Mussels Smoked on Pine Needles

What if I told you that one of the best dishes I ever tasted on Planet BBQ contained only one ingredient that it used, a fuel you find in forests and parks everywhere, and a grilling technique unique in the annals of BBQ. The French call it eclade de moule, and I call it one of the best ways there is to cook mussels. The mussel is a black shell bivalve, particularly prized on the West Coast of France. When working with mussels, first, if you see any with partially open shells, tap them on the cutting board. If the shell closes, you know the muscle is still alive and safe to eat. If the muscle shell stays open, discarded, cardinal rule with any shellfish. When in doubt, throw it out. The next thing to look for is the beard. It’s a cluster of fibers the muscle uses to cling to the rocks. And if the muscle has a beard, grab it with needle nose pliers and pull it out at the restaurant La Bouvette on the Elder Ray, an island off the West Coast of France, They actually use a cast iron skillet with holes in it, the sort you would use for roasting chestnuts. If you don’t have one, you can make a hold pan. Simply poke a series of holes in the bottom of the pan with a knife and twist to make holes about 1/2 an inch in diameter. Obviously this is not a great thing to do to the blade of a knife you use everyday. Once you have perforated the bottom of the pan, loosely fill it with dry pine needles and you want to sort of feather the pine needles that way they’ll catch fire more easily. It’s important that the pine needles be dry. Now take the mussels and lay them on top of the pine needles and you want them fairly sparsely spread. About 1 LB of mussels per person and that’s all there is to it. Now the grill. We’re working on a charcoal grill, but you can also cook the mussels on a gas grill. When working with charcoal, I like to use natural lump charcoal. You can see the shape of the original branch, and what you do is light it in a chimney starter. Place either a piece of crumpled newspaper or a paraffin fire starter in the bottom. Light it on the grill. Beauty of a chimney starter. The shape funnels the heat upward so the coals light evenly without having to use petroleum based fire starter. And here’s a chimney I lit earlier. So simply dump out the coals and rake the coals into a mound in the center of the grill. You want a hot fire? Then place the grill grate on top of the grill and you’re ready for business. Then place the mussels on the grill directly over the charcoal and they’ll start to smoke almost instantly. What you want to do is you want the pine needles to catch fire, and it’s in this flash of blazing pine needles that the mussels cook. The pine needles give the mussels an incredible Piney smoke flavor, and if you need to, you can help the flaming process along by hitting the mussels with a butane lighter. And once the pine needles flame, cover the muscles with another foil pan that holds in the heat and smoke. Cooking time is really quick, 5 to 8 minutes or just until the muscle shells open. The beauty of this dish, you serve the mussels right in the pan with the burnt pine needles, and you eat it with your bare fingers. Take one, Oh my God, smoke mussels with that Piney flavor. Unbelievable. And here’s how they do it. In France, you take one set of empty mussel shells and then use them kind of as tongues, and you eat another. And another mussels grilled on a bed of pine needles. Because sometimes grilling is best when it’s at its most simple.