Hi! I am Barton Seaver and today we’re 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’ve 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 sauté down. This is going to be awesome. This is what—I cannot wait to eat this dish. So we’ve got a little bit of white wine here. We’ve got our mussels. So what we’re going to do is just as the chorizo begins to sauté down in color and render out a little bit of its fat, we’re going to add in the batuta and then our mussels.
So as our chorizo is sautéing 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’ve 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 sauté, 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’re 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’re 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’re 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 sautéing 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’re going to do here, we leave the top off. We’re 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’ve got two bowls here, just to get the reserved shells as you are done eating them. Then I’ve got a plate here, two little forks and on to that plate. I’ve 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 a nice communal lunch, put it on the table. This will feed a live lunch for three to four 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’re ready to go. There you go, Mussels’ Ala Saint-Ex, good.