I went scalloping yesterday. Had a blast, but I have never cooked scallops before. Any suggestions?

Planning on cooking them quickly in olive oil if I can't find any better recipes.

Did this the other day with noodles and cream sauce.

Salt and pepper on the scallops.

Would do it again.

Thank I may try that.

wrap in BACON, place on grille for 5 min. --turn--cook for 3 min--eat. HMMMMMMMMMMM GOOD--

Did you get Bay Scallops or Sea scallops. I'd guess Bay scallops based on your location. For something this fresh I would never want to cover up that delicate flavor. I love theese little gems cooked over charcoal on aluminum foil with just a little butter, lemon, S&P.
Scallops are one of the foods I really enjoy fried as well. The list is pretty endless. Pan seared, Cold smoked. Seviche. Newburg.
But my favorites are the simple ones. Grilled, fried or seviche.

Dave

Saute them in butter and then squirt lemon on them while still in the pan. Remove them. Turn up the heat on the liquid in the pan. Add to the liquid a quarter cup of white wine mixed with a teaspoon of corn starch and stir while boiling till desired thickness. Salt to taste. Pour over scallops. Sprinkle on some chopped fresh Italian parsley.

No phleeease not corn starch slurry over fresh scallops. For something this fresh and delicate at least attempt a beurre blanc and if you really need to stabilize the sauce use fresh heavy cream so you finish with beurre nantais.

My favorite way!!

The "slurry" is only the combo of cornstarch and a cool liquid. Once you add it to the butter and lemon juice and boil and stir it, it becomes part of a delicate and delicious sauce. You don't pour the slurry over the scallops.

My late dad and I used to go scalloping in Niantic Bay in CT. Back then the limit was 3 bushel baskets each. We dredged them up with a steel basket connected to a 10' pole while standing in a rowboat.

You throw out everything but the single muscle. That muscle tastes best to me raw. If you cook them do what tastes best to you but they don't need to be over cooked. Of course we eat raw oysters and clams here as well. Not sure about FL.

It's still corn strarch slurry and once you bring it to temp it's going to thicken. If you use even a little too much or do not bring it up to 170 it will taste like starch or be unbalanced. You are already using butter and lemon as well as reducing white wine. A beurre blanc would be a much much better choice and if you are worried about breaking the sauce just add double cream instead of your corn starch slury. If you finish that of with a liason finale which is a schmancy way of saying remove the sauce from the heat and wisk in cold pats of butter it will tighten up as well. The only reason to use corn starch would be to save less than $2.00 on cream. If it's a health issue then you need to skip the butter any how.
Technically incorrect (beurre blanc does not have cream) here is a video that demonstrates the technique. Also I would suggest using fresh lemon juice for this application Vs the white wine vinegar.

http://video.epicurious.com/?fr_story=bd87b4b5cf4d831f7714f84939d7db677c3fbe30&rf=sitemap

My neighbors went out to Crystal River and brought back two gallons of bay scallops.
They shucked them, dipped them in milk, then breading, and fried the little guys until golden brown.

Sounds like you might have had some training as a chef. Did you study the subject?

That looks delicious. Thanks for the video. My mother makes that suace for salmon, but never told me how to make it. I intend to give it a try.

The huge scallops we get direct from the boats here are the best!!! Raw works for me. Barely grilled on skewers is hard to beat. Overcooking scallops is grounds for mutiny.

Ceviche is quite acceptable, too.

Yes and I just wanted to say there is nothing wrong with your sauce or the concept. However when you use starch, arrowroot etc as a binder you must cook it out. If it's too thick you thin it or if it's overly thin you add more slurry. You can't just stop when you think it's the proper thickness or the results will be dissapointing.
Some time in the 80's IIR the ACF chef of the year for Fl did a sauce like yours but I believe he incorporated caramobola and blood oranges. Your sauce will work very well on fin fish especially that which has any sort of coating that will offer a texture contrast such as flour dredged grouper or whitfish encrusted with oatmeal or walleye with sweet and white potato scales. But I find the starch texture just not to my liking for shellfish in general.
Your just so close to a classic sauce and it's not difficult at all. You can add any imaginable element to beurre blanc. I did a tomato cucumber beurre blanc on poached salmon escallops on one menu.
You can also switch to red wine and turn your sauce to beurre rouge. Disneys Flying Fish at the boardwalk in Orlando did a potato encrusted snapper with beurre rouge as a signature dish.
Either way just have fun with it and try some of theese out. Some times they use really big names for stuff that is just not difficult at all.

I just noticed your avatar is a chef with a huge chef's knife.

Just made a Scallops last week when were on Cape Cod!

Charcoal grill
Large Scallops
Sprinkle of Paul Prudhomes everything spice

Made a sauce of

Butter
Splash of Paddy's Irish whiskey
Cream
Little Crushed black pepper
Spinkle of dried red peppers
reduced to thick

Sauce on the plate, added the Scallops. They were great right of the grill, sauce or without sauce!

Followed those up with a lobster race, with all race participants getting boiled in seawater, then they were gone!

My latest obsession on how to eat scallops is to make egg wash and dip one side of each big juicy sea scallop in and plop in a plate of seasoned bread crumbs and parmigiano cheese. Don't flip it, just let it adhere to the top. Now in a little butter and light oil like canola, fry the scallop crispy on the breaded side (the cheese makes crispy quickly) and give a quick turn on the other and serve. I like them like that. I'm also giving littlenecks the same treatment and frying them crumb side down in ...... wholesome bacon fat! Wow are they good!

I eat oysters raw and have eaten the muscle in scallops raw too. Is there any reason the entire scallop can't be eaten rather than just the muscle ?

Only if you want to get sick and die!! I grew up on the east coast (Bay of Funday) and fished in draggers and seiners. Often we were among the scallop fleet. As said: everything goes over the side except the muscle. We're a long way from the east coast now in central Canada, but whenever my wife and I celebrate an anniversary we eat at Red Lobster. Just recently we celebrated our 51st and we both loved the scallops (along with shrimp, lobster tail, etc). We both like them pan fried in butter-but don't overcook them. I've eaten them raw, fresh out of the sea.

Skate wings and a 2" pipe......

I wound up cook a little bacon and then dropping them in and a cooking them with a little pepper. They were good.

You asked for it with the scallops wrapped in bacon thing! I've made trays and trays of scallops wrapped in bacon for weddings, parties, etc. I put sea scallops seasoned flour, egg wash, then bread crumbs with salt, pepper, and red pepper. Then wrap with bacon and bake off at 400 degrees until crispy. I did a wedding where the bride, groom, and a lot of the guests were vegetarians. There was curried eggplant, hummus cakes, all kinds of Indian Fare. They gave a distasteful glare at my bacon coming out of the kitchen but they ate all my scallops, a good fifteen pounds worth before they touched the other stuff. I have trouble these days covering fifteen dollar a pound "caught this morning" with bacon. Too delicate and sweet.

AkMtnHtr
I suppose you have seen my rants before about the pipe thing... But I am lit anyway! The muscles skates use to move their wings are long tapered cords which can easily be removed from the matrix and chopped to length. Far better than halibut IMO.
art

Actually I haven't seen your rants but I was always curious on how legit that rumour might be. Thanks for the clarification.

Restaurants in RI try to pass off skate wings as scallops. There should be a membrane or at least a remnant of one to be found in your scallop plate. We have enough demand for fishmarkets to stock skate wings, and I've had them in Chinese and Italian soups. They're delicate like a scallop, but they flake like fish in a soup. I think I can tell them apart, but I'm sure the scallops I ate in all those tv dinners growing up weren't all scallops.

Galilee takes in more fish than any port in the Country and we used to buy scallops from the fishermen's co-ops to benefit charities. Like the Cancer Society sells Daffodils every Spring, some charity used to sell scallops. Seafood is plentiful and really fresh here.

Rob
Thought your comment about the size of the landings was way off... Glad I checked first.
http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/pls/webpls/MF_LPORT_YEARD.RESULTS

I'm trying your link (not found), and have googled it myself. I can't find "busiest fishing port" hits anywhere but back at University, we were always told Galilee was the busiest in terms of fish landed. I found Kodiak used to be the second busiest in a little blurb, but nothing about Galilee. We had studies there though in Marine Affairs classes (URI had the only MS program in Marine Affairs in the US too), and saw everything from lobster to squid to swordfish come in. The George's banks lobster fleet, the tuna fleet, scallop fleet, the Stellwagon cod fleet, clam draggers, ground fish fleet... are all out of Galilee.

To tell a real (bay) scallop you must see a membrane on the side of each scallop. The membrane runs top to bottom and is a lighter color than the scallop itself. You eat the membrane also of course.

This picture from the net shows the membrane being removed from a bay scallop. I would not bother to do this myself. They taste fine to me.

"Hand model discarding the tough crescent-shaped membrane at the side of the scallop."

Link

All scallops have a membrane that is commonly removed from the adductor muscle. You do not typically eat the membrane as it is slightly tough but most of the scallop is edible. In many countries scallops are left with the roe still attached instead of just serving the adductor muscle. There are a few hundred sub-species of scallops. The bay scallop (Argopecten irradians) is much smaller than the sea scallop (Placopecten magellanicus). Calico scallops are even smaller but I haven't seen those in a while.

A few years ago we were down near Englewood, Fl (placida) and we got into a pod of stingrays and caught several. They were big'uns and we caught them untill our arms ached. We kept one to find out once and for all if anything on them resembled a sea scallop since I had heard that rumor all my life. Tolerating the bloody mess that it was, we did a total necropsy on the beast and we even fried part of the wings. NOTHING that we found resembled a scallop although the meat was not too bad. We cut down thru the wings skinned the body, took the thing all apart and I just cant believe that sea scallops come from sting rays. Not sure how a "skate" is different so can't speak to that.

Sea scallops do not come from Rays or Skate wings. They are their own beast. Some underhanded companies do press or stamp fake sea scallops but the texture and consistant size, shape and thickness is a dead give away.
Skate wings are indeed pretty darn tasty and I have a bone to pick with Ray's since they seem to not like Yankees from Michigan.

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2008/Mar/20/stingray-kills-sunbathing-woman-florida-keys/

AFTERUM
tapered cords of muscle attach along the body and run straight out to the tips of the wings, inserting on the segmented cartilege "bones". There are matching cords top and body and they are set in a very orderly matrix of fatty tissue.

Pulling the cords out is no trick and cutting them into uniform sections is equally easy. I see no way that a sharpened pipe could be used to do the deed.

I prefer them to almost any ordinary white fish, including halibut... but not yelloweye rockfish and probably not lingcod or black/dusky rockfish.

I will make an effort either with Gr8ful Doug or the next trip to catch some and photo-document how it is done and what it looks like. They are worth the effort.
art

I do not agree with this at all. I have two pounds of bay scallops here and I have been eating them raw as I almost always do. The membrane can not be detected by me as the scallop gets chewed and down it goes. Like wise this treat is the cats favorite snack by far.

I have been eating this 'membrane' for 60 years. Its good!


Bay Scallops
$3.99 lb.
Save $2 lb.

http://www.pricechopper.com/

I eat a lot of scallops , and it's hard to go through a plate without finding at least one the cooks missed. I feel better when I get one in a plate, it's almost reassuring. You've also got to be careful about freshness. We don't see "Diver Scallops" here, and freshness is definitely an issue. Sometimes fried scallop batter will be full of liquid, and I have to believe that it's the same liquid they use to plump up scallops and make them look better. The stuff you see them floating in down the market. I try to buy "dry" scallops where I can.

Aren't you the one that posted the photo of removing the membrane above?
If you intend to eat the membrane there is no need to remove it.
I'm not sure what you dissagree about. As I said most of the scallop is edible and that certainly includes more than just the membrane, at least those that aren't as tuff as gristle.
The membrane on a sea scallop is a wee bit larger and tougher than a bay scallop. The quality and sub-specie of your scallops will make a difference. The fact remains that the majority of scallops consumed in the USA are cleaned to just the adductor muscle irrespective of what is edible.

I agree Rob. Dry scallops are so much better than the soaked or chemical treated scallops. They don't even look the same. The dry scallops sear and taste so much better.

How do you make sure you're not getting scallops that have been soaked in something to make them look plump?

You should have read my post first. To repeat it this is what I wrote in my second post in this thread.

"This picture from the net shows the membrane being removed from a bay scallop. I would not bother to do this myself. They taste fine to me."

My wife just returned from Rhode Island on Wednesday and brought some fresh steamers back with her. She spent a day on Block Island with some friends and then picked up the clams. New England clams are the sweetest clams and nothing on the west coast that I have had can touch them. The wife also mentioned something about Galilee, might be where she got them. Amazingly, they all made it here with not 1 broken shell.

I could say exactly the same thing. I have no idea what your point is. Sorry. Simply because the membrane is edible doesn't mean that most want to consume it. I stand by what I said 100%. You do not typically eat the membrane. Feel free to dissagree. My wife does on a regular basis. LOL

Hopefully you can buy from a reliable fish monger. That's a good start as chemical free or diver scallops will be appropriatly marked and priced. If they are plump, white and swimming in liquid then they are soaked. Dry scallops have more of a brownish-pink tint. Fresh scallops have a very pronounced smell while soaked or treated scallops have no odor or a faint soap smell.

Thanks. I have a pretty good fish monger nearby. I will look into it.

In one of the recent Costco magazines, there was an article about scallops. They made a point to say that the Costco scallops are not soaked in the chemical stuff to keep them plumped up. They further made the point that their scallops are superior for that exact reason.

I just came back from Publix, and the guy there said their scallops are dry, and not soaked in anything.

I lived in Florida for several years and never saw dry scallops in a Publix. Things do change but Publix or super markets are not a place that are typically going to carry that kind of product. They are far more expensive and do not have as long of a shelf life. Just be aware that some people won't have a clue about the difference and will tell you what you want to hear. Don't even get me started on that pasteurized imported crab that gets labeled as "blue swimming crab" that gets passed off as MD Blue crab. It's not even the same subspecies let alone from this continent.
The sea scallops that Costco put in out on the weekends (seafood road show) are positivly treated. Worse yet they thaw WAY to many then refreeze them. They may however have some dry scallops in the freezer section and the stores do not all carry the same products so things could be different at other Costco's. I have not seen dry scallops there yet but I will look in the freezer section tomorrow.

Clams from Block Island to Alaska without breaking a shell? Pretty good deal. I have to tell you that all my out of State relatives that come and visit fly back with lobsters. Now I've heard that lobsters from "other" waters aren't as good, but the fact is I can't tell a Maine lobster from a Canadian from a Narragansett Bay bug. Quahogs (wild ones) are sort of unique to us so it would make more sense to bring back littlenecks. Steamers even. From us up to Nova Scotia, they're really good. Ours have purple, blue shells with wild colors, up North, they're white as snow. Good though. Chatham (Cape Cod) actually has a pink steamer called a Champagne Clam. Boy are they good. A friend and I once ate a bushel together at a clam boil. That's 55 lbs of steamers. We each had to buy another ticket out of deep feelings of guilt and remorse.

Our Costcos have incredible HUGE AK scallops (often larger than 3" in diameter) that are incredible. They are processed and frozen at sea and not soaked. They are bulletproof in the freezer and about my favorite seafood...

The large sea scallops that Costco carries here and they put out on weekends in the road show are a USA product. No idea if they are from AK. They are not marked chemical free but are marked previously frozen. They are soaked and treated. If you see them thawed and they are swimming in water you know for sure. Those are $10.50 a pound here.
They also carry Atlantic sea scallops that they claim are not treated. $20 for 2# bags in the freezer. The freezer food is usually the stuff they write about in the magazine as it's pretty available nation wide.
Once I try the frozen ones I'll try to remember to post about the quality.

I showed the bay scallops that I have here to my wife and I pointed out the membrane on the side of each scallop. I asked her if she ever tasted the membrane or detected that its not tender.

She said no, that she has always eaten the bay scallops as she saw them here. In fact they don't vary here in CT from what I showed her.

My wife is very fussy. She would not eat that membrane if she could detect it. I am sure of that.

For some reason you and I are on a disconnect on bay scallops nor have you commented on eating them raw. I am where they are caught, I have caught them, opened them in the boat and eaten them there in the boat. The membrane is good and part of the New England bay scallop..

The main reason the wife traveled back with steamers is because we can't get good steamer clams up here and we can buy Maine lobsters at a local supermarket in Anchorage. As much as I love lobster, I love good NE steamers just as much, they are sweet and way more tasty than their west coast counterparts.

I finally got around to testing the Frozen "all natural" sea scallops from Costco. I do believe they are chemical free but they are not a true dry scallop but rather IQF. They are all coated with water so expect to loose at least 3 ounces per pound. Because of this the quality was lower than I had hoped for and scallops like this are very difficult to sear properly. Some simply fall apart as they thaw. Having said that they were only $10 a pound and they were tasty. I'm not sure I would buy them again but they are better than the scallops they use in the seafood road show.

Scallops here are through the roof here right now. Must be you all buying them up. There's a lot of reasonable lobster and swordfish around though.

I haven't seen a nice piece of swordfish in a long time. I could go for a nice grilled swordfish steak or maybe some Wahoo.

Bay scallops were $3.99 lb here at the Price Chopper. The usual price is $5.99 lb. I got two bags. They are all gone this week.

We're up to about $14 - $15 for sea scallops right now. Swordfish is under ten. We get cut offs for $4 or so which are plenty good. We're quickly approaching the time of year when all our restaurants add $6 to $10 to a plate of clams because of "availability." I'd hate to get that with scallops too. I love seafood platters but spending almost double for one would be a deterrent. An interesting aside, I had fresh bluefin my friend caught Saturday, and I asked if they ate the collars. They said they chuck em. I am dying to grill a tuna collar ala Iron Chef and will be losing sleep until they get another and bring me home that interesting piece of fish flesh to grill.

$8.99 here


All Natural Colossal Sea Scallops
$8.99 lb.

Grilling a tuna collar sounds like fun Rob. I hope they don't toss the cheeks. You are lucky you are so near all that seafood. How was the bluefin?