Windset Farms® Steamed Mussels with Tomatoes & Bacon

Windset Farms® Steamed Mussels with Tomatoes & Bacon Author: Chef Dana Reinhardt

Duration: 4:35

Hi, I'm Dana Reinhardt from Windset® farms and today I'm going to show you how to make a one pot meal for a blustery fall day. The reason I really liked this recipe is because it takes about 15 minutes from start to finish but it tastes like you spent hours making this dish.

I've got my pan on medium high heat, and I'm going to add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and then I'm going to add some really nice chopped smoky bacon, and I'm gonna let this bake until crip, it should take about five to seven minutes.

This dish has great complexity because there's multiple layers of flavors. This is the first layer which is our smoking fatty bacon. The second layer is going to be added with the sweetness of the Legros® and a little bit of spice from our Gustos®, and the last layer will be from the brininess and the sea taste of the clams, and finish with a little bit of spinach.

So, once you have your bacon nicely crisp I will add some chopped white onions. I'm going to sauté those in the bacon fat. Now that we have the onions, and they're sauteed and the bacon fat, we'll talk about our second layer of flavor, which are the sweetness from the Legros®. You can just coarsely chop. I actually like to leave them in quarters because I like them with a little bit of texture. So we're just going to cut these into chunks and add our second layer of flavor which is going to be the sweetness that the Legros® will incorporate in.

So let us sauté, it's all nice and covered in the bacon fat and we'll cook this down for about five, six minutes and tomatoes actually start to melt into the sauce, but they won't completely disintegrate. From all those great flavors we're developing in the pan here, we're going to move over to the clams and I'm going to show you how to clean clams correctly.

What you need is a basic corn meal in all freshwater, put your clams on top. What happens to the clams is the grit from the cornmeal actually works its way into the shells and then they expel any other grit or dirt that they may have in them. Now I'm going to take this over to the sink and when I take the clams out, I'm just going to scoop them gently off the top of the cornmeal. So I don't mix up the cornmeal into the water and actually maybe even get some inside the clams.

Now that this tomato, bacon and onion mixture has time to melt down a bit I'm gonna add a little bit of garlic and a little bit of heat with our Gusto chopped really fine for this dish. So, all these flavors we've got the sweetness of the Legros® and we get a little bit of spicy heat from the Gustos®.

We've got a great smokiness from the bacon and the last edition will be our clams which will add a nice brininess. Clams and bacon go really well together. I discovered the flavor combination while I was traveling through Portugal a number of years ago and I have used it a lot ever since. So that’s in and put our clams up to high and cover. This takes about four or five minutes for the clams to open. Make sure that you discard any clams that aren't open. Actually, it looks like all of our clams have open. Turn this right off. And now is when we add our spinach and a spinach will just naturally wilt with the heat from the juice of the clams, the sweetness of the little Legro® tomatoes. We're just gonna serve this.

Oh, look at that. It's a sauce. It's got the smokiness from the bacon. It's got the sweetness of the Legros®, the brininess of those clams and look at all that sauce. That is just screaming for a crusty piece of bread. Okay, there you have it. A one pot meal for a cozy night at home with your loved one.

Presenter: Dana Reinhardt, Chef, Vancouver, BC

Local Practitioners: Chef