The Spruce Eats: What Are Mussels? Mussels are bivalves that you can cook easily with little fuss and get mussel meat recipes garlic classic dish regarded as culinary art. Learn how take them from the seafood counter to your plate. Danilo Alfaro has published more than 800 recipes and tutorials focused on making complicated culinary techniques approachable to home cooks.

Serve them in a big bowl with hunks of crusty bread for soaking up the cooking liquid for a traditional presentation. Or try them with pasta or over rice. A type of bivalve mollusk, mussels are similar to clams and oysters. They grow in saltwater habitats up and down the Atlantic coast from the Arctic to Virginia.

The PEI mussels frequently found in grocery stores and served at restaurants in the United States come from Prince Edward Island, Canada’s largest producer of Mytilus edulis, a species commonly known as the blue mussel for its shell color. Most of the mussels you’re likely to see at the seafood counter have dark blue, black, or sometimes green shells. They may also have stringy little “beards” sticking out of their shells, which you should pull off or trim with kitchen shears. In the old days, you had to flush sand out of fresh mussels. The process involved soaking them in water with a bit of cornmeal, and it was a bit of a hassle.

Now commercial mussels are either farmed or they’ve already been flushed, so you generally don’t need to worry about grittiness anymore. Get rid of any mussels with wide-open, cracked or discolored shells. A fresh mussel should smell like the sea—salty and a little sweet—so toss out any that don’t smell good. Mussels are so easy to prepare, you could dump them in a dry pan and cook them over medium-high heat, covered, until their shells open and they release their fragrant liquor. Then you can stir in some butter and black pepper and serve them with crusty bread for dunking in the gorgeous liquid.