Garlic Butter Scallops

Appetizer, Appetizers & Snacks, Dinner

Proper French garlic butter scallops done the way they've been doing them in Brittany for centuries. No cream, no fancy additions, just sweet scallops with persillade, that addictive garlic, parsley, and butter mixture that the French put on everything.

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Prep Time 20 minutes mins

Cook Time 10 minutes mins

Total Time 30 minutes mins

Servings 4

Ingredients 

1x2x3x?

• 12 scallops with shells and coral if you can get them
• 100 gr unsalted butter
• 2 cloves garlic
• 40 gr flat-leaf parsley a large handful
• salt and black pepper

Equipment

12 scallop shells if you couldn't find the scallops with shells

baking tray

mixing bowl

knife

baking mat

Instructions

1. Make the persillade butter

• In a small bowl, mash together the softened butter, garlic, and most of the parsley (save a bit for garnish). Season with salt.

  This is proper persillade, the French cure-all. It should be nice and garlicky.

2. Prepare the scallops and preheat your grill

• Preheat your oven's grill function to maximum, you want it properly hot, around 230-250°C.

  If your scallops still have the coral (the orange crescent bit), brilliant, keep it attached. If there's a tough white muscle on the side, pull it off. Rinse the scallops briefly under cold water and pat completely dry with kitchen paper. Wet scallops won't caramelize, they'll steam, and that's not what we're after.

  If your scallops came in their shells, they’re ready to go. If you bought the shells separately, nestle each scallop into one before grilling.

3. Arrange the scallops

• Place the scallops in their shells on a baking tray.​ Because the shells are curved and can wobble, set them on a bed of scrunched baking parchment (or foil) so they sit level and the cooking juices stay put

4. Add the persillade butter

• If you've chilled your butter, cut it into 3mm slices and place one generous slice on top of each scallop. If using soft butter, just dollop a good spoonful on each one, don't be shy, you want about a tablespoon per scallop.

5. Grill

• Slide the tray into the top of your oven under the hot grill. Cook for 7-8 minutes until the butter is bubbling and the top is golden and starting to caramelize. The scallops should be just opaque, if they're completely white and firm, they're overdone.

  Watch them carefully in the last couple of minutes. The difference between golden and burnt is about 30 seconds when you're under a grill this hot.

6. Serve immediately

• Serve straight away with crusty bread for mopping up the garlicky butter.

  These need to go to the table still bubbling. Once they cool down, the magic wears off.

Notes

• Try to get the scallops with the coral attached if you can, it adds sweetness and looks more impressive. Avoid anything labelled “soaked” or “water-added,” which basically means they’ve been pumped full of water to increase weight.
• Proper scallops should smell like the sea, not fishy.
• If you can’t find scallop shells (or can’t be bothered), individual gratin dishes or even a large shallow baking dish works fine too. You lose the drama, but the taste is identical.
• You can make the persillade butter up to 3 days ahead and keep it in the fridge. Just bring it to room temperature for 15 minutes before using, or slice it straight from the fridge if you’ve rolled it into a log.

About this recipe

The French have been mad about coquilles Saint-Jacques for centuries. They are named after Saint James, Santiago in Spanish, Jacques in French, whose symbol was the scallop shell. Medieval pilgrims walking to Santiago de Compostela would wear scallop shells on their hats, and eventually the shell became synonymous with the dish. Few ingredients have a more specific cultural history than the garlic butter scallops that now appear on brasserie menus across France every autumn.

The best scallops in France

The finest butter and garlic scallops start with the finest scallops, and those come from the cold waters around Brittany and Normandy. The season runs from October through March, strictly controlled to protect stocks and maintain quality. The moment the season opens, coquilles Saint-Jacques appear on every menu worth reading. French restaurants and fishmongers treat the arrival of scallop season with the same seriousness they apply to the first asparagus of spring or the first Beaujolais Nouveau of autumn. That seasonal specificity is part of what makes this butter garlic scallop recipe worth understanding properly.

Persillade: the butter that makes it

Garlicky buttery scallops are built on persillade, one of the most useful preparations in French cooking. The formula is dead simple: butter, garlic, and parsley. That is it. It gets used on lamb, on mushrooms, on snails, on a crusty baguette. Here it goes directly onto the scallops before they go under a hot grill, melting down into the flesh and keeping it moist whilst the top caramelises.

The key with persillade for garlic and butter scallops is intensity. This is not the place for subtlety. Load the butter properly with garlic and parsley. The French figured out a long time ago that sweet, delicate scallops can handle bold flavours as long as you do not overcook them. The flavour of the persillade and the sweetness of the scallop need to be in balance, and that balance requires enough garlic and parsley to hold their own against the natural richness of the shellfish.

The preparation

Preparing scallops properly before they go under the grill requires a sharp knife for two tasks: cutting away the muscle that attaches the scallop to the shell, and trimming any membrane from the white flesh. Neither task is difficult, but both require a blade that is sharp enough to work cleanly without tearing the delicate flesh.

I use the Opinel Intempora knife set for this. Opinel knives are made in the Savoie region of France and have been part of French kitchen culture for generations. The precision of the blades makes the preparation of these garlic butter scallops faster and cleaner, which matters when you are working with something this delicate. A blunt knife drags through scallop flesh and ruins the presentation before the dish has even reached the grill.

For a dinner party

These scallops are brilliant for entertaining because they look far more complicated than they actually are. The shells do the work visually. People see them and immediately assume you have spent hours in the kitchen. Meanwhile, you have mixed some butter with garlic and parsley, spooned it onto the scallops, and let the grill handle the rest.

Prepare the persillade butter ahead of time, have the scallops in their shells ready on the tray, and grill to order. The whole cooking process takes under five minutes per batch. That ratio of visual impact to actual effort is exactly what you want when you are feeding people and simultaneously trying to enjoy the evening yourself.

The reference point

If you are ever in Brittany or Normandy during scallop season, order these in any brasserie worth its salt. They will arrive bubbling hot in the shell, often with nothing but a wedge of lemon alongside. That is the reference point. That is what this butter garlic scallop recipe is aiming for.