Fresh mussels in Brittany
One thing I have to say about small towns in France is that they look cooler than small towns in the United States. A lot of the buildings look sturdy and solid. The houses in the country side seem to use a lot of stones and concrete, instead of wood. As for the buildings in the center of town, they look way prettier. I like a slice of old Americana every now and then, but there’s something about those old European towns. Just look at the city hall. Seriously, do city halls in the U.S. look like that? WTF, America?! Anyway, the trip into the city on Day 2 was to get some bread at the bakery and then some mussels. Can we say, sea food for dinner?
In this area of Brittany, there’s a lot of sea food to be had, and lots of fishermen. The area is pretty flat and it used to be covered by ocean water a long long time ago. Now a days, you have this area surrounding the coast where high tide and low tide will cover and uncover large swaths of sand. So to work around this, many of the fishing boats here have wheels. Yup, these boats DRIVE on land too. Pretty awesome. The mussels fishermen use boats like these.
After they come back from the ocean with mornings bounty, they gotta unload it and clean it. I guess normally you’d have to figure out a way to see this up close, but since Steph’s parents know this guy, Robert, who is a mussel fisherman, it made my life easier. We got to see them do this up close. There’s a guy who unloads the mussels off of the boat into this conveyor belt and then it goes to another fisherman who pulls out the bad ones. Pretty simple process.
Then they just put these things into large plastic baskets before they get bagged up. Gotta love fresh seafood!
See, bagged up and ready to go. I guess mussels are one of those things that gets AOC designation. The French do this so they can protect the quality of certain products like wine and cheese. I didn’t know they did it with mussels too until I saw the bag. Pretty cool though, since the bag looks pimp.
And the very best part of the whole thing is that we get to eat the mussels. Pretty sweet. They pull them in in the morning and by nighttime, they’re on our plates ready to be devoured. Probably doesn’t get any fresher than that. These days chefs like to say they want to know who their suppliers are, and I’ve never gotten to experience that myself, where I see the product right after it’s procured, and then it’s in my belly the very same day. This is fairly easy to do with sea food here in Brittany by the coast. How much fresher can it get!? Our mussels were steamed with white wine, bay leaves, thyme, onions, garlic, and of course, butter. Perfect way to end the night for sure.
Posted by Danny on September 11, 2011 at 9:12 pm
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