Typical advice for freezing mussels is to cook them and freeze the meat covered by liquid or blanch them (like 20 seconds) in boiling water and freeze them in the shell. Then, you can cook them from frozen or gently thaw. My own preference would be to eat them fresh or if I froze them, they'd be in a soup or chowder (without the shells).
Thanks everybody for your responses to my question on cooking/freezing mussles. The only reason I asked is I am getting conflicting advice on cooking them from TV cooking shows and chefs on TV and in cookbooks in general. Some of them say if they don't open after cooking then throw them out, and if they are open before cooking and won't close then throw them out, but I have read in cookbooks that you can freeze them straight away, as soon as you buy them and if your not going to cook them straight away, then its fine to use later. But when I have actually asked people what they would do, most people have told me to throw the frozen ones out and only use fresh ones to cook with. I just thought that if you can freeze other seafood and cook with it after it is thawed, then why not with mussles, I'm just a tad confused . Thanks once again.
I have never heard it's unsafe to freeze mussels in the shell. I don't know why it would be. I do it all the time and so do my friends and family. We always cook them from the frozen state, but I have heard people defrosting them in water. I think that would affect their flavor and they cook very quickly from frozen. If you are worried it's unsafe, you can also cook them first and freeze them with some of the liquid. I would use those mussels in a soup or fish stew.
5 Comments
If a mussel will not close, it is dead. Don't eat it.