Melbourne’s best mussels!
Transcript of Pixie and Alex’s interview (owners/ operators of the Mussel Pot where you’ll find Melbourne’s best mussels!):
Pixie:
My name’s Pixie. I’m from the Mussel Pot at Prahran Market and I’d like to show you how to cook mussels at home, just like you’d taste them here, so you can be a fantastic chef!
Alex:
I like mussels because they’re a clean, green product for a start, they’re seafood which is healthy and they’re local – Victorian. That’s something we have pioneered in Victoria- mussel farming and it’s just a natural product.
We don’t have to give them any fertalisers, we don’t use chemicals, they just grow in the ocean water and we pull them out and sell them. It’s a clean, green industry.
Our take home packs are the same mussels we sell fresh, but they’re debearded in the morning, or as we go during the day, and then we add our sauces- Pixie’s secret sauces – it’s hard to extract the exact recipe from Pixie, she’s very secretive about that.
The white wine- you can probably work that one out yourself. The coconut chilli cream- I’m still not exactly sure what’s in that – perhaps if you can ask Pixie- but I don’t know if she’ll tell you.
Anyway, we sell you as many as you like- whether it’s 1/2 a kilo or a kilo then add enough sauce as we know and then all you have to do is put them in the pot at home on a hot stove and they’re ready in about 3 minutes.
Pixie:
And all you do is pop the mussels in a pot when you get a home and pour the sauce in and then put it on for 4-5 minutes. Give it a little shake every couple of minutes and as they start to open, take them out and put them in a bowl.
And if they don’t open, don’t discard them, give them a little tickle on the side of the mussel and they’ll open up. They’re safe to eat- it’s a myth about closed mussels being bad- you don’t discard them – not our Victorian fresh mussels, because we grow our mussels on long lines, we don’t dredge them like they do in Europe.
Leave them in and as they open up like these are here- you just take them out one by one, and the beautiful juices have gone through the mussels. We don’t add any salt to our mussels because what the mussel does is when it’s cooking it steams open and it has the natural salt water in it.
There you go! Bon Appetite!
You can enjoy Melbourne’s best mussels here at the Market, or take them home- it’s up to you!
