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How to Cook Mussels Saint-Ex

Mussels - Cooking and Serving the Dish

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  • amloon Flag


    those mussels look absolutely amazing!...you may have just made me love mussels again!

  • vgromero Flag


    you are superb, amazing, i love your pot

Barton Seaver

He is 28, but his culinary resume reads like a seasoned 40-something. Washington, D.C. native Executive Chef Barton Seaver, a StarChefs.com Rising Star of 2006 and recently nominated as a Rising Star Chef by the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, of Hook was taught at an early age about the importance of food.

Dinner in the Seaver home was a seven nights a week family affair. Eating dinner with his family was a communal celebration and involved shopping for the freshest ingredients at local markets, instilling this value in him at a young age. Mac and Cheese was never just out of the box, but prepared with a homemade bamel cheese sauce and pasta made from scratch. Summers spent at a family friends hog farm on the Chesapeake Bay, along with crabbing and going with his father to buy fresh seafood from local fisherman, taught Seaver the importance of supporting local purveyors and using quality and fresh ingredients.

According to Seaver, "Seasonality and locality made sense to me early on." Seaver began his professional career working for popular D.C. restaurants such as Ardeo, Felix, and Greenwood. After years of invaluable kitchen experience, Seaver made his way to Hyde Park, New York, where he trained at the renowned Culinary Institute of America. During his schooling, he spent time in the kitchens of Tru restaurant and The Dining Room at the Ritz Carlton under Sarah Stegner in Chicago.

Upon graduating with honors, he immediately took a fellowship position at C.I.A. as a graduate teacher in both the meat and fish classes. Working in this hands-on environment taught Seaver the importance of proper handling and techniques of exceptionally fresh products, all the while giving him direct access to sources of fish through the eastern seaboard ports. Under the guidance of Chef Corky Clark, he learned to appreciate underutilized species of fish and became a proponent of sustainable ocean products.

Seaver is a certified sommelier through the Sommelier Society of America and is continuing his studies with Wine and Spirits Educational Trust in London. Recently, he was asked to join the Board of Directors of DC Central Kitchen as the culinary force behind the non-profits educational programs. Additionally, he is also active in the Slow Food movement, and recently cooked at the bi-annual Slow Food Terra Madre conference in October 2006 in Italy. Other organization involvements include the Chefs Collaborative, the James Beard Foundation, the National Restaurant Association, the International Seafood Conference, Chefs Congress, a culinary resource to the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Seafood Alliance. As a firm believer in the idea that chefs are the keepers of food culture, he is publishing a monthly article for the online newsletter for StarChefs.com.

In an effort to educate fellow industry members, Chef Seaver will address the issue of sustainability from the perspective of a chef offering solutions to common problems they face in their profession such as buying decisions and their responsibility as the definers of what is fashionable eating. Monthly columns are archived on the StarChefs.com website with new articles posting on the 15th of each month.

Mussels - Cooking and Serving the Dish

This video will show how to cook mussels and serve the dish.

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Mussels - Cooking and Serving the Dish

Ingredients


1 head garlic, cloves separated and peeled

1 small onion, peeled and quartered

2 jalapeno peppers, seeds removed

1 ½ tsp. smoked paprika

About ¾ c extra virgin olive oil

2 lbs. farmed mussels, washed and debearded

¾ 1 t kosher salt

½ lb chorizo sausage

3 cups white wine

zest and juice of 2 limes

1/4 c cilantro leaves, finely chopped

Freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

1. In a blender or food processor, combine garlic, onion, peppers and paprika.  Drizzle in ½ cup of olive oil until well blended into a fine paste.  Add 1-2 tablespoons of oil if necessary.

 

2. Add sausage to a large stockpot and cook for 5 minutes.  Stir in spice paste and kosher salt and cook 3 minutes more, or until it no longer smells of raw onion. 

 

3. Add mussels and white wine and bring to a simmer.  Cover pot and cook for 5-6 minutes, or until all mussels have opened.  (If any mussels do not open, you can put them back into cooking liquid for 2 minutes more. If they do not open, discard).  Just before serving, mix in fresh lime juice.

 

4. Divide into 4 bowls, garnishing with lime zest, cilantro and freshly ground pepper.  Serve with toasted french bread.

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Transcripts

Barton Seaver: Hi! I am Barton Seaver and today we are finishing up our mussels dish. This is my favorite dish of mussels Saint-Ex, named after the first restaurant I was a chef at, good, rich, hearty, Portuguese inspired flavors. So we have got our mussels. We have made our batuta which is a spiced paste of onions and garlic. We have got our Chorizo. Now again, you can use either dried chorizo or a fresh chorizo like this, cut it into big chunks, if you are using the fresh.

Now we have got a pan like a deep sided cast iron pan like a Le Creuset here on the stove, we have got that on high heat, so we take our chorizo, put that in there. Now the chorizo has got all that good, rich fat in it, so you don't need to add any fat to it and remember, we have quite a bit of oil in the batuta.

Now this all becomes part of the sauce. So as this begins to just saut down. This is going to be awesome. This is what -- I cannot wait to eat this dish. So we have got a little bit of white wine here. We have got our mussels. So what we are going to do is just as the chorizo begins to saut down in color and render out a little bit of its fat, we are going to add in the batuta and then our mussels.

So as our chorizo is sauting here. Wow! This smells so, so awesome. So we are getting our chorizo going, we are going to add our batuta into here. Now that might look like a lot of sauce there, but part of the whole dish is that you end up with this wonderful, rich, delicious mussel infused soupy liquid at the end of it and I have got a whole loaf of bread toasting in the oven here, because believe me, you are going to want the whole loaf.

So as you begin to saut, that paste begins to break down a little bit. The oil comes out of it and the flavors here are very, very intense, but it all blends together very well at the end of this. So now that that's going just a little bit, we are going to take our mussels, just add those in right on top of all that good flavor. Then you want to stir it up just a little bit here.

Now these mussels are going to begin to open pretty quickly and as soon as the mussel opens, that means it's cooked. So we want to do that step pretty quickly. You get the white wine in there fairly quickly as well. Now I am going to use about two cups of white wine because we want that broth to really be very rich. Just two cups of white wine. Then what we are going to do is add a little bit of salt.

So even though these mussels are from the ocean, we still need a little bit of salt in there to really just bring together all of those flavors. Now we are going to put our top on just to make sure it's over here on high heat. Once you let that simmer. That's going to take about two minutes. So that will give you enough just enough time to get yourself cleaned up and set ready to go.

So now the mussels have been sauting and simmering in all that good juice for about couple of minutes here, so we can open up the top. Yeah, and you can see they are just beginning to open up and fully cook. So what we are going to do here, we leave the top off. We are going to take just a few little pats of butter, put that over the top. What that does, is it helps to just bring the sauce together and remember that oil as it began to separate out from the onion, garlic and the batuta mixture there. Adding a little bit of cold butter just brings the whole sauce back together.

So we will now put just a couple of lemons just on top here and what we will do -- oh, that was hot. Put the top just back on. We get everything else set up ready to go. So I have got two bowls here, just to get the reserved shells as you are done eating them. Then I have got a plate here, two little forks and on to that plate, I have got a loaf of bread that we have been toasting in the oven, just a little petite baguette here. That will be perfect to sop up all the juices and then when you go to serve this thing, you just serve the whole thing. It's nice communal lunch, put it on the table. This will feed a live lunch for 3-4 people, but I probably will eat all of this myself. So I think we are ready to go here. Oh yeah, let's just stir this up a little bit and show you what we got underneath there. That sauce just slowly simmers down. It's good.

Alright, turn it off. We are ready to go. There you go. Mussels ala Saint-Ex, good.

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