Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Chemistry Adventures: Bacon-Wrapped Scallops with Celery Root Cream

This isn't much of a post, I suppose. I made an awesome celery root cream the other day while learning how to perfectly cook scallops. I also made my first-ever home-cured bacon, using meat glue for the first time in the process. The only natural next step was to glue some bacon to some scallops, cook to perfection, then serve with that sauce...
This is probably the second-most boring thing you can do with meat glue (after just gluing two hunks of meat together to make a bigger hunk of meat): gluing bacon to a scallop. Can you get any more clichéd? But I suppose cliché food combinations would never become cliché if they didn't taste so damned good.
So, I took a thin-sliced piece of home-cured bacon and a gorgeous diver scallop. I brushed some transglutaminase slurry onto both items and wrapped the bacon around the scallop.
This was tightly wrapped in cling film and then vacuum sealed so the glue could set overnight.
The next day, this vacuum-sealed bundle was treated just like the bundle of brined scallops the day before: sous vide cooking for a half hour, then pan-seared in butter and olive oil. I served it up with the same sauce and added a little super-finely-diced bacon to the finely-diced celery for garnish.
So, yeah. This was completely delicious. (How could it not be?) Nonetheless, I think I prefer the simplicity of the brined, non-bacon-wrapped scallop... maybe? I'm torn. I guess I'll just have to keep cooking both until one fully wins my heart...

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