Hi, my name is Bryan Davis of Chef Bryan’s Kitchen and today we’re going to be making mussels with Tarragon vinaigrette.

What we’re going to start of with now is we’re going to build our court bouillon or poaching liquid. What I’m going to be using for the base of my poaching liquid or court bouillon is going to be white wine. We’re going to go ahead and turn on our burner here. We’re going to add about two cups of white wine. This is a chardonnay, but you can use pinot grigio, sauvignon blanc, I would necessarily go out and buy a specific wine if you’ve got some lying around, that’s probably what I would suggest.

The other thing you want to keep in mind is you should never cook with the wine that you wouldn’t drink. If you have a favorite, that’s probably what you should use.

So we’re getting our wine. We’re going to bring this up to a boil and then we’re going to turn it down to a simmer. We don’t actually want the liquid boiling, but we do want it to be hot enough to simmer the mussels. What we’re going to do is we’re going to build our poaching build. We’re going to use a little bit of green onion. Again, this is just for flavors so there’s real no measurement count for this. I’m going to use about two tablespoons. So we’re going to put the onions in there. We’re going to put a little bit of our tarragon in there and we’re just going to let that sit and steep in the wine for a couple of minutes just to kind of help now the flavors.

One other thing you can do I’m not sure, in my house I save left over vegetable trimmings and things of that sort, if you do that, you can always add some of those to the poaching liquid as well. I got some leftover carrots, celery, and onion. So I’m going to go ahead and add just a little bit of that. This is not necessary. You don’t need this in order to make this dish, but if you have that lying around, it just definitely adds a little bit more flavor to the poaching liquid itself. The reason you want to add some is much flavor to this as possible and why we’re using wine and not water is when this is done, we’re going to strain it through fine sieve and then we’re going to make our vinaigrette out of it.

We’ve got our court bouillon almost up to temperature. Like I said, we’re going to bring it to a boil, turn it down, let it simmer for a couple of minutes to meld the flavors and then we’re going to add our mussels.

Let’s talk just a minute about mussels. Fresh mussels, you can find – they usually come in bags in the grocery stores, specialty food stores. If you want to make that they’re close, completely close, and not necessarily open as this one is. If it’s open, you want to discard it. If you take an open mussel and tap on it and it closes, that means the mussel is still alive and you can use it. If it doesn’t close when you tap it, you throw it away. You don’t want to use any open mussels for the dish. You want to make sure that they’re alive and if they’re alive, when you tap them, they’ll close.

We’re going to turn down. Then also what you want to do before you prepare the mussels is you want to rinse them off. There is really not much you can do inside to clear the sand out of them, but you want to make sure that all of the outside is cleaned and rinsed of so you don’t get to end up with any sand in your dish.

The other you want to do is as the mussels set; they’re going to release some moisture in the bottom. A lot of that moisture in the bottom is going to have some sand and is well. So you really don’t want to add that to the dish as well. So we’re just going to take the mussels and we’re just going to put them in our poaching liquid and then we’re going to turn our heat up a little but and then we’re going to steam them. What we’re going to do – shellfish are great in the sense that they let you know when they’re done. When the shells open up completely and are fully opened, the mussels or clams are done. So we’re just going to put our lid back on it and we’re going to let them steam for about four to six minutes. Any mussels that aren’t open after four to six minutes, we’re going to discard as well. So while the mussels steam, we’re going to go ahead and put our vinaigrette together so when we come back, we’ll start putting the tarragon vinaigrette together for our mussels.