Food

Cover via Amazon

A repost from March 2007

I've never cooked mussels before, always eyed them with interest on the fish stall at the market but never plucked up the courage - to be honest I also thought they'd be very pricy. But last week I finally got round to a proper read-through of Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, noting down recipes which interested me, and he has three very tasty-looking recipes for mussels, so Saturday morning I finally bought a netful.

They turned out to be very economical - just £3.95 for a big net. I didn't count them but there were enough for myself, my girlfriend and a good lump frozen for a future meal (after cooking of course - you can't freeze them beforehand as they must be alive when you cook them).

Naturally I had the usual concerns about freshness, the risk of sickness etc., but the fish guy on Bedford market has never yet sold me anything but the best quality product, so I wasn't too worried. The general rule, for those who don't know, is to throw out any mussels which aren't tightly closed, or which don't immediately close when you tap them. Out of this big batch there was only one which fitted that description, so I was pretty confident.

They're rather beautiful things, with gleaming black shells encrusted with little limpets and things, and a satisfying weight to them. The annoying part is preparing them. Each one has to be "bearded" (they have a hairy strand which protrudes from the concave side of the shell, and which must be pulled off just before cooking), and scrubbed. That takes quite a while, I'd guess about 30-40 minutes to prepare this batch for us. Obviously I'm fairly inexperienced but I don't think you could make it much faster.

All round this dish was ridiculously simple to make, I'd encourage anyone to try it. I mostly used Tony's recipe for Moules Normandes (Mussels Normandy-style), with two major exceptions - I couldn't get hold of any Calvados (apple brandy) at short notice so I just sloshed in some white wine. Didn't seem to hurt. And I couldn't find any shallots so I substituted with garlic and onion (shallots are somewhere in between flavour-wise).

• Mussels, one netful - weighed a bit less than 2 pounds.
• Bacon (I bought a nice cheap pack of "bacon misshapes", and cut off about 6 cubic inches of good chunky stuff) in small cubes.
• 4 tablespoons of butter
• 1 shallot, thinly sliced (or substitute with a bit of onion and some garlic)
• 6 small mushrooms, thinly sliced
• Half an apple, peeled, cored and cut into chunks (I used a bit extra due to not having Calvados)
• 75ml Calvados (or in my case a glass of white wine)
• 1 tall tub of double cream (can never remember how much they hold).
• Salt and pepper.

Prep is simple - just cook the bacon in a pan (no extra fat needed if it's good fatty stuff, which I had) for about 10 minutes till it's well browned. Actually it took about 20 minutes because it was nasty British bacon and it took 10 minutes to cook off all the water. Eugh. But it was nice when done.

Meanwhile in a large pot (I used my stockpot, and this recipe half-filled it) cook the butter over a medium/high heat until it foams, then add the shallot (or whatever) and cook it till transparent. Add the mushrooms and apple and cook it all for 5 minutes, then slosh in the booze, which should deglaze the pan nicely. Stir in the cream and add salt and pepper. Then once it's all boiling, add the mussels and cook for ten minutes, or until all the mussels are opened. Shake it, cook for another couple of minutes, shake again and serve.

Now, that's pretty much how Tony had it. Have you spotted the deliberate mistake? Yup, he doesn't mention what to do with the bacon. Now, assuming he doesn't intend you just to cook it alongside so the aroma wafts into the pot and subtly affects the flavour, I put it in at the same time as the mussels, and the effect was gorgeous so I'm happy. I also added a step which Anthony didn't mention (but I'm sure he would have done himself if he was cooking it) - deglazed the bacon pan with a slosh of the white wine and poured it in. Flavour city.

Tony's recipe actually uses all the same quantities but for 6 pounds of mussels. In that case you wouldn't get the "chowder" at the bottom, it's up to you whether you want to scale up for that reason. One thing I would suggest if you're using my quantities is stirring instead of shaking - it's doable if you're only cooking 2 pounds, and it would mix the sauce through without shaking half of the mussels out of their shells!

Labels: Anthony Bourdain, Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies Recipes and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking, apple, Calvados, Cook, cream, Fish and Seafood, Garlic, mussels, seafood, Wine

Recipe time! Hooray hooray. And this is absolutely one of my favourites, as well as a drastically underappreciated dish. It's one of those recipes which turns a cheap, junk cut of meat into something brain-meltingly gorgeous, with very little effort. There's a little bit of an interesting philosophical twist in there as well, because if you can cook great things with the less popular cuts of an animal it's a great way of showing respect to that (once-)living thing and making its death worthwhile. Eating the best bits and throwing the rest away is the way of the destructive, unthinking corporate-encouraged lifestyle. Using the whole animal, nose to tail, is a pretty good way of breaking away from that. [stops channeling Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall].

As with most of my recipes, this is a "framework" set of instructions and ingredients (I hate following a fixed recipe every time). Once you've got the basic technique down you can play with the flavours to almost infinite variation.

Slow Simmered Pork Belly

Ingredients:

• Pork belly - roughly a couple of strips per person. You'll soon learn how much is right depending how thick it's cut etc. As with most cooking, I'd recommend making more than enough the first time, and believe me, it's hard to have too much slow simmered pork belly. It can be skin on or skin off - the slow cooking process will reduce the toughest skin to tender gorgeousness, and it adds extra flavour and brings gelatin to help thicken the sauce. Some has bones, some doesn't - it doesn't matter which you get.
• Soy sauce. Lots of supermarket soy sauces (and more expensive ones) are really really salty. The only one I use is Blue Dragon naturally brewed soy (and they're not paying me to say that). It's beautiful and sweet-tasting, with almost no saltiness.
• Garlic, lots of
• Some or all of: Star anise, 5-spice, Sezchuan peppercorns (roast them first either in an oven or a thick-bottomed pan then crush them), mixed spice.
• Booze. In order of preference: sake (available in most supermarkets now with the cooking ingredients), shaohsing (very similar Taiwanese equivalent, I know it's in some stores where you can't get sake), sherry, cheap white wine.
• Honey. Substitute: Golden syrup, or half and half white and brown sugar.
• A bit of salt. If you can't find a non-salty soy sauce you might not need to add any.
• Particularly optional: Chillies, fresh or dried or chilli oil.

The procedure is very simple indeed. First heat some oil in a pan, and brown the pork well. Make sure it's brown! The fat should be a bit crispy at the edges by the time it's done. Then sling in the garlic, stir around for about a minute more and start sloshing in the liquids. Precise quantities are really really unimportant - for two people I'd use about half a cup of soy, a good two or three tablespoons of the spices, maybe four or five tablespoons of booze, five or six tablespoons of the honey, syrup or sugar. It takes quite a lot of the sweet stuff, more than you'd expect. If you want it spicy, add chillies to taste.

Then add maybe a full cup or two of water, depending on how long you're going to cook it for. Try a spoonful of it once everything's in there, and make sure the mixture of sweet, savoury and spicy is just right - you can always adjust it at this point. The taste test is a drastically underused technique in most home kitchens - so many people just dump all the ingredients in according to a recipe and hope until the cooking's done, making things so much harder for themselves! Just remember that the liquid is going to reduce down a lot, so if the taste isn't very strong it will become more so - the balance is the important thing at this point.

Then you simmer it without a lid on - like the stock it shouldn't be boiling wildly, just a few bubbles rising to the surface. Actually, to be quite honest, belly pork can take quite a bit of bubbling, and if you find yourself short of time just turn it up and let it boil hard till it's reduced enough, it won't really suffer.

You want to give it at least one and a half hours, ideally two and a half of steady simmering, and when it's done you want to have cooked off most of the water so that the sauce has concentrated down to a thick glutinous consistency - the sugar thickens it once it's concentrated enough, and it almost becomes caramelised. This means you might have to add more water as you go along if it's getting too reduced too fast, just don't go crazy because you'll end up being there forever waiting for it to finish.

You'll need to keep a general eye on it, as it'll need a stir now and then to stop it sticking - half an hour is probably the longest you should leave it unattended, and for the last half hour not at all - it'll reduce faster and faster once there's less liquid. Once it's had the longest cooking time possible and the sauce is thick and rich, just dump it out onto some noodles or rice and eat! And be prepared to become addicted to pork belly for the rest of your life, of course.

A sidenote/bonus recipe, because this suddenly struck me yesterday and it's particularly relevent to this recipe. Chilli oil: Don't buy it. Just put 2 or 3 finely chopped fresh red chillies or 8-10 crushed dried ones in a saucepan with some good light oil (veg, sunflower, etc.), heat to just-bubbling, then allow to cool and bottle with the chilli bits still in it. Keeps forever.

Ooookay, that was way too easy.

Labels: cheap cuts, Chili pepper, Cook, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, pork, pork belly, slow cooking, Soy sauce, Spice, Sugar, Wine