5 Ways To Tell If You're Eating Fake Scallops
You head into a restaurant and peruse the offerings. It's a little of this; chicken, pork, steak; and a little of that; crab cakes, salmon, and — oh! — beautiful, fresh scallops. Immediately, you make up your mind to order the sweet, succulent marshmallows of the sea. Regardless of how they're prepared, be it gently sautéed and snuggled over a bed of risotto or grilled and laid alongside charred vegetables, scallops are treasured for their lightness, luxurious taste, and overall deliciousness. But, on occasion, restaurants and eateries will skimp and serve, well, fakes.
Yes, it's true. Fake scallops are a real thing. Oftentimes, skate wings, shark, or stingray are paraded as scallops since unassuming diners and those not-in-the-know can have a hard time telling the difference between these seafood items and the real thing. But if you're attuned enough, you'll be able to spot the pretenders on your plate and only shell out the big bucks for the real thing.
Give it a sniff
First off, a good scallop should have a very specific smell to it; they should not smell in any way fishy. They should not be pungent, smell fermented, or have any metallic or iodine-like stench to them. Good scallops should smell like the sea, i.e. fresh and slightly salty. We're not talking under the boardwalk of the Jersey shore in 90-degree Fahrenheit weather.
Fake scallops do, indeed, smell fishy. Think about the last sniff you gave a piece of cod, or the lingering smell at the seafood counter. It's not necessarily bad or rotten, but it is, distinctly, fishy. Fake scallops would give off such a scent, since they're made from fish like shark (which is often banned for having dangerously high levels of mercury), skate, stingray, or surimi and not a sweet bivalve.
Check the taste and texture
Is your palate refined enough to detect the differences between a real scallop and the counterfeit version? There are a few ways to tell them apart. A real bay scallop — the smaller variety — is sweet and has a seaweed-like salinity to it. The larger sea scallop is still sweet, but not as much as its diminutive cousin. It has a salinity to it, too. Neither variety has a fishy taste in any way. Real scallops also have fibers running through them — remember, it's a muscle that holds a shell closed — so there will be a true texture to it.
Alternatively, fake scallops, which are made from either stingray, skate, shark, or surimi, have a distinctly fishy taste to them, like the flavor you'd find in a pollack, flounder, or even tilapia filet. They won't be sweet in any way. Upon biting into them, you won't find those same fibers you would in a real scallop; it'd be denser.
Take a good, hard look
Your eyes may be able to help you pick up on a counterfeit scallop before your mouth needs to. Regular scallops — either bay or sea — vary greatly in size. There's not a whole lot of uniformity. They'll be beige, pinkish, or off-white in color, although some can appear more orange. They're rarely bright white, are firm, and appear translucent before being cooked. Fake scallops will appear all the same size and denseness since they're quite literally punched out of shark, skate, surimi, or stingray meat with a cookie cutter-like device.
Location, location, location
Where is the restaurant you're enjoying said scallops? Are you snuggled in a bungalow-facing beachfront eatery near the shore? Or are you posted up at your local Red Lobster in a landlocked state? Obviously, real and in-season scallops are going to be a lot easier to come by if you're closer to the ocean, since fishmongers are going to be more readily available, selling their wares close to the restaurant. It's imperative that scallops get from ocean to plate fairly quickly, since they don't stay alive for long once they're out of the water. If a restaurant doesn't have a budget to pay for the added transportation and labor, it seems unlikely they'd be able to showcase scallops on the menu.
Evaluate the price point
Scallops, both the sea and bay varieties, are on the pricey side of the seafood spectrum. This is due to a few factors. First, unlike seafood like salmon, tilapia, mussels, or even crab, scallops are pretty tough to farm, which means markets are constantly dependent on wild-caught scallops. Once scallops are caught, they start to die and go bad — quickly. That means that the timeline from catch to plate at your local eatery has to be lightning-fast, driving up the price further.
So, if you're at a restaurant (or cheap takeout joint) and you see scallops and the price seems deceptively low, you have some reason to be suspicious. While it's pretty unlikely that the James Beard-nominated restaurant is passing off fake scallops, but the in-and-out burger joint offering fried scallops for $5 is worth an eyebrow raise.