legend_018 said:
I'm reading the recipe and at one point it just says:
Add the smoked salmon. It mentions nothing about cooking it. So I think I'll have to try to find the ones you mention about being fully cooked already. I might have to ask at the market.
......
Fill a bowl with cold water, and set the clams in to rinse. Leave for at least 30 minutes.
...
In a large soup pot, bring the stock, wine and clams to a boil and reduce slightly, about 10 minutes.
and finally toward the end of the recipe it says:
Discard any clams that haven’t opened.
When do I actually take the clams OUT of the shells based on those steps above?
Like someone said, salmon can be cold-smoked or hot-smoked. A recipe that calls for smoked salmon is usually looking for the hot-smoked salmon. By hot-smoked, they mean that the temperature inside the smoking chamber was higher than room temperature. The temperature is rarely set very high because they want the smoke to permeate the fillet and don't want to overcook the fish.
About clams: When you buy your clams, they should all be tightly closed. A clam that's open when you get it is a dead clam. When you cook a live clam by steaming it, it will gradually open up. The ones that don't open are often ones that you'll find full of sand, with no sign of the clam itself.
Strain the clam juice well with either multiple layers of cheesecloth or a single layer of filter paper. Make sure to slice the bellies open and clean them out, because even after leaving them in cold water for 30 minutes before steaming they will be chockfull of undigested stuff that they ate previously. This isn't necessary with mussels, because they don't live buried in the sand and muck like clams, and their guts remain fairly clean.
If you bought the clams from a seafood department that has live clam aquariums, letting them rinse themselves out in water for 30 minutes probably accomplishes nothing, since there's usually no food or sand in those aquariums. But when I've dug my own clams, I've always let the clams sit for 3 or 4 hours in the sink full of cold water before steaming them, just to let them filter a bunch of sand out. Some people say to add some salt to the water if the clams came from salt water. Makes sense, I guess, because I don't know how long an ocean clam will live in a sink full of fresh water.
[Funny side comment: Apparently there's some kind of auto-censor on this forum. I tried to write "salt water" as one word, and it put asterisks in place of the letters t-w- a- t. Ooops!]