Greenshell Mussels in Saffron & Coconut Bisque

I was backpacking in New Zealand around the turn of the year, and since I was on a budget, I bought at least one meal a day from a supermarket. Each and every store carried a huge selection of mussel products: pickled, fresh, smoked, barbecued or baked into pies.

My favourites were the smoked mussels in barbecue sauce. They were eaten cold, and still came very close to the chicken wings I loved so much in America. The garlic ones and the plain smoked ones were just as good. Kiwis eat pies everywhere, petrol stations included, so it was only a matter of time before I found a pie with mussels in it. I did, and the creamy mussel filling and the rich puff pastry crust went down very well as I sat eating out of the wind at the edge of a vineyard. On my last evening, in Thames, I met a Briton who had come to New Zealand and never gone home. A big smile spread over his face when I said I liked the mussels, because he was addicted to them too. Before long he had conjured up the business card of a smokehouse in the north of the island and told me to ask them how smoked mussels are made.

What all these products had in common was the species, the Greenshell or Perna canaliculus. The same mussels were also called green-bearded or green-lipped mussels, but Greenshell is the official trademarked name. The rim of the shell really is green, and I am told these mussels live nowhere but in New Zealand waters. I soon found out that the Greenshell is a true New Zealand staple and a major export item too. Back home I also read that the mussels are farmed on ropes hung in the sea, and that one of the big farming areas is the Firth of Thames, the very bay on whose shore I had my mussel conversation.

I fell in love with these Kiwi mussels and was afraid I would not find them back in Finland. To my big surprise and even greater relief, my local Asian market had them. Even the price was attractive, €6.00 per kilo ($3.25 per lb). The mussels were frozen, in half shells.

Blue mussels are native to Scandinavia and northern Europe, but they don't offer much to eat. A Greenshell has three to four times as much meat for its shell. You can see in the picture, too, that the mussels are quite big and meaty. Some of the meats are orange and some are cream-coloured. I did not know before this that you can tell a mussel's sex by its colour, but apparently the orange ones are females and the pale ones males.

When I was looking for a recipe for my Greenshells, I discovered a young Kiwi chef, Garth Hokianga, who is known for his trademark combination of healthy and delicious food. Garth has worked as a personal chef for Dustin Hoffman and for the Sultan of Brunei, and a résumé like that is good enough for me.

His bisque is half coconut milk and half chicken stock. I smashed the lemongrass and the ginger with the back of a knife, as the recipe says, and fished them out at the end. Only a quarter of a teaspoon of saffron went in, but it was enough to colour the whole soup yellow. The recipe is written for fresh mussels, which open as they simmer in the liquid. Mine were frozen, so I boiled them separately straight from the freezer, three minutes counting from the first big bubbles, and added the meat to the bisque only at the end.