How to open and prepare a scallop

The Staff Canteen

In this video, I'm going to show you how to open and prepare a scallop. First of all a little bit about sauce in a scholarship we only use hand-dived scallops not dredged for obvious reasons just in case your not sure dredged scallops literally dragged from the seabed damages seabed, scallops are full of grit and hand-dived are literally what they say that divers go down pick them up one by one and you get a pristine condition scallop.

When you look at the shell it should always be closed, if the scallops open give it a tap, if doesn't close don't use it, when it comes to opening the scallop a scallop has got a round edge and the flat side, the way I was taught was always have the flat side to me, the two main areas that keeps a scallop closed are the little clasp there and then there’s a muscle roundabout there, in with a sharp knife just break that clasp and then let your thumb hold it, the only thing that's holding it together now is the muscle, in with a knife and just gently cut through that muscle the scallop will come off the shell, so there you've got the skirt, the scallop meat and then underneath we got our scallop row, to remove the skeleton from the next shell, take the skirt let the scholar fallout and again through that muscle, then with your finger let the scholar fallout the shell, so we've got two clean shells with no white meat left on them.

The next step we're going to do is remove them the meat from the row from the skirt, now you'll see on a scallop where the meat is there’s a clear line that's the muscle, so with your thumb gently pry the muscle from the scallop flesh and gently let the scallop come out with the row cut the row out, and with the remaining part the black intestine get rid of that so we're left with our three elements, ice-cold water we're going to drop our scallop row in for a matter of seconds and I would a scallop is porous it will absorb the water so you don't leave it in the water, there's our scallop, our row and our skirt for the sauce.

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The Staff Canteen

The Staff Canteen

Editor 11th May 2017

How to open and prepare a scallop