If seafood is best eaten 100 metres from the ocean, imagine scallops harvested from an ocean farm and eaten on the boat within minutes.
Scallop farmer Duncan Bates and Tempest Chef Michael Howell teamed up to dazzle a TV crew — and me — with the freshest seafood we’ve ever enjoyed. The Nova Scotia launch of my book, Apples to Oysters: A Food Lover’s Tour of Canadian Farms, could not have been more delicious.
After Duncan pulled a few dozen farmed scallops from the lantern nets, Michael and I got shucking, discarding mantel, frills and digestive sac but leaving the gonad attached. Though the gonad of the scallop is a delicacy in Asia — akin to lobster roe or caviar — most folks in Canada’s east coast eat only the white pillow of meat, or adductor. What a shame.
Red tide or PST can collect in the gonad, unlike the meat, but Duncan grows his scallops in an ocean bay that is generally free of red tide and the water is tested extensively to ensure his scallops are safe.
But beyond being able to eat the pretty and tasty gonad, there are other advantages to serving farmed scallops. A farmer can harvest them in the morning and have them on your plate that night, with the adductor still flickering, they are that fresh. And you can eat these scallops guilt free as farming has virtually no impact on the ocean compared to the wild scallop fishery, which involves extensive and damaging dragging of the ocean floor.
Chef Michael Howell knows all this. He only serves sustainable seafood at his excellent Tempest in Wolfville and farmed scallops are a signature dish. On this sunny spring day, Michael fired up a Bunsen burner, sautéed the scallops and gonads then returned them to a half shell and drizzled them with a beurre blanc accented with chives he had picked from his garden that morning.
The scallops were so delicious, Duncan and I could not stop grinning as we ate, while CTV’s Live at Five host Liz Rigney cursed the shellfish allergy that prevented her from diving into this scallop feast.
And Michael was just getting going. He followed up with a scallop ceviche (with passion fruit and fresh ginger flavouring the lime juice) and a stupendously yummy scallop chowder.
As we motored back to shore, bellies full of scallops, we had the happy feeling of being at one with the sweet spring ocean.
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