Mussels and Bacon Cooked in Cider

After earlier in the evening enjoying some fine Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food oysters with shallot vinegar, I completed my Monaco seafood double header with this delicious recipe for mussels steamed in cider with sautéed bacon.

With a relatively simple dish like this, where one or two components are the stars of the show, it really pays to spend a little more on sourcing good quality ingredients. In the huge Monaco Carrefour (which I have genuinely come to appreciate) I was able to find some fantastic mussels from the bay of Mont Saint Michel, on the Normandy coast.  The mussels from Mont Saint Michel can boast of being the first seafood product to be designated the French Appellation of Controlled Origin (AOC) status, and once you taste the sweet, creamy meat you can understand why.

The quality of the mussels can be attributed to the large tidal range in the bay, with up to a 14 meter difference between the high and low tides. These large differences in sea levels expose thousands of hectares of sand at low tide and the constant refreshing of the salt water means that the area is the perfect environment for the mussels to thrive in.

To go along with the Normandy mussels, I was also able to find a nice bottle of artesian Normandy cider. Cider from that region is, quite simply, some of the best in the world (see my post pears poached in perry for another recipe that uses Normandy’s famous booze). Needless to say, I had pretty high expectations for how this dish was going to turn out. Below, you can see both the mussels and the cider together with the other ingredients of smoked streaky bacon, garlic, fresh thyme, parsley and olive oil.

To start with, I gave the mussels a scrub under some cold running water, making sure to remove any beards that were still attached to the shells. At this stage, throw away any of your mussels that are open and that don’t close when given a gentle tap – they are bad, and, believe me, food poisoning from bad mussels is not something you want.

As soon as I was ready to get cooking, I sloshed a good glug of the olive oil into a big, heavy saucepan. Once it was hot, I added in the streaky bacon, which I had previously cut into thick, rough and ready chunks.

I kept the bacon pieces moving around the pan and after about 5 minutes they had released most of their fat and begun to turn a nice shade of golden brown.

I then added in a half dozen garlic cloves (unpeeled but lightly crushed) and a few springs of the thyme, letting these fry off for another minute of so.

Next, I tipped in all of the mussels and a small glass of the cider (which left plenty over for me to polish off…). I took a quick picture before covering them with a tight fitting lid and giving the pan a gentle shake from side to side.

After about 4 minutes of steaming, the mussels had opened up. I took the pan off the heat and added in a few grinds of black pepper. At this stage, take care to remove any of the shells that have not opened (again, they are most likely to be bad).

That was pretty much it. I sprinkled over some chopped parsley and served the mussels in the hot cooking pot along with some good crunchy French bread and a cold glass of the Normandy cider.

Fantastic! I took a first mussel using my fingers, and then used that empty shell as tweezers to pick my way through the rest of the pot, fighting with the lawyer over each delicious morsel. They really did taste divine. The rendered bacon fat combined with the dry cider and the moule juice to enhance the sweet yet savoury flavour of the Mont Saint Michel mussels. An absolute delight and so easy to make. It really is one to try yourself!