How To Tell If The Scallops You're Eating Are Fake

Good scallops should smell fresh and slightly salty, and not fishy at all. They should not be pungent, smell fermented, or have any metallic or iodine-like stench to them.

Fake scallops do, indeed, smell fishy since they're made from fish like shark, which is often banned for having high levels of mercury, skate, stingray, or surimi.

A real bay scallop is sweet and has a seaweed-like salinity, while the larger sea scallop is slightly less sweet, but neither variety has a fishy taste.

Real scallops also have fibers running through them. However, fake scallops have a distinctly fishy taste and won't be sweet in any way, and you also won't find any fibers.

Regular scallops vary in size and are beige, pinkish, or off-white, although some can appear more orange. They're rarely bright white, are firm, and appear translucent.

Fake scallops will appear all the same size and denseness since they're literally punched out of shark, skate, surimi, or stingray meat with a cookie cutter-like device.