Hi. I'm Ben Pollinger.
I am the executive chef at Oceana restaurant in midtown Manhattan.
Today we're going to be cooking for the holidays.
We're going to do a take on the Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes for Christmas.
And the beauty of this dish is that you do all of the preparation ahead of time
so that when your guests are over
you can enjoy your party.
All you need to do is assemble the ingredients on the plate.
We're going to start with cooking our shellfish.
We've taken our shrimp and seasoned it with salt and pepper
and we're going to poach it.
We're poaching them in a court-bouillon, a flavorful poaching liquid.
You let that simmer for about 40 minutes before adding your shellfish.
And we're going to cook that for about 4-5 minutes.
In the meanwhile, we're going to start steaming our mussels and our clams.
These are New Zealand, green-lip mussels.
They're really large,
very plump, and they're a very pretty color.
And we're going to add a little bit of white wine,
put a lid on the pan,
and steam them until the shellfish opens.
It's going to take about 4-5 minutes.
The next thing we're going to start cooking is our calamari and our scallops.
We've seasoned these with salt and pepper,
and drizzled them with some extra virgin olive oil.
And then we're going to grill them on our grill pan.
You can do this outside on your grill as well.
Then we also have here octopus.
Octopus can take a long time to cook,
anywhere between an hour and a half to two hours.
We've braised our octopus with white wine, chicken stock,
some garlic, rosemary, and some shallots.
You want to see the fork or the knife come out without a lot of resistance.
Now we're going to talk about a fancy term called cross hatching.
Basically this is how to make grill marks on anything grilled.
We're going to turn it at 90 degrees.
What that's going to do is give you those nice marks
that you're used to seeing on a steak.
Now you're going to see when we turn over the scallops
those nice, great grill marks here.
Our shrimp are done.
And we're going to round out our selection of shellfish with some steamed lobster.
Very simply, take your lobster, put it in a pot,
with about an inch of water in the bottom, bring it to a boil,
and steam it until it's cooked.
We're going to check on our clams and mussels.
Once they're open you can pull them right out of the pan.
And if, for some reason, the clams or the mussels don't open
just discard those.
Our calamari and our scallops are ready to come off.
The other ingredients in the salad are cannellini beans and giant corona beans.
Cannellini beans are your standard, Italian, white beans.
And the corona beans are these really giant that have a nice creamy consistency.
We've taken the cannellini beans and pureed them in the blender
and seasoned them with a little bit of red wine vinegar.
We've got some giant, purple alfonso olives that have been marinated in red wine vinegar.
Some shaved fennel.
Some wile arugula.
And some flat leaf parsley.
We've also got some sliced mire lemon.
We're going to start with the fennel, the arugula, and the parsley.
Going to add some of our sliced lemon.
Our olives.
And we're going to also add some of our corona beans,
seasoning this with a little bit of salt
and a little bit of pepper.
And here's our vinaigrette that we've made.
What we do is we take some of that braising liquid from the octopus
and the wine that we've steamed the mussels and the clams open with
and we mix it with a little red wine vinegar
and extra virgin olive oil.
I like a nice fruity extra virgin olive oil from Liguria,
this is from the north, west of Italy.
So we've mixed that together,
and we're going to season our salad with this.
Toss it to coat all of the ingredients.
And then we are ready to assemble the plate.
We're going to take out cannellini bean puree
and add a nice, big, fat piece of octopus right here
then our salad ingredients.
We can add some of our mussels and clams.
Some of our scallops.
Shows off our nice grill marks.
Some calamari.
A couple pieces of our poached shrimp.
We're going to top it off with our steamed lobster.
And then something like this,
I just like to finish it off with a good drizzle of
fruity extra virgin olive oil.
And here's our feast of the seven fishes in one plate.
Great seafood salad.
A fantastic way to start your holiday meal.