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Bay scallops - great in pasta dishes or cioppino like dishes cooked in liquid to be tender and tasty.
Sea scallops - simply prepared by themselves pan seared in butter with a pinch of seasoning.
The difference I've noticed is that Bay Scallops are packed/shipped wet, in a liquid - not good for pan searing and will end up being chewy as old pencil erasers.
Sea scallops are flash frozen and dry packed - much better for pan searing.
We only buy “dry” scallops. A lot of seafood has an added chemical which saturates seafood with water.
Definitely prefer sea scallops. Sear them off with some butter/olive oil. They cook very quickly. I don't care for the bacon wrapped version. The bacon usually overpowers the delicacy of the scallops. I don't normally get bay scallops but would use them in some sort of pasta dish.
That seems like overkill. Sharks are endangered and therefore as pricey as sturgeons, and skates and stingrays consist of cartilage. Scallops sold as food are movement muscles of the scallop mollusk; it's basically oceanic meat. Shark probably costs a lot more than actual scallops, and I can't see the cartilagious texture of skates and stingrays passing off as the real thing.
The restaurants are better off making fish ball surimi, like the kind found in Korean supermarkets, and adding bits of scallop mollusks normally ending up as waste product, then passing those off as real scallops. (Or adding a disclaimer in very small print.)
Last edited by MillennialUrbanist; 01-04-2023 at 06:47 PM..
I want to like scallops. I really do. But I just don’t care for the flavor, or the texture when they are cooked “properly”, medium rare-ish. I like seafood fully cooked. My exceptions are seared tuna and sushi. Odd I guess.
That seems like overkill. Sharks are endangered and therefore as pricey as sturgeons, and skates and stingrays consist of cartilage. Scallops sold as food are movement muscles of the scallop mollusk; it's basically oceanic meat. Shark probably costs a lot more than actual scallops, and I can't see the cartilagious texture of skates and stingrays passing off as the real thing.
The restaurants are better off making fish ball surimi, like the kind found in Korean supermarkets, and adding bits of scallop mollusks normally ending up as waste product, then passing those off as real scallops. (Or adding a disclaimer in [i]very[i] small print.)
I've tried making "poor man's" scallops from skates before. It wasn't fooling anyone.
I never see shark for sale in the seafood stores so I don't know how much it would cost if it were. A lot of shark is caught just for their fins, which are cut off and the rest of the shark is thrown overboard wasted. There are lot's of different shark and not all are endangered (yet).
We caught a salmon shark some years back and kept it (that was legal). It tasted like pork and not at all like a scallop.
The best scallops I ever had were always the little bay scallops.
Sea scallops were so variable: toughness, dryness, flavor or lack thereof.
If a restaurant serves sea scallops, they’ve been sea scallops unless specifically called out as being bay scallops.
I won’t even consider eating them unless they’re bay scallops.
Bay scallops were always the "preferred" as far as I knew, because they were smaller and more tender, but they are harder to find these days. Not sure why this has flipped and the sea scallops are more expensive now.
A clue might be found in Billy Joel's fishermen's lament, The Downeaster Alexa, which includes the line,
"I was a Bayman like my father was before
Can't make a living as a Bayman anymore"
In other words, the bay waters have been overfished.
If you like any kind of scallops, you should sometime try eating Abalone if you ever get a chance. I have never seen it for sale at any restaurants, but when we lived in California we had friends that would dive for them in the area between Anchor Bay and Mendocino. I have heard that there have been some severe restrictions and even bans on them since, so you might have to go to another country like Mexico or Australia.
You can buy farmed abalone frozen at Costco.
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