How To Prepare Mussels

Hi there and welcome to Fin and Flounder. My name is Richard and I've got a colleague here, Paul, who will hopefully show you how to cut some fish, a little bit about the fish itself, maybe where it comes from and many more things.

We're fishmongers based in Broadway Market, predominantly we use the UK coastline for sustainable produce where possible.

That means dayboat-caught produce, line-caught and mainly using anything that is in and around our coastline. Fish like line-caught mackeral, line-caught pollock, maybe dayboat-caught cod or Icelandic cod, so obviously it comes from sustainable waters.

Hi there, I'm going to talk about mussels, one of the most common shellfish in and around our coastline.

You'll find these around coves, you'll find these on rocks, and you'll even find them on ropes. These are one of the most sustainable seafoods that we eat today, the reason being is they grow on ropes and you can cultivate them very easily. So these are just normal mussels.

Predominately we get them from the Shetlands, towards Scotland, but we can also get some Cornish mussels as well. The difference you will find is these are maybe a bit more meaty in terms of texture, and the Cornish ones are a bit small and a bit sweeter. They're distinctly more black with less bionicles.

You can see the bionicles on this mussel here, so the Cornish ones will be very very black in texture.

Now the main difference between these and clams is that these need to be cleaned. Unfortunately they are very tricky.

The best way to clean is really just to pull off the piece here. This is the piece that links them to the rock. So when they're on the rock they're joined by this piece here, and all you're doing is pulling that off and that's it.

Then you're just scrubbing them down.

Now the mussels themselves. They open and close and they filter toxins through the water, so again, if they're open then you tap them and they don't close.

So you're tapping them and if they stay closed or close up that means they're alive. If they're open when you tap them, then you need to discard them.

So as you can see this is a healthy mussel, good for eating.