. Bring the water and wine to a boil in the covered pot, add the clams, and cook until the shells open, about 6 to 8 minutes, pulling them out as they go rather than waiting for the last one. Discard any that stay shut.

Strain the liquor twice. Pour the cooking liquid through a fine mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth into the measuring cup, then leave it to settle and pour off the clear liquid, leaving the last half inch behind. That final half inch is where the sand ends up. This is the step people skip, and skipping it is why home chowder is gritty.

Shuck and chop the clams. Pull the meat from the shells and chop it coarsely. Refrigerate it until the very end. Clams cooked twice go rubbery, so they are not going back in until the soup is finished.

Build the chowder

Render the salt pork. In the cleaned pot over low heat, cook the diced pork slowly until the fat runs out and the pieces are crisp and golden, about 8 minutes. Lift the pieces out and set them aside for the top. That rendered fat is the foundation of the flavor and there is no substitute for it.

Sweat the onion and celery. Add the butter to the pork fat, then the onion and celery, and cook until soft and translucent with no color, about 8 minutes. Browning takes the chowder somewhere else entirely.

Add the potatoes and the liquor. Stir in the potatoes, bay leaf, and thyme, then pour in the strained clam liquor. Top up with water if needed so the potatoes are just covered. Simmer until the potatoes give easily to a knife tip, about 12 minutes.

Crush a few potatoes against the side of the pot. Four or five is enough. They release starch and thicken the chowder from the inside, which is why no flour is needed and why a floury chowder tastes pasty.

Finish and serve

Add the cream and hold the heat down. Pour in the cream and bring the pot to no more than 180F, where the surface barely shivers. Do not let it boil once the cream is in, because it will separate and there is no fixing it.

Season carefully. Taste before adding any salt at all. Clam liquor is seawater and salt pork is cured, so there is a real chance the pot is already seasoned. Black pepper freely.

Return the clams off the heat. Stir in the chopped clams, cover, and take the pot off the burner. They need about 2 minutes to warm through and no more. They are already cooked, and anything further turns them to rubber.

Rest it, then serve. Ten minutes off the heat improves it noticeably. Serve with the crisp pork scattered over, parsley or chives, and oyster crackers.

Making it with canned or jarred clams

This is the version most people will actually cook on a Tuesday, and there is no shame in it. It takes the recipe from an hour to about thirty minutes and removes the sand problem entirely.

What to buy. Three 6.5 ounce cans of chopped clams, plus 2 cups of bottled clam juice. Buy the clams packed in their own juice rather than drained, and keep that juice.

Replace the liquor with the juice. Use the juice from the cans plus the bottled clam juice in place of the strained liquor. Skip the steaming and straining steps entirely.

Add the clams at exactly the same point. Off the heat, at the end. Canned clams are fully cooked and they toughen just as readily as fresh ones.

What you give up, honestly. Fresh clam liquor is the single biggest flavor contributor in this soup, and bottled juice is a thinner, saltier substitute for it. Compensate by using less added salt and by rendering the pork a little further for more depth. It will be a good chowder. It will not be the same chowder.

Making it Manhattan style

Manhattan chowder is not a variation so much as a different soup wearing the same name. Tomato instead of dairy, and the result is lighter, brighter, and more like a vegetable soup with clams in it. Some people prefer it, and the argument that it is not real chowder is a matter of regional loyalty rather than cooking.

Take out the cream entirely. No dairy at all.

Add one 14 ounce can of diced tomatoes with their juice, along with the potatoes, plus an extra cup of clam juice or water to make up the volume.

Add a diced carrot with the onion and celery. The tomato wants the sweetness behind it.

Season differently. Oregano and a pinch of red pepper flakes suit it, where thyme alone suits the cream version.

The practical advantage. With no dairy in it, this one freezes properly and reheats without splitting, which the New England version does not.

Make ahead, storage, and reheating

Make ahead. Chowder is better the next day, genuinely. Make the base through the potato stage, refrigerate, then add cream and clams when you reheat.

Refrigerating. 3 days. Cool it quickly rather than leaving the pot on the stove, since a large volume of dairy soup cooling slowly sits too long in the range where bacteria multiply fastest.

Freezing. The New England version does not freeze well. Cream separates on thawing and the potatoes go mealy. If you want to freeze it, freeze the base before the cream and clams go in, and it holds 3 months. The Manhattan version, having no dairy, freezes without any of this trouble.

Reheating. Low heat, stirring, never boiling. If it looks like it is breaking, off the heat and whisk hard.

A short history

Chowder arrived in New England with fishermen, probably French and Breton, and the word itself is contested. The common explanation traces it to chaudiere, the French cauldron a communal fish stew was cooked in. Another traces it to the English dialect word jowter, a fish seller. Neither is settled, and confident claims either way go past the evidence.

What is documented is that early American chowders were layered rather than simmered, built in a pot with alternating layers of salt pork, fish or clams, onions, and ship biscuit, and that they contained no milk or cream at all. The dairy came later, in the nineteenth century. Potatoes replaced the biscuit as the thickener, which is why the potatoes are still doing that job in this recipe.

The tomato version emerged around New York in the nineteenth century, plausibly through Portuguese and Italian fishing communities, and New England took it as an insult. That feeling was strong enough that in 1939 a bill was reportedly introduced in the Maine legislature to make adding tomatoes to chowder illegal. It did not pass. It remains the best evidence available that people take this soup seriously.

Nutrition, estimated

Per serving, based on 4 servings.

These are estimates calculated from standard reference values for the listed quantities, not laboratory measurements. Sodium is high here and unusually so among these recipes, because clam liquor is seawater and salt pork is cured, and both are counted. That figure does not include any salt added to taste, which is exactly why the method tells you to taste before salting.

References

• Northern Quahog, NOAA Fisheries. The hard clam species behind littlenecks and cherrystones, including how U.S. clam aquaculture is managed and why farmed quahogs are considered a sustainable choice.
• Selecting and Serving Fresh and Frozen Seafood Safely, U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The tap test, dealer tags, discarding cracked shells, and safe storage. Seafood is FDA regulated, not USDA.

Related guides

• How to Shuck Oysters, which covers live bivalve handling, dealer tags, and saving the liquor in detail
• How to Fillet Haddock, if you want to make the fish version of this chowder
• The Butchery Guides

Thank you

Thank you for cooking this. Chowder is a humble soup with a lot of opinion attached to it, and taking the time to purge the clams and strain the liquor properly is what separates the people who mean it from the people who do not.

If you make it, I would like to hear how it went, and especially what you changed. Tell me here.

If this one worked for you, seafood chowder uses the same base with fish instead, and shrimp bisque is the smoother, richer end of the same family.

Cook Bolder, Serve Wiser, Eat Better.

Chef Alan, 35 years in professional kitchens and a six-time Four Diamond chef
Wine Drop Cookery