Back around the year 2000, I was really into buerre blanc. I had just started my subscription to Gourmet and I had a husband who only ate up the food chain as far as fish. We ate a lot of scallops and I made a lot of scallops with buerre blanc.
Today at the upscale grocery where I was picking up some fancy dijon and lime juice (Key West lime juice, not to be confused with western key lime juice), scallops were on sale. They were $17.99/lb for good sized sea scallops. I would never have bought such a thing at such a price, but they were $19/lb off!! That means these modest scallops usually cost $37/lb!! My current husband, who loves a good burger and fries, also loves scallops. The last time he had them was at a $75/person multi-course dinner at an upscale restaurant in Minneapolis, where he was shocked to receive two scallops on his plate. Two giant and perfectly prepared scallops. I pointed out then and I pointed out again tonight that those scallops were probably quite a bargain.
So I’m not wondering what happened to scallops. We ate them all when they were cheap and we were just out of college or in our twenties and gorging ourselves on seafood with no thought of tomorrow. But surely we could have kept going with the buerre blanc.
I bought the scallops, and as I am wont to do, I thought about buerre blanc. I hauled out my old recipe book with the recipe for tomato buerre blanc. That involved soaking sun-dried tomatoes, processing them with butter and chilling the tomato/butter log for an hour, making a reduction of shallot, white wine, water, and lemon juice, adding the butter a tablespoon at a time until incorporated and not too hot or it would separate, then keeping it covered in the pan over a larger bowl of warm water while I sautéed the scallops.
That wasn’t going to happen tonight. And anyway, I wanted something more ginger/lime. A few pages later, after Besugo a la parilla and Grilled catfish with noodles I found it: Sea Scallops with cilantro gremolata and ginger lime buerre blanc.
For this sauce, all you had to do was simmer minced shallot and ginger in white wine and lime juice until reduced, then incorporate the butter by the tablespoon. Then you were supposed to strain out the solids through a fine sieve, but I just moved it to the back burner and let it sit. I didn’t bother that it could have been more blanc and the butter was a little browned. It had incorporated so all was good. (I was starting to think maybe this sauce went out of fashion because it’s just a lot of work.) Sorry, no pictures of the sauce, cause I got super busy with meal-making at that point and forgot about being a blogger. Look at the tomato instead…
Meanwhile, I’d found this recipe for a zucchini and white bean salad that could be served with grilled scallops. So I’d gone out and harvested more of the shell stage dragon’s tongue beans and boiled them for about 20 minutes while I made the sauce.
I also had the very first ripe Gezahnte tomato. This large accordion type tomato is hanging in heavy groups on the vine, and I’m so excited about them.
I didn’t get too crazy in assembling everything, just added lemon juice, shallot, and salt to grilled zucchini and the beans, cut up the tomato, and put it on the platter. I seared the scallops on the cast iron skillet for the grill and then poured the gingery limey buttery sauce over them. Topped everything with cilantro from the garden. So good. (Gluten free, too, as far as I can tell.)
Bon apetit!
