Polacco Family – Purple Scallops

I am finally back to Adelaide!! Let’s continue with my previous post. Remember I said I was going there for sea urchins? I was going to the Polacco Family Trust stall. The stall owner is Paul Polacco, who has been diving for sea urchins as well as scallops for over 2 years near Kangaroo Island. This handsome young man has been extensively busy with his business – diving, collecting and going to Willunga farmers market on Saturdays and RASFM on Sundays.

With his hands full, Paul has had a lot of good catches. The clean and crisp water of KI has brought up many good species that are high in quality for eating. The purple scallops and purple sea urchins are of those species. Oh, well, as I didn’t get the sea urchins, I’ll not be able to talk about it but for the scallops, people has to try them. These beautiful scallops have purple colored shields and corals, which are rare to see in most of the metro fish shops.When go pass the stall in RASFM, people will normally see Paul there opening and cleaning scallops. There is also a heating hot plate BBQ with some scallops, which people can sample for just $2 each. Anyway, I bought a dozen of half shell for $20 whereas the unopened ones are $16 per dozen. I know they are more expensive than ones in seafood stores but for freshness and sweetness, I think these purple scallops deserve the extra money. Btw, purple scallops are high in protein and antioxidant.

To keep the freshness, my wife decided to cook them in two ways. One is as sushi with Kokuho Rose sushi rice, wasabi and cariviars. The raw scallops were extremely fresh to meet sushi grade. Oh, yum! They are moreish and soooooooooooooo sweet. With a soft and tender flesh, these scallops are perfect for sushi. Oh, okay, this made up my failure in buying sea urchins. As I said, the flesh is super sweet and I mean it. They are 10 times sweeter than normal red and grey shell scallops! Although I am not too sure where the sweetness came from, but that’s how they tasted like.

The second way we did the scallops were to pan sear them for one minute each side. Using such method we were able to keep the sea bream in the center of the flesh. Oh, full of sea water inside the scallops! It is not to mention that the corals were sweet too. After heating, the corals turned golden and for each bite, the sweetness was just exploding in my mouth. A balsamic vinegar dressing was added to further enhance the flavour.

After this good experience, I say I’d definitely be back for more scallops and I am looking forward for the next sea urchin season to sample some of the best SA seafoods. The Polacco Family enterprise purple scallops are highly recommended!

Polacco Family Enterprise

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