This plateau de mer, or seafood tower,
is going to cost you three, four hundred dollars in a restaurant. I can show you
how to do it for under $100 and it's easy and it's fun and you're gonna have
a great time doing it. Plateau de mer 101. My favorite way to cook shellfish is just to poach it in a court-bouillon. So I have an old head of celery here. Quarter a lemon, give it a crush with your hands, you don't need to
pull all the juice out, the hot water will do that. I've got some bay leaf. All
of those flavors will be heightening your eating experience. I can start to
smell the lemon and the celery in the onion and bay. I'm actually gonna add quarter cup or so, third of a cup of white wine and the reason is the alcohol
there will help pull more flavors out of these wonderful aromatics that are there
into that boiling water. But once I see some nice movement and consistent boiling I will plunge my lobsters into the water. I will put my lid on top so that it comes back to a boil faster. Alright, let's put some water to a boil with some aromatics. I have bay leaf, I have celery, I have onion. I'm going to add some white wine. Some thyme. Maybe some parsley, why not? All of those flavors you will be able to taste in the shellfish. I love working
with Chinese steamers and the reason is they're made in sizes that fit inside
all of the pans that I have, but more importantly, it allows me to build from
the bottom up with the things that take the most time to cook. I'm gonna detach the legs of this Alaskan king crab.This has already been cooked, it just needs to be heated through again. I have the legs and then I have the body that has all of
this incredible meat in there. Put those legs, divide this and the reason that I
separated the joint, is that when I ultimately plate this I want big pieces
of meat that correspond to the sections of the animal as well. Let's make a layer of muscles. These muscles have been cleaned and debearded. If you want to know how to clean and debeard a muscle, just go on to andrewzimmern.com and find the video. Next layer. Let's put shrimp in here because i'm
gonna shuck my clams and oysters and why not use some of this incredible seaweed. Most of the time they'll just give you this for free. A lot of the goods that come to the seafood shop are packed in it. You can use it to temper your seafood,
and what i mean by that is that even though steaming is fairly gentle, it is a
lot of heat. The bigger shelve items that I have like the mussels and the crab are
not gonna feel a lot of that energy, but the shrimp I don't want to get too tough.
The slower that you cook shrimp, the more tender that it is. I put the seaweed
there, I sort of buffer the steam and it's gonna stay in there a little longer
and it's gonna cook a little slower which actually is beneficial, and you can
see we're steaming there and how easy it is to check. As my different items for my
plateau de mer become ready, I want to take them out, because we want to cool
them down, and the first thing that's ready is our crab because we just want it warmed through. Shake my muscles around. See how nice a bamboo steamer is? You just take
out a whole section. If you wanted to serve these hot to people as an hors
d'oeuvre and just let them dip them in seasoned butter on the table, you can
just plunk that down on a towel. I mean look at how beautiful those are. I
just want them to cool down. You're gonna have to trust me, I can smell the seaweed
and the lemon and the celery and the onion and the bay coming off of
that shrimp and crab. It really does make a difference building those layers of
flavor. Now that this is rested for about 10 minutes, I'm just gonna cool this down by covering it in ice and letting that ice melt over it. Our lobsters have cooked through, I usually like to let them be in the court-bouillon and come back
to a boil, and then go about 10, 12 minutes. Let them rest for four or five minutes. Right now, it's 212 degrees inside those lobsters and you can just let that rest for five, six, seven minutes and any doubt about them being cooked
through will be eliminated. We have our cooked
crabs and shrimp. We have our mussels. Some clams and oysters. We have our
lobster. Let's build our platter which is so much fun once you have all the pieces. We have our herbed aioli. We have our cocktail sauce. We have our house-made
mignonette. Take some pink peppercorns, crush them and just put them on the top
there. Sometimes it's really nice to take some pieces of seaweed, it makes it so
festive. On the bottom, let's put our lobster. Make sure that the tail meat is
loosened so it's easy for my guests to have at it. Use one of your lobster heads
and tuck that into the ice. Take my two claws, take off the small piece of the
claw, take off the knuckle and then, whether you want to work with the
scissor or the back of your knife. It's nice just to leave those sitting up. Here
we have our shrimp and crab that have been cooling and all you want to do, heal your shrimp. Working with a small knife make a thin incision down your shrimp.
Make sure there's no vein in there, Lay those around the side. Next
thing to come out of here gonna be some of my big pieces of crab. I can just
crack these sections, make a little stack of those there. Take a look at this, find
the flat end, but all I want to do is peel this back so that I can make a nice
safe cut for myself because there is connective tissue in there. And then we
pull out that spine that runs down the piece of crab meat and then I always
like to give it a little slide back and forth, just to make sure it's freed from
its shell. Then we'll just lay that bigger piece right there. Now we have the
sausage down below, you can duplicate up top, or you can use that to put all of
your shucked shellfish on. Put the oysters on one side, the clams on another. It's just nice to do it that way. Lemons for the top, lemons for the bottom.
Mussels are one of my favorite foods and I want to honor them. I just take a little bit of olive oil and sherry wine vinegar. Make sure to season it with a little bit of salt. And then every muscle that goes on to this platter, I based. I know this seems like a ridiculous extra step, but it
makes your plateau de mer so delicious, and there you have it. This right here is
an epically awesome plateau de mer, seafood tower, with great sauces. This looks almost too pretty to eat, but you know something, I'm hungry.
Plateau de mer 101. Cross it off your list.
