It wasn’t that many years ago that if you didn’t live near the coast, fresh seafood simply was not available. When we made a rare visit to the beach, a seafood restaurant was high on the list of priorities.
It wasn’t until I moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast that seafood became a regular part of my diet. Seafood always was a real treat but to have seafood shops and restaurants so readily available was and remains a real treat.
But there was one big problem — there were so many choices. What the heck was I going to get? I loved it all. Fried shrimp, fish and oysters, crab cakes and scallops. The only logical decision was a seafood platter with a little bit of everything! That was a good idea, but it was also a bit of a compromise.
My favorite of all were scallops. Scallops come in several sizes, 10/20 (to the pound), 20/30, and the much bigger U-10 and the huge U-8. There are two basic kinds of scallops: bay scallops and sea scallops. As the name implies, bay scallops are caught in the shallow water of bays and tend to be sweeter and tender. Sea scallops are more common, found in deeper water and are much larger. There are also diver and dayboat scallops, but that refers to the method used to catch them. Diver scallops are caught by hand and do less ecological damage than gathering by dragging a weighted net. Dayboat scallops are gathered by net and only stay out to sea for one day, insuring their freshness.
I love all varieties of scallops, but the real trick for a delicious scallop is the cooking method. Pan seared is the preferred method, but the problem is that it requires an extremely hot pan. For the home cook that can be a big problem. Most home stoves barely have 10k BTUs, but a decent restaurant stove has at least 30k BTUs. That’s quite a difference.
The objective in cooking a proper scallop is to sear the surface so that it has a light crust and is just barely done in the middle. Nothing is worse than an over done scallop. It may take some practice to get this right.
Use a light neutral oil with a high smoking point is perfect, like canola or vegetable oil. Olive oil will never do as its smoke point is very low, and you certainly do not want smoky tasting scallops. Fill a pan with about one-half inch of oil, then heat till it sizzles. Pat the scallops dry, then season with Tony’s and just a pinch of freshly ground black pepper. Carefully drop the first scallop in the pan, it should immediately start to sizzle, if it doesn’t, the temp is too low. When you get the heat right drop a few in the pan and cook till a light brown crust forms, 2 to 3 minutes. Do not move them around except to turn once and do not overcrowd them.
The final trick in getting scallops right is to serve them immediately. The quicker they get from the pan to the table the better. A wedge of lemon is also a good idea, but other than that, I think a properly cooked scallop needs hardly any accompaniment at all, other than a good glass of wine.
