How to Cook Scallops Like a Chef

Mastering scallops is a game-changer for any cook—and in this video, Will shares three incredible techniques to elevate your seafood game.

Start with a simple baked scallop in the shell, loaded with garlic butter and crispy breadcrumbs—perfect for beginners. Next, learn how to pan-sear scallops like a pro and serve them with asparagus and a rich seaweed beurre blanc. Finally, dive into a stunning Michelin-inspired dish using a clever seaweed technique and a delicate dashi foam made from the scallop’s skirt and roe.

From easy dinners to elegant showstoppers, these recipes will transform the way you cook scallops.

CHAPTERS:
0:00 – Every Chef’s Favourite Seafood
0:19 – Level 1
5:35 – Level 2
11:29 – Level 3

every chef’s favorite seafood whether you’re a beginner in the kitchen or a seasoned pro I’ve got three amazing ways to prepare scolops that will take your cooking skills to the next level with the last technique being one used in some of the best Michelin star kitchens in the world first up let’s start with how I make scolops at home for a quick and easy dinner okay so we’ve got some absolutely stunning Excel scolops here and the way that a scollet works is essentially they will open and close their shell across the sea floor so they’re quite cool when you watch them actually swimming around um basically this is the hinge joint for this shell which is where how they sort of move around so sometimes when it’s they’re nice and fresh like these are just have to get your knife in there and just slightly open it so you’re just prizing that shell apart place your knife in and then you just got to open it nice and quickly and just take a spoon and slowly prize the flesh and the meat away from the bottom shell and it is just all about making sure that there’s absolutely no meat left on there at the end and what we’re going to do is we’re going to actually keep that shell cuz the first technique I’m going to show you we’re going to use that as like the presentation the main biology of it is that’s the skirt completely edible it’s just sometimes contains quite a lot of grit this thing is called the row tends to sometimes be removed which I always think is a real shame when you get them in restaurants because it is still delicious it just cooks slightly differently to the actual scolop itself this is the main meat of the scolop and then this is almost like the abductor muscle that joins itself to the rest of the shell put my thumb in between the abductor and the main part of the flesh and what you want to do is just gently I’m just really showing you slowly here prize away the rest of that flesh and then you’re left with this perfect beautiful scolop from um opening from shooking straight into ice cold water so if you lay them on a tray neatly and stack them up like that you’ll get this perfect shape once they kind of set and firm up in the fridge so to prep the rest of the scolop you can use the abductor muscle i feel like gets wasted quite a lot but is absolutely fine to eat and then what I do is just gently go down and take off the rest of this the row cleaning it up power give that a nice good wash restaurants are typically criminal for just wasting things that don’t need to be wasted okay and then we’ve got the skirt and then this is essentially the poop sack and the rest I’m not really sure what it is but it doesn’t look very nice so I’m not going to use it you can get scolops now in a lot of different places so I saw them in the supermarket recently i would say that it’s it’s good to go to your fishmonger if you want to and you could get your fish mongering in furnace to do this step for you they wouldn’t mind doing doing this at all it’s one of the nicest jobs to do in in cooking to be honest doing doing scolops give these shells a really quick wash using a bit of warm water it’s mainly the outside of the sort of scolop that you want to kind of make sure it’s nice and clean what we’re going to do with these is simple just going to make some breadrumbs and bake them in the shell with the breadrumbs and a little bit of garlic butter all we need to do to start this recipe is just dice up a little bit of butter do a little bit of conflot which will go inside our butter so what we’re going to do is just melt that butter and then as it melts this garlic and this shellot is just going to very lightly cook we don’t want it to caramelize just want it to be sort of translucent a touch of salt pepper just add a few anchovies so nice background seasoning we can use salt or parmesan it’s almost a way of just seasoning rather than adding just salt so it adds a bit more of a depth to it so whilst that softens get a little loaf of bread this is just a campaou style bread so not sourdough or anything just a nice yeasted bread with a bit of whole grain don’t worry about the crust crust is going to give it a good flavor this is almost just like making a pangra tarta bit of lemon zest just for freshness we’ll save the actual lemon itself just to season the scolop at the end this is just a little domestic blender we use but really simple just blitz it up a little bit and then to that I’ve got some cherville if you don’t have chil don’t worry you could use maybe something like curly parsley but it just adds a nice sort of ana seed note to it just lightly cut that up just shifting and then just pick a little bit of parsley okay so whack your parsley in there as well touch of salt into the breadrumbs tiny little pinch of nutmeg into the breadrumbs as well put a touch of olive oil in there i know we got the butter as well but this will just help make sure that that doesn’t burn all we’re going to do is actually put these under the grill and then to secure them just make a really rough little nest per scolop okay so hey guys what’s going on fly shook scolops go back in the shell and then you’re kind of building them the way they were actually sort of formed in the first place now just season the top and then load up the scolop with a little bit of breadcrumb and then when you’re spooning this butter over make sure you’re getting in a good amount of the shallots on there as well so I’m just putting that on there now all the garlic and all the butter don’t be shy and then just finish over the top again just a light sprinkling scolops under the grill right so let’s have a look beautiful bubbling garlic butter just finished with a little bit of juda lemon and happy days okay so this is it chef this is this is what my perfect beginner level scolop this is what I’m cooking on holiday if I get some nice shellfish what do you reckon i reckon I’m coming on holiday with you chef pushing not enough space in the car boss just look how meaty that scolop is as well looks like a lot of butter but you definitely need all that butter it’s good chef i always think the row is underrated as well yeah we were saying that earlier leave it in there hey keep up the good work chef thanks mate next technique slightly more advanced what we’re going to do now is whereas we open the scolops from like this there’s also another way you can open them to be honest it’s actually my preferred way you can hold it towards you and then just run your knife down right the way to the hinge open it up and then you get very little meat left on the on the shell this is a technique that we always use this it’s called the spoon technique and full transparency this is what I’ve used pretty much all of my career because it’s 10 times quicker but you use the nice sharp edge of your spoon and you go in perfectly just pull towards you then you can just select the scolop which is obviously the bit that you want what we’re going to do is just make a really simple burblanc adding in some white wine into a pan it’s around about 300 mls and then some vinegar i’m using shard vinegar you can use a cider vinegar or white wine vinegar this is going to add your sort of the sweetness to the sauce so burblanc just very classic French sauce it’s a butter-based sauce so similar to a holidays but you start with a base of reduced liquid first and then we’re seasoning that just with some shallots and we want to cook these until they’re beautiful and translucent okay so I’m just chopping up as well i’ve got a little bit of dul so this is it’s basically a type of red kelp it’s got a really cool flavor you can replace this with any sort of dried seaweed you can get or indeed you can replace it with some nori sheets that you would use to make sushi so just chop it up finely add the doulin okay so we’ve got some asparagus here which is perfect to serve with something like scolop so I’m just going to take it off on the bias which is just a diagonal cut at the bottom just to remove that and then to finish our sauce all we’ll be doing is adding in Monte butter and it’s really important for a blanc that this stays in the fridge and that we dice it up first so dice it up nice and small and then return that back into the fridge and then one of the things I’m going to use to finish this sauce is just this nori sheets so really easy to get it’ll give you this really good hit of minerality and and umami as well so best thing we’re going to do is just to blitz that up so into a little coffee grinder or spice grinder so just pulse that up until you get these cool little shards like that so it’ll add a nice little texture and color to the sauce okay so I’ve got a non-stick pan and I’m going to put a a good amount of oil in there and then I’m just going to oil the scolops as well nicely lubricated pepper a good hit of salt all over the scolops and then pan searing important thing what we’re always trying to get is we’re trying to get a really epic crust on our scolop so that starts by drying them off which we’ve already done then laying them down into a scorching hot pan i’m just trying to make that initial contact and the way I’m also resting them in the pan is you can see I’m using the other one to prop the other one up so you don’t get too much of a color all up the way the sides smell of roasting scolops is just something else but now once they’ve seared for about 35 seconds just check that they’re coloring up nicely so by agitating them like this and by moving them around slightly you’ll just make sure that the color is nicely sort of dissipated they’re now probably like 10% of the way cooked so just adding in a little bit of butter but keep them face down you can actually take a scolop quite far it’s beautiful epic sear so now just reduce the heat right down and they’re just going to get a little uh butter bath until they’re nicely cooked so a nice bit of nut brown butter this stage I’m just going to whack in those rows as well they can just lightly come up they don’t need a hard sear we’re not trying to develop color on there we’re just trying to cook them through let’s take those out and they will actually just continue to cook nicely add in our asparagus like this into that brown butter and that’s just going to cook away nicely in the brown butter whilst that road continues to come up to the right temperature asparagus can come out which has been cooking in that brown butter beautiful scollet butter and now we can start finishing our sauce so almost all of the liquid is reduced away from this now and then what we always do is just take it off the heat now a little hack for you i always add a tiny splash of double cream into or whipping cream into a burblanc just adds a little bit of stability to it and then we can start off emulsifying our butter the the heat’s not on anymore what I want is a really nice loose burblanc so you can take that reduction even further and get a more intense sauce but I want it fairly loose because I’ve got I want it to sort of nicely dress the dish so you’re just waiting until the last piece of butter that you’re putting has kind of dissolved and then adding in a bit more so good hit of lemon juice going in there i’m going to add in a good tablespoon of our nori sheets that have been blitzed up it’s going to change the color slightly as well give us more of that seaweed sort of bright green that we’re looking for so these scolops have nicely rested now so just carve them up delicately so nice and sort of translucent in the center our asparagus is nice and lightly cooked that just goes into little batons some little sea fennel just lightly wilted down in that same same scolop pan and just a few fresh could use chvel or parsley i’ve just got a little bit of chvel here just to finish through the sauce so you want the sauce to be quite a nice sort of thick consistency it’s going to coat all the ingredients in the dish then we’ll go on first with our scolops so one nice cut asparagus goes around then just add your sea veg on top and then just finish with the sort of nutty scollet butter that you had in the base of the of the pan so what level are we here intermediate uncle Roger would be loving this asparagus easy peasy you could actually easily do this for a dinner pie yeah definitely more elegant isn’t it yeah it’s more of a dish more flavors going on nice acidity the other one’s like rich and hearty like pub food this is more of a dinner party dish whereas the one before is like chill summer vibe last recipe is actually a sort of amalgamation of a few different techniques I learned whil working in Michelin restaurants the first technique which I thought was really cool when I first saw it was a technique from the Clostar restaurant in Shortitch and I just thought like it’s basically a way of adding a different texture and look to the scollet by inserting in some seaweed into the mix and it just looked epic so I thought I’d do that but I wanted to also show a technique that people I think people think is often really difficult it’s actually really simple just need a few different ingredients and that’s a foam sauce i’m going to use the rest of the scolop skirts and row to make a light stock and the only thing I don’t want to put into my stock is this poop sack so poop sack is removed give it a light rinse as well just cuz it can be quite fishy and then that’s ready to use so the sauce is actually based from a restaurant called Soip which is a little uh one-star Korean restaurant so we’re basically going to make a a really simple dashy we’re going to use fish stock as the base so if you can’t get fish stock really simple to make you can click here and I can show you how to make a fish stock in this in one of our other videos we’re going to add in our scolop rows as well skirts and row go in i think this recipe is going to be a it’ll be perfect if you want to impress someone and just to make this into a a dashy so we’ve got our base of fish stock we’ve got our scolop rose in there we’ve got some really nice aromats which making it smell incredible which is just the ginger and the crushed garlic this is a Korean variety of seaweed but it’s essentially comoo sheep so salted comoo and then that just goes in we’re going to bring it up to the boil and then we’re going to reduce the heat and we’ll let that infuse and steep about 70° and then that will be the base for our sauce later few la last sort of minutes at aromat so it’s been to the boil and it’s just been simmering just going to add in a couple of spring onions few few spring onions stalks from herbs I’ve got so I’ve got coriander and a little bit of parsley it’s got a really nice delicate flavor so we’re just trying to we don’t want to reduce it we’re just kind of adding depth to this now awesome flavor okay so we’ve got this beautiful scolop and what we’re going to do is we’re just going to use the a very sharp knife one two three so nice cuts all the way down then we’re working out the exact sort of height of the scolop and we’re going to cut these little sort of plinths inside the scolop meat which will give once it’s steamed it’ll give this awesome effect any trimming excess that you’ve got just place straight into the stock you got these nice little cubes open that scolop up and nory’s got a natural salt content so it’s going to start to season the scolop throughout as it sits in there and then it’s all just about just trimming this up and just follow the natural shape of a scolop to trim it up you get left with this pretty cool looking scolop and then we’ve got the seaweed running all the way through and when we carve this open later it’s going to look absolutely epic i think it seems like one of those things that’s so so ultra complicated but when you actually see it it’s pretty it’s pretty simple and it’s easy to achieve i think for anyone who wants to go and work in a Michelin kitchen it’s little things like this that you don’t like we were we were thinking about doing this video and then this just this one way of preparing them came to my brain which I saw years ago and that’s the that’s the thing with the Michelin you get loads of these tiny little minute techniques just going to season those scallops with a little bit of salt and pepper oh flavor on that unbelievable unbelievable get a little whiff on that that’s a hug in a mug okay so to finish the sauce we’re just going to pass it off now it’s infused for roughly around about 20 minutes which is perfect for a dashy so strain off the liquid some white soy those of you who don’t you can use dark soy if you want but it will affect the color the element that you need to make your sauce foam is always either a bit of butter or a bit of cream cream on this case so you’re just going to add bit of texture to the sauce i couldn’t get fresh yuzu i wanted to use a different type of citrus so this is a a yuzu juice that you get yuzu is just a type of sort of asiatic citrus okay so I’m going to add just a little bit of soy lethin and lethin just adds sort of body and a foaming agent to your to your sauce or stock just take that off the heat and you can start to see a light foam forming around there okay so scolops have just been lightly seasoned so you can see they’re just starting to release a little bit of their moisture and we’ll just add these into the top of the rack where they can steam more gently and then our leaks can go on here as well so the sculps are nearly cooked you can see they’ve sort of changed color a little bit add in our seed veg into there as well so just nice and soft not too firm so we’re just going to take that off and allow to continue to steam our leaks they’re nice and tender finish them with a little bit of salt pepper so this is what we want it’s that nice translucent color in the scolop and that beautiful sort of mosaic effect all the way through so dress with a little bit of oil a little bit more of the yuzu juice and we’re ready to plate finish our dish what we’re going to do is just layer on these charred leaks that beautiful scolop on there and then just finish this dish by just lightly foaming your sauce and just spooning over just the foam so you can take off the foam skim that off the top and it’ll have all that flavor from the sauce but it you’re just adding this it’s an extra sort of texture and then just a tiny little bit of good quality oil to split the sauce out that’ll just add a little bit of fragrance to the sauce have you seen this technique technique before i haven’t no it looks cool comoo scolop i mean we know it’s going to taste good so such a different dish to the other two a lot more elegant like subtle and gentle yeah definitely definitely a really interesting way to elevate your standard scolop dish into a Michelin worthy dish that was scolop three ways if you want to see us how to make more stuff freeways like and subscribe