Scallops & champagne – as Christmas is coming soon again
December 14th, 2017 | starter
I know some of you will think: “Now she goes mad, the wife of the captain – using champagne for cooking…” Let me say first of all: Yes, of course you can cook this wonderful dish also with Crémant or Cava. But for special occasions, even Champagne fits to perfect the scallops on Capellini with this velvety saffron sauce. The blood oranges make the icing on the cake not only optically. A dream of a starter!
Champagne is only allowed to be named Champagne if it was made in French Champagne. Crémants are those sparkling wines, also produced by bottle fermentation, which are produced outside Champagne. The quality is very similar, but the price of Crémant usually much cheaper.
Capellini are very, very thin spaghetti, probably the thinnest pasta in Italian cuisine. Capellini’s cooking time is extremely short (3 – 4 minutes). They are perfect for fine cuisine with noble sauces and for example fish or seafood.
Scallops with capellini and champagne-saffron-sauce
(serves 6 – 8 persons)
This is how the wife of the Captain does it:
This dish can easily be prepared before your guests arrive. You can prepare the sauce, boil the pasta and keep warm (attention: only slightly al dente, so that they don’t get too soft). The oranges can wait of course already filleted in the fridge. That means, you only have to roast the scallops and decorate the plates, when your guests are around.
You can use the scallops as a whole, but you can also halve them lengthwise (then the frying time is minimized once again, thus “buzz – buzz”…).
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