Pot of mussels – The recipe

This is one of my favourite recipes ever, using one of my favourite ingredients: New Zealand mussels. Indeed, Aotearoa taught me many things, and one of them was cooking using strange ingredients with new techniques.

If you’ve never been to New Zealand they have a wide variety of sources of protein, one of the cheapest and most available happens to be shellfish, like the famous black or greenshell mussels. They are massive, super flavourful, affordable, and can be found anywhere around both islands. You literally go to the supermarket like a PakNSave or New World, scoop them out of the seafood section and take them home. Sweet as bro.

Let’s get crackling, first things first – Ingredients:

• 2 kg of black NZ mussels
• 2 celery sticks sliced
• 1 white onion in chunks
• 2 garlic cloves, halved
• 4 saveloys or similar sausages, cut in 4 or 5 pieces
• 1 ½  cup of vegetable broth
• 1 big as pot with its lid
• 2 spoons of olive oil
• Juice of 2 lemons
• Salt, pepper and a teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1/3 bar of unsalted butter
• Chopped fresh cilantro or persil
• Optional: 1 red fresh chili cut in half (seeds and everything)

Preps

Clean the muzzles, rinse them in cold water and pull off those “hairs” coming out of them. Dispatch those already opened.

Fire

Pot on medium heat, olive oil and butter in; let it heat up, throw in onions, garlic, celery and sausages (optional: add chili if you are ok with it), also in goes the lemon juice, a teaspoon of smoked paprika and salt and pepper to taste. Stir the pot around until ingredients are completely integrated. Then pour in the broth, take it to boil. Stir around, taste it, you must taste it and correct spices if needed.

This is pretty much what you end with

In go the mussels, use a long spoon to mix all the ingredients, now gracefully toss the coriander or persil, your choice. Bring pot to medium heat, lid on.

Let it cook for 15 minutes or until all mussels have opened up, and I mean ALL the mussels.

Now, dig in, you don’t need to plate this dish, you just put the massive pot of mussels in the middle of the table, open the lid and each one of your guests ought to help themselves to the bottom of that pot. Enjoy.