How to Check Blue Mussels are Alive

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Gator Hillard and I am here on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to talk about making Blue Mussels with a sweet vermouth sauce. Okay, this is going to be your main ingredient. This is a very important ingredient because with crustaceans, these are called a mollusk; it is just a form of shellfish basically. Clams, mussels and stuff like that. Sometimes you are going to go to the store and you are going to see them open. If you tap it what you want to do is you are going to look at it just like that, sometimes it will be open. You just have to tap it and you can see it is starting to slowly close, that means it is still alive. If it stays open it is dead. Discard it; get rid of it because you can get sick from it. That is basically what you want to do. You just come back and you are going to have a whole bunch of different kinds of mussels and everything so that is one of the first things you want to check and then these right here they are called beards, you want to rip those off. You want to make sure all those come right off and there are other ones in here that are even better, but you just have to sort through them. And this is with everything; you have to do this on every one. This one is closed, it is good. You don't even have to worry about tapping it or anything because it is still alive, it is still fresh. This is definitely something that you want to buy the same day when you make it. This is a really good example right here of a beard. It is like barnacle seaweed, stuff like that. So you want to make sure that comes right out of it because you are not going to eat it. It is not good, doesn't taste good. Just continue to do that. Make sure you check all your mussels. Make sure that they are all closed. And like I said if any of them are open just throw them away once you tap them. That is all you need is about two. Sometimes they will do it slow, close up real slow for you, but even if they do that they are still good. It is the ones you go to worry about that do not close up. Once you are done with that just go ahead and wash them and you are going to move on to the next step."