How to Prepare Scallops for Ceviche

Hi, my name is Bryan Davis with Chef Bryan’s Kitchen and today we’re going to make scallop ceviche. And what we’re going to start with right now is preparing our scallops. We’re using some really nice, fresh, fairly large but not too large jumbo sea scallops and one thing you want to remember when you’re using the sea scallops is a lot of times they’ll have these muscles on them. The muscle is just a little piece right here. It is not very tender or conducive to eating. So, what we want to do is you’ll be able to see because you see the rest of the side of the scallop is completely smooth. So, when you see the little muscle base all you’re going to do is just take your finger and just peel that off and that’s what you want to remove and this is what we’re going to use. So now we’re going to go ahead and prepare our scallops. What we’re going to do is we’re going to take our scallops and basically what you want to do is you just want to cut them in thin slices. You want to try and keep them all about the same size so that all the slices about the same size so they all cook about the same amount of time. And again, we’re going to be using the ceviche method so we’re going to be cooking them in acid. We’ll be adding zero heat to this dish as we build it. It’s just basically—what we’re doing is we’re preparing our scallops and then we’re going to put them in a marinade, for lack of a better term and just let them cook in the acid. We’re going to go ahead and finish out slicing our scallops and put them in our bowl and basically all we’re going to do is add our different ingredients. Again, and this can be to taste, if you make it a few times you might want to alter the flavors of your mouths or the flavors that you’re using but what we’re going to do is basically just take our bowl of scallops and start going through and add our ingredients. So, I’ve got a red onion here and basically what I’m going to do is share you how to prepare the red onion for this dish. And what we’re going to do is just cut our onion in half. We’re going to leave the root end attached and we’re going to take and we’re going to make two little slits right in the onion. And then we’re going to slice it as thin as we can. We want a thin slice on the onion. It’s not something that we want a huge onion bite to but we want a little bit of the onion flavor and I like to leave it in the slices rather than taking it down to a fine chop. So, we’re going to take our onion about two ounces of onion. We’re going to add that right to it. We’re going to add our tomato concasse which basically a tomato concasse is canned tomatoes. You can use fresh if you want. It’s a little more work to use fresh. You have to peel them and then chop them, boil them down but if you use canned tomatoes you add a little bit of chopped onion, a little bit of garlic to taste, cook it down until it becomes almost a paste consistency and then you let it cool. So, we’re going to add our tomato concasse. We’re going to add our green onions and again this is to taste. I’m going to use about a quarter cup maybe a little bit more. So, we’re going to use our green onions. We are going to use some garlic. Now then again, as in any dish that you’re going to use raw garlic. You want to try and get it as small as possible. So what we’re going to do here is we’re going to mince the garlic. What I'm going to do, I’m going to start by taking off the ends of the garlic and then we’re just going to mince it down. So we’re going to start by slicing it down and then we’re going to take it to a rough chop. That way we’re just going to keep running our knife through it until we get down to a rough chop and then I’m going to show how to turn it into a paste. So, we’ve got the garlic down to a fairly small chop. What we’re going to do now is just add a little bit of Kosher salt and what’s going to happen the Kosher salt is going to work as an abrasive. So we’re going to use the flat end of our knife and basically just smash the garlic into the cutting board and you can actually hear the salt working as an abrasive, breaking the garlic down and as you keep doing it breaks down even further and you can keep doing this until basically your garlic turns into almost a liquid form. We’ve got our garlic paste here and we’re going to add about a clove and a half of the garlic. You can save the rest of that and then we’re going to add a little bit of cayenne pepper for a little bit of heat. I like the heat bouncing off the citrus so we’re going to add maybe half a teaspoon of the cayenne pepper. We’re going to add our lemon juice. I’ve gone ahead and squeezed the juice of five lemons and now these are going to be six. We’re going to use six ounces of lemon juice. You get about an ounce from each lemon. So, I’ve got my five ounces and I’m going to squeeze the last one right in. I like to squeeze it through my fingers. You can definitely use a juicer if you’d like but if you squeeze it through your fingers you can catch any seeds that pop up. We caught a couple there and we’re just going to go ahead and squeeze the rest of that lemon there. It gives us a total six ounces of lemon juice. And then we’re going to add our cilantro and we’re going to add about three tablespoons of cilantro. Now, what we’re going to do is we’re just going to stir all of this up and we’re going to put this in the refrigerator we’re going to cover it, put it in the refrigerator and let it marinate. You want it to marinate for a minimum of four hours and add a little bit of salt and this is some Kosher salt and some fresh, ground pepper, stir this around and that’s basically what we want there. So we’re going to cover this and when we come back, I’m going to show you how to plaid it for the salad or a first course.