Moving to mussels: Ben Shewry on this entertaining flex

Finding seafood that's sustainable, nutritious and affordable can be tricky. Chef Ben Shewry suggests turning to these bivalves.

Two meal mussels by Ben Shewry. Credit: Kitti Gould

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Seafood: Cooking inspiration, mercury magnet, cultural storyteller

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15/11/202333:18

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Moving mussels – it's something Ben Shewry has done throughout his career.

When starting out as a chef in New Zealand, he'd unload frozen green-lip varieties onto a bain-marie, add Mornay sauce and grill the molluscs for buffets. As he admits on the seafood episode of my Should You Really Eat That? podcast, it was "not a particularly good" experience.

The Chef’s Table episode about his award-winning Melbourne restaurant, Attica, offers the flipside to this: his meticulously executed dish of mussels was one of the show's onscreen highlights.

As the camera circled around the plate, the shell was vividly decorated with a portrait of Lance Wiffen, who sources the ingredient for Attica from the waters of nearby Port Phillip Bay.

Then there's the time Shewry turned to the shellfish, about a decade ago, when he wasn't sure what was ethical and green enough to serve at Attica.

"I actually couldn't work out the sustainability of anything and so I took finned fish off the menu completely for two years," he says on the podcast. "So I decided to work with things that I knew were sustainable like mussels and oysters, until I could kind of reconcile what was up."

Even though he has a clearer idea of what's environmentally responsible to offer at Attica nowadays – particularly as he's ambassador for The GoodFish guide to sustainable seafood – mussels continue to be a reliable standby for him. They're native to the area and are also filter feeders, so they help rehabilitate and keep the natural surroundings clean.

I would point to mussels as being one of the one of the best.

"That's what's so great about mussels," he tells SBS Food. "The other thing that's really great about mussels, apart from them being really delicious, is that they are quite affordable."

The chef acknowledges that it can be "a privilege to be able to consider sustainability in a lot of ways," but this shellfish is a truly accessible option.

"If you're able to buy groceries every week, I would point to mussels as being one of the one of the best to eat because they are alive, they're delicious, they're really quick as well to cook," the chef says.

"There's a myriad of recipes out there to cook mussels," he adds.

In fact, Shewry demonstrated the versatility of bivalves by preparing his two-meal mussels on the Weekend Feasts episode of The Cook Up with Adam Liaw earlier this year.

With this handy recipe, he turned a kilo of black mussels into a two-in-one dish: a broth flavoured with basil stems, potatoes, lemon and the mollusc shells as well as a separate meal that highlighted the bivalves – hot from the pan and dressed with freshly squeezed lemon.

Chef Ben Shewry shares how to cook with mussels. Credit: Colin Page

On my podcast, he shares a version of this recipe that’s even more free-form and flexible.

"One of the ways that I like to cook mussels is by heating a large saucepan until it's quite hot, nothing in it, popping the mussels into the pot, maybe with a half cup of water or the classic white wine, putting a lid on, steaming them until they're just open. And then I like to pick the mussels out of the shells and you can use them in a salad and a risotto and a pasta, you can have them just as a bowlful," he says.

You can have them just as a bowlful.

"But all of the juice that's in the bottom of that saucepan, I like to use that to make a soup from, so you can add things like leeks, onions and potatoes, celery and carrots and you can make a really delicious, like, a light chowder, kind of – by sweating the onions and garlic off and then adding the mussel juice to it and that's like a delicious, delicious stock and far better than any cubes that you might buy, that's for sure."

He even adds the shells to the compost, to make it a completely no-waste dish – although he admits it will take a while for the mussels to fully biodegrade.

If you need another excuse to make this, The Cook Up episode points out that mussels are one of the most affordable proteins you can get, particularly in Victoria. This recipe was sparked by hunger relief charity Foodbank asking Shewry for a simple, accessible meal idea that would help people stretch their dollar.

There's also research that shows mussels are a great source of omega-3 fats, while also having a light footprint on the environment if you have to be further convinced about why the shellfish is good for the budget, environment and your diet.

As for the mussel shells featuring his supplier Lance Wiffen, the chef still has those portraits (they're worth preserving and not compost-destined material). And for anyone wanting to experience Wiffen’s mussel-harvesting knowledge, it's possible to visit the waters where his shellfish are cultivated.

"His company is called Sea Bounty Mussels and has just started taking people on boat tours out into the bay," Shewry says. "The care of his farm, in the mussels, is something beautiful [to witness]. If you have the slightest interest, it's a great day out."

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