How to Sear Scallops Perfectly (and easily)

I learned a few important things when I worked in cheap tourist seafood restaurants in rural maine during high school. One of them was how to sear perfect scallops, which comes in handy because seared scallops are nearly my favorite food. It’s really easy; you just need to forget what you know about cooking meat and obey a few simple rules:

1. Buy the biggest, freshest scallops you can. Okay, that’s no different from meat.
2. Bring them to room temperature; if they are colder, they won’t cook through to the middle before burning on the outside.
3. Be very, very careful with them. Rinse them, but rinse them carefully. If you don’t rinse them you run a small chance of your guests finding some sand or grit in their food.
4. Pat them dry and let them sit between two towels to dry out well. Like with the temperature, if too much water has to evaporate they won’t cook well.
5. Salt and pepper both sides liberally.
6. Get a large pan as hot as it can possibly be on your stove. Thick or cast-iron pans will work better here, particularly if you’re on electric heat. Add a very small amount of olive oil and let it coat the pan lightly.
7. Put the scallops in the pan evenly spaced out rather than crammed towards the middle (if you’ve let your pan get appropriately hot, the heat shouldn’t be especially concentrated at the middle anyway); they need their own sections of metal to get the surfaces as hot as possible.
8. Leave them for between 2.5 (for very small scallops) and 4.5 (for extremely large scallops) minutes, then flip. Don’t flip them early; you can’t go back on these once you do; trust me, you won’t burn them if you just don’t touch them.
9. The first side is not a science; it’s to see how quickly they’re cooking. The second side may require slightly more or (more commonly) slightly less, but you basically just need to look and see whether they look slightly more than half cooked or slightly less.
10. Err on the side of pulling them early rather than late. Even with really large scallops, they’ll get chewy fast if you leave them on too long, and unless you’re an idiot you probably haven’t totally undercooked them.