Seafood cream with scallops and grilled prawns

This recipe for this Christmas meal and New Year’s Eve dinner, a guaranteed success, simple and practical since you can prepare the steps a few days before and leave the end point of the recipe for 5 minutes before lunch or dinner, heat and ready. Of those magnificent recipes for their ingredients and that everyone likes. I am not going to deceive you, it is not a cheap recipe like the ones I have used to you, but someday we can give ourselves a little luxury and get seafood up to the top, in an original way, in the form of cream and with some vegetables.

In this recipe I have used quality ingredients, as always, mixing the best of seasonal food with seafood so typical on these dates. I leave you with the recipe, there is no better way to start a winter meal than with a bowl of warm cream of seafood. I hope you like it and that it is a star dish in your celebrations.

Preparation of seafood and fish fumet

1. In this case, I have decided on the following pieces: a sea ox, some crayfish and some shrimp. I had a bit of monkfish in the freezer which, as you well know, as I say in all fish recipes, gives the broth a delicious flavor.
2. Sandra, a friend from Compostela, told me a long time ago the cooking tricks of seafood (I am not cooking seafood all day, the truth is that I did not know much about it). We can buy it alive or already cooked, if we buy it alive the best so that it retains all its juices and that at the time of cooking we do not lose part of its substance is that we kill it by vinegaring it. In a large jar or casserole we put the following measures, for each liter of water 100 ml of vinegar. What we achieve is that the bug dies slowly, this process usually takes 2 to 3 hours. Then we cook it in hot water with a little laurel and salt but not for a long time, in the case of the crab for example about 8 minutes. If you do not have time to vinegar the seafood, as long as the seafood is alive it is important to cook it from cold water. This time all the ingredients were already frozen.
3. Thaw the prawns and crayfish in the fridge the night before. We peel them, remove the head and the shell that protects them.
4. Once we have the prawns already peeled, we remove the intestine (the black thread in the center) and reserve them. In the same way we proceed with the crayfish and leave the meat of the seafood in the same plate as the shrimp.
5. We put a wide casserole with hot water (about two liters approximately) and two bay leaves and add heads and shell of the prawns and crayfish. If we have any fish remains (if possible white like hake, rooster, conger eel, heads or bones) it can be added too, I added monkfish.
6. It is left to cook for about 15-20 minutes over low heat. The broth will start to foam, they are the remains of impurities. It is best to remove this foam.
7. When the 15 minutes of cooking are over, add the sea ox and cook it for 5 minutes with the broth, then remove it and set aside to add, remove the meat and all its juice. And finally we pass the broth through a strainer and reserve. As you will have seen it does not have salt, it is best to add as we try the cream, to be able to rectify.
8. So that we do not have problems with the sea ox, I advise you to open the piece by removing its tail (which serves to recognize the sex), from there the shell is opened by levering with the handle of a knife. In a bowl we are depositing everything that is edible. You have to remove the gills that only contain sand and a bag that is between the eyes that does not taste good. We break the legs and we remove all the meat until leaving the shells clean. When we have everything we add it to the plate with the rest of the seafood and fish.

Preparation of the seafood cream

1. Peel the onions and cut into two. Finely chop julienne and add to a saucepan with a finger of extra virgin olive oil. Brown over low heat for 5 minutes.
2. Meanwhile we wash, peel and chop the carrots and potatoes. Add everything to the same casserole with the julienned onion and sprinkle with the pinch of baking soda (1 or 2 g is more than enough, a point of a knife is a good measure), which will help us to poach the vegetables in a very short time . I have learned this trick from Iñigo Aguirre, who tells us on his blog:  “Many of you will have made candied onion and you will know the time it takes to get a really powerful caramelized sauce. A real pain in the neck when your days are numbered: I present you an infallible trick that will allow you to poach onions in 5 minutes and confit them in about 20. In addition, the flavor is enhanced with even sweeter and caramelized notes. The technique is to speed up the process by reducing the acidity of the onion with an alkaline product: baking soda. ”
3. We remove everything well and fry for 10 minutes over medium heat. We cut the bread into thin slices and put them in the casserole, add a teaspoon of dessert with paprika from La Vera and stir everything together the flavors.
4. We add the seafood broth or fumet that we have previously prepared (which can be brick if you do not have time to do it) and the pot with the whole tomato and its juice. Let cook until everything is soft.
5. We add the meat of the prawns that we are not going to use in the plating, the clean piece of monkfish or your favorite fish and the rest of the seafood that we have reserved: the crayfish and the sea ox. We stir well by mixing the flavors of our ingredients.
6. We taste of salt and if necessary, season with salt and pepper. We only have to crush until we get a creamy texture, and we have the cream ready to serve very hot. The texture must be cream, if we are a little fat we can add a little whole milk or liquid cream. If we are going to use it another day, we look for a tupper where we can put all the liquid and keep in the fridge until we are going to eat it.

Preparation of scallops, prawns, fried and plated leek

1. While the cream is being made, we chop the leek that we had reserved in fine julienne and fry in a frying pan with abundant aove over low heat. As soon as it catches a golden color, remove from the pan to a plate with absorbent paper. We reserve.
2. We brush a pan with aove and when it starts to smoke we pass the prawns (the recipe is for 6 people, that is to say twelve prawns that had reserved, the rest is taken by the cream) only about 2 minutes without overdoing it, just enough for it to put pink.
3. We clean the scallops, dry very well to remove excess moisture after thawing. We mark the scallops in a pan with a little bit of egg, half a minute on each side. Personally I like that they are a little raw inside, if you do them a lot we run the risk of being very dry.
4. We cut the ham slices into very small cubes and put them in the micro at maximum temperature for two minutes, at the end of the first minute we remove so that the pieces do not stick and in case they were to burn, we are controlling the process to have crispy ham.
5. We choose a nice deep dish, add a generous tablespoon of very hot cream and place in the middle, a few scallops, without starving, with a little fried leek on top. Sprinkle with the crispy ham and a tiny pinch of Maldon salt.

I assure you that it is a luxury dish, very simple and easy to cook. A ten point recipe to be like a king on any special occasion or date and not spend the day in the kitchen.

Be sure to enjoy all the recipes for fish and seafood that we have on the blog, I assure you that you will find a lot of ideas to make yours much happier.