My Moules marinière

Cleaning Mussels
2kg clean mussels
Remove all beards/dirt/small shells attached to outside from the mussels. Discard any that have a strong smell, or any that are broken/open.

Cooking Moules Mariniere
Olive oil/butter
3 shallots, finely sliced
4 cloves garlic, finely sliced
200g white wine
30g flat leaf parsley, finely cut
150g double cream
50g crème fraiche
1 lemon
Heat a casserole pan big enough to cook the mussels, add olive oil and butter and sweat shallots/garlic with a pinch of salt. Allow to soften. Turn up the heat, add the clean mussels and white wine and cover with a lid. Cook for 4/5 minutes until the mussels have opened. Discard of any mussels that have remained closed. Add cream and reduce for 2 minutes. Finish with crème fraiche and lots of parsley.

Shoe String Fries
6 maris piper potatoes, washed/peeled
Using a mandoline, julienne cut the potatoes and then soak in cold water. If you don’t have a mandoline, cut the potatoes into 2mm slices and then cut into thin strips. Drain the potato well.

Heat a pan of oil/fryer to 160c and fry potato strips until golden, drain well and season.

[Music] [Music] Okay, one of my favorite things of all time today. This is muscles mariner. Very classic dish. Everyone knows it. There’s a couple of little takes on that and how to make it really delicious. This is my muscles mariner. So, the first thing is you need muscles. You need really big nice plump muscles. These are from Fouy. So down in Cornwall. If any are open like this, see that open? You either want to get rid of that, but just check just knock them knock them together. They start to close. That’s closing probably. All right. That one. Any clothes, any massively wide open, get rid of any beards in there, scrape them off and pull them down and give the whole thing a really good wash. I would recommend that highly and nice big plump muscles like that incredible. They are poundfor-pound muscles are just flavorwise they are the best value flavor you can buy. There you go. That’s my thought on muscles. We need a little bit of diced onion for our muscles mariner. We need a nice heavy brace pan. And all we need to do is that goes in the pan. In goes the mostly chopped onions. And we’re just going to let that sweat now. Very gently. Just soften those onions. We don’t want to color them. We just want to soften the onions down. Sweat them and get all that sweetness. I’m really looking for the sweetness of the onions to come out, bleed, and I get that translucent onion thing going on. That’s really important. I just give those a little move around. Slow my pan down a little bit. Let the butter do its work. Let the onion just soften. Take out the gnarly chopped onion. There we go. Nice. Look, you see how they slow down? All of a sudden, the water starts to come out of that evaporation. That’s the water coming out. Then we got the sweetness and the sugars coming to the forefront. That’s really important. So there we go. There’s our onions to start with. Okay. Into that is going to go a little bit of garlic as well. Just taken the root out of this garlic. Can you see that there, Sam? Very important you take the root out of the garlic. And that is bitter inside. So we don’t want any of that. I’m just going to slice this garlic up really nicely. Freya has arrived. Do you like Mus’s mariner, Freya? Do you like more mariner? Freya is going to say, “I don’t like fish. I just had a sausage roll. I don’t like Do you like muscles mariner?” I’ve just had a Greg sausage roll. So, that’s the garlic gone into there with the onions. Letting that sweat still. This is a quick dish. It’s a It’s a midweek thing. Something you can get done really quickly. You just need to buy nice muscles and they don’t cost a great deal of money. Go to Moxins and Clappen, my friends there. He’s got another shop as well in South Ken. He’s got a shop in Dalage. You can pick them up all over the place, but you want nice fresh large plump muscles. We want those onions to be nice and soft. If you don’t take these onions far enough, the whole thing is going to be a stringent. The wine won’t cook properly. So, don’t don’t do that. Right. I’m going to put in there a little bit of fresh thyme. I think th time onions just feels right. I like to get the thyme in there now. So, in goes the time. Really nice. Okay, that’s fantastic. Now, in goes white wine. I wouldn’t use cheap, really cheap wine for this. So I would use the best quality you can afford. Once the wine goes in a Chardonnay, a dry white wine you want. So a nice Chardonnay in there. Nice s your blanc in there. Something like that. Something quite dry. In it goes. A decent amount of wine. We want that wine down by basically half. So get the wine down by half. So we’re cooking out all the acidity, but we’ve still got that layer of flavor from the wine in there as well. So let’s get that down. Turn the heat up and get that reducing down. Muscles at the ready. Clotted cream at the ready. Salt’s there. And we need a little bit of chopped parsley for the end. So, we’ll get that chopped. [Music] So, we’re all ready to go. Now, let’s talk about the garnish for our muscles mariner. For me, it’s a baguette and fries or chips. Small chips. But Adam being the brilliant guy of the not me. The other Adam has made these which is like shoring fries. Is that shoestring fries? Pompai sho string fries. I don’t know what it is. Bloody delicious. I don’t I don’t know how you cook that and eat that with that, but they are very nice. They are very clever. I would stick to just fries, but that’s a mega potato that Adam made. Right, wine’s down by half now. In goes the muscles. This is when the fun starts. And you need to be ready at this point because once you go in here, you’re committed. You’re no going back. And you’re about 5 minutes from eating delicious. Give them a good move around. Lid must go on. Very important because you’re steaming that muscle, creating a huge bunch of steam and heat in there. That’s going to open that muscle up. That’s really important. Okay, let’s check on those muscles now. You can see they’re starting to open up. That’s not cooked. Look. Look at this. That’s not cooked. It’s still sealed to the side of the the shell. That’s not cooked. So, keep going here. I’m going to use a spoon just to move them around a little bit. [Applause] But they’re not far off. Couple of minutes. There’s all sorts of variations of a muscle mariner. People do them in stout, do them in cider. I do them with cider sometimes, but I don’t think there’s anything better than the classic white wine double cream. We’re going to just elevate that double cream element today. But yeah, that’s what it is. I got this pot. These are not for muscles, but I am going to use them for muscles at uh at restaurant Constants when we open there. But this dish is actually designed to do my clay pot chicken at Constants. Really clever little beautiful dish. We cook the chicken in there with a lid on like that. Like so. I reckon it makes the perfect muscle dish. So, let’s have a look. And that’s in real time. There we go. Those muscles are now beautifully cooked. Just going to turn that heat off for a second. My muscles are going to come out because I’ve got another stage that I want to do now. You could just put the dairy in now. It’s not a problem, but I sort of want to do it a slightly different way to get the sauce proper. You will end up taking those muscles further than you want to. And I think it’s critical that the muscles are cooked to exactly that. Look at that. Look, look how be Sam come in on that. Look how beautiful that is. That’s just like beautiful, right? You want don’t want them any more cooked than that. Chef T. Amazing. Adam, where who are they from? They’re beautiful. Absolut Jody. Bloody brilliant. That’s the That’s the level, Jody. Thank you very much, sir. Harry, look at these muscles. Look at this. Look. Look at that. Beautiful. Oh, wonderful. So, muscles are out. They’re not going to cook any further. That’s really important. Now, means I can deal with this. This is the liquor. So, that’s all the all the juice that’s come out of those muscles and the white wine reduction and the sweetness of the onions, the little bit of thyme, and the garlic in there as well. That is delicious. But it needs the reason to put the double cream in there or the lactic fat or whatever you’re going to put in there. It’s basically to hold on to all those saline juices and the white wine. So, so that it coats it coats your mouth. It gives richness, gives depth. That’s the point of the lactic going in there. So, I get all that reduced down now. And I’m going to go in with clotted cream. And you could use double cream, you could just use single cream, you could use creme fresh, but I’m going to use clotted cream because I think the richer the better because there’s nothing as powerful as a muscle liquor like that that’s really reduced down. Utterly delicious. Let that go in. Let it come up. Let’s finish that with those lovely chopped herbs now. Chopped parsley in there. Could use lovage, no problem. But uh I think let’s just keep this classic this one. Get the muscles in there. Get that parsley in there. Cook it out. Now, we want to cook this a couple of minutes so that we’ve got enough that it just coats and sits inside those muscles. That’s really important. Any muscles that didn’t open properly, they’ve gone. They’re in my lovely dish. I’m very happy with that. I think the best accompiment for this is a nice baguette actually cuz it’s that juice. This is the gold for me. This is the golden stuff. This is the important thing at the end of that dish. Right, I think they can go back in now to make sure they’re properly coated. Give them a good move around. I think we should put this on the menu at Constants. But really lovely, but make it English cider lovage. Really delicious. And that goes into my bowl ready for serving. What an amazing thing. Put the lid on. I’ll move it over there. Right, there we go. That is my muscles mariner. Very classic with the shoestring fries. I reckon you could probably finish this and then put all the shoestring fries in the juice at the end and eat it all. In fact, I might do that. So, this is how we do this. Eat one and then got a set of tools for the rest. In it goes. This is a roll your sleeves up, get involved type dish, it they just remain so saline. You you’re at the sea with them. They are so beautiful. And that juice is just something else. And I reckon that with this with the shoestring fries is going to be an absolute winner. Feels like summer food, too. So, for me, that’s a winner. Muscles mariner my way. It’s like a bowl of It’s like a bowl of the best cereal cornflakes you’ve ever had in your life. Look at that. I think we just invented something. Probably for good reason. Adam, you know what? That is flipping brilliant because you got texture from potato and the salt of the potato as well is really like quite gnarly and salty. That is flipping brilliant. What a great accidental success. Enjoy. I used to I used to cook for this for you. Your mom Your mom used to cook this for you all the time. Yeah. I know. Really? Vicki is a better cook. She is a better cook at home to be honest to be kid to be fair. I come out I cook something and the kids are like oh no dad cook. Well I tell you what happened in co I’m there every day and they’re like oh yeah our dad’s cooking this amazing stuff and then after a while they’re like mom is it possible you can cook instead?