Clams

Live clams keep as long as they stay alive, generally 1–2 days refrigerated. Shucked clam meat keeps 1–2 days.

Keeping them alive is the entire task, and it is easy to get wrong. Store clams in the refrigerator in a bowl covered with a damp cloth — not a sealed container, not a plastic bag, and never submerged in fresh water. Clams are living animals that need to breathe; an airtight container suffocates them and fresh water kills them by osmosis.

Discard any water that collects in the bowl rather than letting them sit in it. Set the bowl on ice if you need an extra day.

Purge sand by soaking in cold salt water for 20–30 minutes before cooking — salted, at roughly a third of a cup per gallon, so the clams stay alive while they filter.

Cooked clams keep 3–4 days. Freeze shucked clams in their liquor for 2–3 months.

With live bivalves, freshness is not a judgment call — it is a binary test, and the animal performs it for you.

A live clam closes its shell when tapped. An open shell that does not close means the clam is dead, and a dead clam decomposes very quickly, so it should be discarded. Equally, a clam whose shell stays shut after cooking has usually died before it went in the pot; discard those too. A cracked or broken shell is a discard regardless.

The reason this matters so much is Vibrio. Clams are filter feeders that process large volumes of seawater, concentrating whatever bacteria and viruses are in it — including Vibrio species and norovirus. A living clam's own systems keep this in check; a dead one becomes a rapidly multiplying culture.

This is also why shellfish tags and harvest-area closures exist, and why clams from an unknown source are a genuine risk rather than a technicality.

Cooking destroys Vibrio and norovirus, so thoroughly cooked clams from a dead-uncertain batch are still not worth the gamble — you cannot tell how long decomposition ran before cooking.

The date on a seafood package is almost never a safety deadline. A "sell by" date is an inventory instruction for the store. "Best if used by" is a quality estimate.

Neither overrides refrigerator windows from FoodSafety.gov / FDA seafood guidance. Fresh seafood bought on its sell-by date still needs cooking or freezing within the cold-storage window on this page. Freezer times here are quality windows — food held at 0°F stays safe longer, but texture and flavor fade.