Cozze al Forno

Olivia perfected this recipe for our Festa della Donna celebration in March. Seriously, we and our guests couldn’t keep our hands off them- each table probably had about three plates at a time.

The dish ‘Cozze al Ripiene’, stuffed mussels—which you can find renditions of from the North to the South of Italy—was the initial inspiration for the mussels on our Festa della Donna celebration in March.

I fell in love with ‘Cozze al Ripiene’ at Antica Trattoria Centro in Liguria where it was one of roughly eight rounds in an “antipasti di mare” (seafood appetizers) we ordered. This Italian trattoria that served up never ending plates of house-cured fish, marinated anchovies, crudi (raw fish) and crustaceans was truly my dream. When the Cozze al Ripiene finally arrived my mind was particularly blown. At first, I didn’t realize the mussels were stuffed at all. Served inside their closed shells and stewed in a light tomato sauce, the breading was modest in proportion, exceptionally light, and somehow literally inside the meat of the mussel, with plump orange flesh encapsulating the filling on all sides. I was confused and, to be honest, a bit tipsy on a delightful frizzante (bubbly) that had been vinified only 15 km away (only in Italy, man). I snapped a few photos and promised to figure out exactly what the fuck I was eating at a later date. 

When Emilia and I started working on a Southern Italian Festa della Donna party, I once again thought about those mussels. But there was a thematic problem—Liguria is in Northern Italy.  Luckily, Italy has alotta coastline, and while Ligurians may be more apt to include mortadella in this dish, in the South—specifically, in Puglia—they often use pecorino and/or tuna instead. Sicily also has a version. Wild.

After more deliberation, we created a dish inspired by these memories, but that was more conducive to passing around a party. Rather than asking folks to pry open their crustaceans and mop up a tomato sauce (trust me, you would not want to miss a drop of that sauce), we decided to broil a mussel on the half-shell. Still using the plumpest mussels we could find (shout out to Wild Local Seafood in LA!), garlic, crunchy breadcrumbs, and parsley, plus some additional aromatics, chili, and a touch of anise liquor, we present you a mussel dish for entertaining or for crushing solo, that anyone can pull off. And stay tuned, as I just may still come up with even more Cozze al Ripiene recipes.

~Olivia

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Thank you to @grandma_camera for actually being the best photographer. Need a food photo guy? or a documentary photo guy? please DM him and follow his insta, he really just kills it.

“These are addictive”

“What?”

“These are addictive".

“Yeah” *nom nom nom*