Hey, I am Barton Seaver and today we are going to be cooking mussels. These are farm raised mussels from Rhode Island. Now I think mussels are absolutely fantastic and in keeping with traditions in Rhode Island of the Portuguese fishing communities, we are going to doing very hearty, spiced dish. It's going to be steamed with Chorizo and onion and garlic. It's going to absolutely awesome. So in the first couple of segments we are going to teach you a little bit about mussels, how to store them, how to buy them and then running through how to cook them.
The ingredients for this dish, what we are going to need is about one head of garlic, the cloves separated and peeled, one small onion or a half of a medium onion, peeled and just cut into rough chop, we need about two lengths of Chorizo sausage. You can either use a fresh sausage or a dry cured sausage. You just want to slice it up. Then you have two cups of white wine. Now anytime you cook with wine, cook with the quality of wine that you would want to drink as well because most likely, you are not going to use all of it in the cooking process. So what you are going to do in the rest of it? Well, you are going to drink it.
We are going to need two teaspoons of fennel seeds, two teaspoons of coriander seeds, about four teaspoons of smoked Spanish paprika. Now it is very important to have smoked paprika as it's a completely different product and absolutely awesome. We are going to need about three quarters of a cup of cooking oil, either peanut, canola or my favorite and preferred in this one is vegetable oil. We have about two pounds of farmed mussels, washed and de-bearded and then we are going to finish off with a little bit of lemon juice and Kosher salt. And for the equipment, I love using a really thick bottom cast iron pan like a Le Crueset for this, something with a lid on it. That is very important and something that's big enough to hold the mussels.
I particularly prefer the Le Crueset because it makes a very nice serving dish as well. So now we have gone through the ingredients, we have gone through the equipment that we are going to need. So now let's get started cooking one of my favorite recipes, Mussels Saint-Ex.