Pickled, cooked, marinated, breaded in tiger version, with garlic, with tomato, Italian style, in salads, or with some simple and wonderful French fries at aperitif time. Mussels are a true wonder no matter where you look at them, and you can make dozens of recipes with them.
Although canned they are delicious and maintain all their benefits, buying them fresh gives us the opportunity to eat them with their simplest recipe: steamed with a splash of lemon. The bad thing is that, according to José Andrés, we don't do it as well as we think. On his social networks he shared the best way to cook mussels and it is not using white wine or water. They are lemon mussels for which we only need mussels, lemon, garlic and olive oil. Nothing else.
When you have them very clean, if you don't know how the gastronomy experts at Directo al Paladar explain how to clean the mussels well, we start by putting a good splash of olive oil and a sliced garlic in a pot until it turns golden. Once ready and with high heat, we add the clean mussels and the juice of one lemon, as well as some strips of the skin without the white part so that it does not become bitter. Then we cover and we know they are ready when they open. “When they are open they must be removed,” he explains.
Mussels, for the chef, “are like popcorn.” And cooking them follows the same line, because we just have to wait for them to open and take them out because we don't want them to overcook. They don't have to be overcooked, just opened with the heat and cooked as little as possible. Andrés assures that the best is the sauce with “a good bread or rice at the end. Impressive.”
The good thing about this recipe is that they are cooked only with heat and the sauce is left with a lemon aroma but with the power and salinity of the sea. You don't need to add anything else to have a delicious, easy and quick dish.
