June 2003 Species Focus
Bay scallops
Imported China bays fill gap left by dwindling stocks of domestic
scallop
Seafood-savvy chefs have always treasured fresh bay scallops. Plucked from the shallow waters of Cape Cod, Nantucket and eastern Long Island each fall by small-boat fishermen, the cream-colored bays are so sweet that chefs consider them in a culinary class by themselves.
“They are,” says longtime Long Island restaurateur and chef John Ross, “a gift from the seafood gods.”
It wasn’t that long ago that this small scallop was a pretty big deal to fishermen and small packing houses in some of the most famous resort towns in the Northeast.
“Bays were the core of our business,” recalls Ken Homan, president of Braun Seafood, a distributor in Cutchogue, Long Island, N.Y. Homan grew up in the fish business on the eastern tip of Long Island.
In a good year, millions of pounds of bays would be dredged from the waters of Peconic Bay, a rich, sprawling watershed of more than 200 square miles of countless bays and marshes.
“From September to March we would process 5,000 to 10,000 meats a day,” he says.
Although small compared to the sea-scallop business, bays still supported a sizeable fishery that provided a welcome shot of cash each fall to the local residents. In 1982, when 2.7 million pounds of bay-scallop meats were landed, the fishery brought in more than $10 million to fishermen, who counted on their scallop money to get them through the winter.
Since the early 1980s, though, the bay-scallop fishery has been in a steep, steep decline. A brown algae that bloomed in Peconic Bay in the mid 1980s decimated the eel grass that shelters the young scallops.
By the late 1980s, New York’s bay-scallop fishery had declined to less than 10,000 pounds of meats a year, and it has never recovered. This year, Braun Seafood processed a total of 50 pounds of bays on the first day of the season.
Harvests from Massachusetts, which typically produced more than two-thirds of the annual bay scallop harvest, have plummeted as well, from more than 2 million pounds of meats in 1982 to less than 50,000 pounds a year now.
“They blame it on pollution, lack of feed, overfishing — but I don’t think anybody really knows the answer,” says Steve Connolly of
Steve Connolly Seafood Co., a veteran Boston seafood distributor who has been buying bays from a Nantucket shucking house for more than 40 years.
This winter, says Connolly, Massachusetts harvests were abysmal, due in large part to the bitterly cold winter.
“Most of the fishermen are part-timers, and they could make more money and stay warmer pounding nails,” he says.
From prices that used to run about $8 a pound, the wholesale cost of fresh bays has doubled, to about $16 a pound. In spite of the high price tag, demand remains strong among chefs who can charge a premium price for a premium scallop.
“I buy them whenever I can,” says award-winning chef Michelle Bernstein, who runs the highly acclaimed Azul restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Miami. “I fly them in by FedEx if I have to. Their flavor is unbelievable.”
With only a handful of bays being harvested domestically, it may seem surprising to see them on more menus than ever before. But 99.9 percent of the bay scallops sold in America these days are farmed in the waters of northeastern China, on the shores of the Yellow Sea. In most cases, it is the same American bay scallop species (Argopecten irradians) that is native to the U.S. East Coast.
In 1982, Zhang Fusui, a shellfish biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, planted the seeds of China’s scallop-farming industry when he flew 27 live bay scallops from New England to Qingdao. Although it took awhile to get going, by the mid 1990s, Chinese scallop farmers were harvesting more than 300,000 metric tons of bay scallops from lantern nets that saturated the coastline from Qingdao to Dalian.
Buoyed by their success with bays, the Chinese also started farming their small native scallop, Chlamys farreri. By 1990, more than 10 million pounds of small, frozen Chinese scallops, mostly bays, were pouring into the U.S. market. Though the industry sold both species as China bays, by the time they made it onto the menu, they were simply sold as bays.
“The term ‘bay’ has become bastardized to the point where it’s just a generic name for small scallops,” says Andrew Kaelin of AIS Aqua, an import company in Taos, N.M. He worked with the World Bank in China funding aquaculture projects before becoming an importer of China bays.
In addition to China, Argentina, Iceland, Mexico and Peru export small scallops to the United States, where they are often marketed as “bay” scallops. After China, Argentina is by far the next largest supplier of small scallops, with annual exports consistently averaging about 7 million pounds.
Iceland normally exports between 750,000 and 1 million pounds of meats, while annual exports from Peru and Mexico have been anywhere from 200,000 pounds to more than 1 million.
According to Connolly, the taste of a true North American bay will vary depending on the water and the amount of feed. Cape Cod bays, he maintains, aren’t as sweet as bays from nearby Nantucket. “A Nantucket bay tastes like candy,” he says, adding that he prefers to eat them raw or just quickly seared.
Flavor profiles differ
The taste profile of the imported
frozen bays doesn’t
come close to the real thing, argue people who know the difference. Nevertheless,
the U.S.
market has a very big appetite for imported bays because of their very attractive
price and culinary versatility. Red Lobster, for example, probably the largest
single user of China bay scallops, serves a Broiled Seafood Platter that
includes broiled bay scallops, shrimp scampi and crab-stuffed flounder.
Depending on size, recent ex-importer prices of dry China bays have been averaging between $1.75 to $1.80 a pound (120/150 count meats) and $2.75 a pound (60/80 counts).
Because China bays are harvested after just one growing season, they are smaller than domestic bays, which have a longer growing cycle. Domestic bays typically run about 40/70 meat count, while the bulk of the China product is imported in the 100/200 size range.
By soaking the meats, however, U.S. scallop processors can pick up at least one size grade. Kaelin estimates that at least 70 percent of the Chinese product is sold to U.S. scallop processors.
“The best product is just given a very light soak in a high-grade phosphate. That will prevent weepage when you cook,” he says. “Most processors, though, try to pick up 20 or 25 percent weight. That’s a lot of water, so the scallop doesn’t have any taste and you get a lot of weepage.”
Soaked or dry, the cheaper prices of the imported bays has opened up a whole new market for small scallops over the last decade or so, says Ken Homan.
With so little domestic production, “the high-end market for bays has all but disappeared,” he says. In its place, a low- and medium-end market has developed.
“It’s not that great a product, but the low prices mean there are a lot of uses for it. Some people even prefer them to small sea scallops because they’re not as dense and they’re easier to cook.”
Frozen bays also show up on some surprisingly upscale menus. This spring, for example, the business-class menu of Germany’s Lufthansa Airlines featured a seafood-salad appetizer of small 150-count bays and tiny coldwater shrimp. Since the seafood was served in a spicy marinade, the natural taste of the scallops was irrelevant. And even though the food cost was less than $1, the perceived value was high.
While there’s little doubt that imported product will dominate the market for small scallops for the foreseeable future, on the East Coast efforts are underway to restore the native bay scallop, even if only to a shadow of its former self.
In Peconic Bay, there are plans to fertilize the now-clear waters of the watershed. Biologists plan to introduce nitrogen to kick start algae growth. They hope the increased food load will lead to a resurgence in bay scallop harvests.
Meanwhile, a handful of fresh bays is available from November to March. And frozen bays are readily available year-round. While they may not taste like a “gift from the seafood gods,” they can be a very nice addition to the bottom line.