Ingredients
100 Scallops Bulhão Pato o’ Carna
Ingredients:
100 scallops
3 heads of garlic
2 bunches of coriander
A bottle of olive oil
10 lemons
Salt and pepper to taste
Method:
When the weather is too bad to be going scallop diving, you’d be best to buy some scallops and go camping. Or better yet, get given a sack of over 100 for free by captain James MacFilthy as he drops you off by boat on a deserted island for the night. Good Scottish weather was on order, which included sideways wind and heavy rain. Luckily the temperature was at that amenable summer level which meant that being utterly soaking wet wasn’t completely miserable. We were filming a pilot for an adventure travel show, and we were filming us adventuring into the hitherto, (for us at least) unknown. Carna is a small largely uninhabited island off the Ardnamurchan peninsula on the West Coast of Scotland. A guy in a pub told me that it is on the same ley lines as Stonehenge. I don’t know what that means or if it is true but that is exactly the sort of fact I like to
go unchecked: if its on the same ones as Stonehenge’s then that’s got to be good right?
So after a fantastically wet boat ride to this magical little island we arrived and struck camp, put up our tents and build a shelter. Once we’d successfully built a cover from the elements, naturally it stopped raining.
Now if you’ve ever been camping before, you’ll know that it takes a while to get all your kit arranged and sorted, and that only then can you start cooking. So we began shucking 100 scallops on the beach. Using a blunt knife I employed a method that was taught to me by a guy who had been taught by Nobu himself, quite the accolade I’m sure you’ll agree. It basically goes a little like this: Slip the butter knife in high, by the hinge, on the flat side, and push down – keeping it hard on the flat side. Then scoop it off the cupped side, discard the beard and keep the roes separate.
So, some time elapsed, we had shucked most of the scallops and it had started to rain again; cue a dash to the shelters.
The preparation Bulhão Pato is named after a Portuguese poet, and is normally reserved for clams, which is exactly the style in which I had regularly gorged on them during my recent tour of the Portuguese coast. The name and preparation having first been introduced to me years before whilst cooking with Leo Carreira -we used the juice from the clams to make deep fried clams juice with lemon emulsion- not a recipe you’d want to be trying on a Scottish beach.
So with the rain dripping down the back of my neck and the white spot of a head-torch lighting my way, I sliced garlic and chopped coriander on a less than clean chopping board balanced on my knees. With the scallops prepped and the fire ready to go, a splash of olive oil and in they went, a minute or so each side, turned once amid a sprinkle of chopped garlic. When cooked on both sides, a healthy squeeze of lemon, and some salt and pepper to finish. We had some of them out of the pan and passed around the rest in a communal Tupperware with some pickled seaweed and plain boiled potatoes whilst huddled under the tarp. You may wish to serve them indoors on a plate, but that’s totally up to you.
