3 Chef Tips That Make This Elegant French Dish Even More Flavorful

Coquilles Saint-Jacques simply means « scallops » in French, but it also is a common shorthand for referring to this specific preparation, in which meaty and sweet scallops are coated in a velvety sauce, topped with breadcrumbs, and broiled until browned on top. It’s a classic of the French kitchen that is frequently found on the menus of bistros and brasseries, and makes for a wonderfully elegant appetizer when entertaining at home, especially when served on a scallop shell.

My recipe is designed to honor the most traditional versions of this dish, while taking several liberties to boost flavor and resolve some of the bigger issues I had when following more traditional versions closely. Before I explain my departures from tradition and why I took them, I’ll first go through the elements of this dish to explain more or less what’s typical, though keep in mind this is a dish that takes many forms in different kitchens and hands—there is no one single way to make it.

Classic Elements of Coquilles Saint-Jacques

Most iterations of this dish have a few key things in common:

• Scallops: Can’t really have a scallop dish without scallops, right? In the most ideal of worlds, we’d all be able to find live scallops in the shell, which are the sweetest and freshest, and come with a shell that doubles as a built-in, very pretty serving dish. But the reality is that very few of us can get live scallops much of the time. That’s okay, we can still make this work.

  First, be sure to buy dry-packed sea scallops, not ones that have been brined. Brined scallops are swollen with brining solution, which causes them to dump liquid in the pan when cooked, preventing browning. Even worse, they taste like absolute crap, nothing like the amazingly sweet flesh of a proper dry scallop.

  The scallops are traditionally poached gently in a white wine–based court bouillon (the term for a lightly acidic, aromatic broth used for such purposes). This poaching liquid is then used in the sauce (see below).

  As for serving, if you really want to do it on the shell like you see in the pictures here, you can order cleaned scallop shells for food use online. You can also skip that and just use small ramekins or even small gratin dishes.

• Sauce: The sauce for coquilles Saint-Jacques is typically a velouté, which is the French term for a velvety roux-thickened sauce made from a stock or broth, though milk or cream can be added as well. If it helps, think of velouté like a béchamel but with some kind of stock or broth in place of much of the milk.

  Many recipes use the scallop’s white wine–based poaching liquid to make the velouté, thickening it with a butter-and-flour roux, enriching it with cream or milk, and then further thickening and enriching it with an egg yolk. Many coquilles Saint-Jacques recipes also add mushrooms and shallots to the sauce.

• Golden Topping: Once spooned into the serving vessels, the scallops and sauce are usually topped with a breadcrumb mixture, often with a cheese like Gruyère mixed in, and then broiled until golden and crispy—delicious proof that cheese and seafood can indeed go together.

I started my recipe development by making this recipe much closer to this more traditional approach, but I ran into some issues that I wanted to resolve. First, I found that the scallops too easily got lost when poached and covered in such robust other ingredients.

Second, I found the sauce too sharp. It lacked a savory depth; even rounded out with milk, the issue persisted. I concluded that basing the sauce on a court bouillon made primarily of dry white wine was contributing to this.

After some experimenting, the final version of my recipe attempts to address this, admittedly by departing from tradition in the process. I’m comfortable with that—authenticity for its own sake isn’t something I’m interested in, as long as we’re clear about when and why we’re splitting from the more traditional methods.

The Techniques That Make This Recipe Different (and Delicious)

One of the first things I did when rethinking my own approach to this classic was to sear the scallops. Searing good-quality sea scallops brings out their inherent sweetness and deepens it—it’s something I wanted to infuse into both the scallops and the sauce. To make that happen, I sear the scallops in the very same saucepan I use to make the sauce, creating a fond on the bottom of the pan that I can then capture with subsequent deglazing.

Now, I’ll admit that searing scallops in a small three-quart saucepan is not the ideal way to do it. They’ll be a little crowded, they’ll steam more, you may not get the world’s best sear on them. But that’s fine, the goal here isn’t the world’s best seared scallops, it’s simply to cook them lightly and build some of that sweetness and fond.

The next change I made was adding bottled clam juice to the white wine broth. This adds a savory, shellfish-forward foundation for the sauce to support the scallops while reducing the quantity of wine in the sauce. The result is a more flavorful sauce that’s nicely balanced with the wine’s acidity, but not sharp or harsh.

To boost the sauce’s flavor even more, I simmer the wine and clam juice with aromatics like shallot, thyme, bay leaf, and the trimmed stems of the mushrooms (because, yes, I decided I wanted to go with the mushrooms in this recipe). But then I took it a step further, adding a small dose of instant dashi. This is one of those obviously nontraditional techniques that makes such a wonderful different in the result. It increases the sauce’s umami flavor while tying together two critical elements—the earthy mushrooms and sweet, fresh-from-the-sea scallops—thanks to the dashi’s deep umami core that often incorporates both mushroom and ingredients from the sea.

Aside from that, I stick pretty close to tradition, cooking the mushrooms and shallots until deeply flavorful, building a roux- and egg yolk–enriched velouté, and topping each serving with crispy and golden buttery breadcrumbs flavored with grated Gruyere and fresh thyme.

The result is utterly French, even if this is, in some ways, a more modern interpretation of that. Then again, that too is utterly French, because the cuisine is very much alive and open to reinvention.