You can now order a Fruits de Mer platter for home, ready to eat
Nothing is as festive as a glorious Fruits de Mer platter full of all kinds of delicious things from the sea. For a summery lunch or an exclusive dinner for two, you can wake me up for it. And Fish Tales is now making it very easy for you to bring this French classic to the table at home…
A platter of crackling-fresh seafood, served on a bed of crushed ice, with a matching bottle (or two) of refreshing white wine, is hard to resist. According to the official rules of classic French cuisine (Larousse Gastronomique), a Fruits de Mer platter must contain at least oysters, cockles, mussels, king prawns, langoustines, lobster and optionally crab or sea urchins. But of course, you can put anything you like on it.
Deliciously local
Fish Tales is now making it very easy for you to bring this French classic to the table at home. You can now order your own platter online, with seafood sourced from, among other places, the waters of Zeeland and the North Sea. The best part: you can put together the platter entirely to your own taste. Think Zeeland flat oysters and Zeeland mussels, Wadden Sea cockles, whelks, periwinkles and razor clams. But also palourdes (which are carpet shells), North Sea crab and unpeeled cooked Dutch shrimp. Summer is the perfect season for catching all this beauty from the sea fresh, and therefore close to home.
Ready to eat
All the crustaceans and shellfish (with the exception of the oysters) have been pre-cooked or steamed and can therefore be placed on the table just like that – ready to eat – . For an extra Zeeland touch, you can order the matching Zeeland white wine (Johanniter Cuvee, from Wijnhoeve ’t Biezenhof) and Zeeland bread (pain de mer) as well. The Fish Tales online webshop also offers two Fruits de Mer menus for anyone who finds it difficult to choose. A Classic Menu (for beginners, so to speak) or the exclusive Royal Menu, for true enthusiasts.
Definitely Zeeland
The sustainable fish brand Fish Tales – once co-founded by fish expert, cookbook author and FavorFlav friend Bart van Olphen – works worldwide (and in the Netherlands too) with small fishing communities that fish with respect for nature. All products for the Fruits de Mer are MSC-certified or rated green on the fish guide. The mussels and oysters, for example, are cultivated in the wild in Zeeland by Neeltje Jans. These mussels and oysters bear the 100% Zeker Zeeuws quality mark, a guarantee that the Zeeland mussels, oysters and razor clams have actually grown in Zeeland’s waters. The cockles are hand-raked from the salty Wadden Sea. Other crustaceans and shellfish come from Zeeland-based Seafarm, owned by the fishing family Bout, which is known for its sustainable shellfish (and its excellent restaurant on the Oosterschelde), which are refined in their own tanks with water from the Oosterschelde. Now that the Oosterschelde lobster season has been closed since mid-July, the lobsters are sourced from Nova Scotia, Canada. After being transported, the lobsters are kept alive in tanks at Neeltje Jans.
Image: David Loftus
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