[Intro music]
Mussel soup of étretat.
The soup is made of shell fish, we are going to use mussels
and it comes from Normandy, from the city of étretat,
which is very famous for its cliff.
To make the soup, you will need fresh mussels, sliced leeks,
chopped onions, small pasta, butter, diced carrot,
curry powder, tomato- tomato concassé, chopped garlic,
seasoning- pepper and salt, Gruyère cheese, chopped parsley,
white wine and fish stock. First thing, clean the mussels.
Grab the mussel and cut the beard and pull.
If you pick up your mussel in the wild, they may have barnacles or other shells
on the top so you will have to get a knife and scrape them.
Those are cultivated so they don’t have that.
When you clean your mussels, they should be totally closed.
If they are open, it means they are bad.
Sometimes they are open a little bit to breathe, so if you have one like that,
just play with it, touch it and it should close immediately.
If it doesn’t, discard the ones that are open, because it means that they will be dead.
Wash the mussels and you see the water is pretty dirty.
So I am going to drain the water, change it and wash it again.
You should use cold water, because you don’t want to cook them now.
Not here at least. Great!
Drain. Let’s steam them.
To steam the mussels, place them in a large pot. Add the wine.
Cover with a lid and bring it to the stove.
Let them cook covered until they are all open.
After 2-3 minutes, give them a stir when they start to open.
Just to make sure that you put their core to the heat
and cover again for another minute.
Great. My mussels are all open. So they are cooked.
Turn them off and we are going to strain them in a colander to collect the juices.
The stock or the mussel juice here, reserve it,
don’t throw it away because that will be added to the soup.
Heat a pot on medium heat, melt the butter.
Add the leeks, garlic and onions.
Mix well.
And sweat the ingredients for about 5 minutes or until they are soft and melted.
Add the carrots, the parsley. Mix well.
And cook the ingredients for about 3-4 minutes or until slightly soft.
Smells great. The vegetables have been sweating for about 6 minutes now.
They have start to stick a little bit to the pot.
So it’s time now to add the remaining ingredients.
Such as the tomato, the mussels stock.
So the mussels stock, we are going to pour it but we are going to stop
before the sand, if you have any.
Sometimes you have little bit of sand at the bottom.
So you see, the impurities here?
Great we have used almost everything except those ones.
The fish stock and the curry powder.
Mix well. Make sure all the ingredients are in the liquid.
Bring to a boil and allow to simmer for about 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, let’s separate the mussels from their shells.
So use one of the shell as a tong to push,
to separate from the shell and pick.
Look what I found!
They were all open except one, which means that one was dead before.
So too bad, garbage. So the mussels are now separated from their shells.
Reserve the mussels refrigerated as we are not going to put them in the soup yet,
otherwise they would be overcooked.
Put a piece of damp towel or damp paper towel over
and keep them in your fridge. Nice fragrance of the mussels.
The soup has been simmering for about 15 minutes.
It’s time now to add the pasta.
Cook the soup for another 5-7 minutes or until the pasta are done.
Finally, add the mussels, just to heat them and serve the soup.
Lay down the soup in a pretty plate,
making sure that everybody has about 5-6 mussels each.
Sprinkle grated cheese on the top. And serve.
Bon appétit!