Seared Sea Scallops With Ginger-Lime Butter Recipe (2024)

Is the cast iron essential for searing?

Great recipe. A couple of ideas we tried. (1) The butter sauce tends to separate when made as described, but the same ingredients can be used to make a more elegant buerre blanc sauce that holds together. (2) If you take the sweet potato slices, dab on a tiny bit of butter, salt & pepper, then brown under a broiler for a minute or so you get a nicely caramelized layer on top that ups the dish a little.

Really? Never use frozen scallops? Maybe for those of you on the East coast (within a stones throw from the water) you can get really fresh scallops, but I think I'd rather have frozen scallops from Whole Foods. You're giving frozen fish a bad rap.

5 minutes and time from flipping is too much for these scallops. Two minutes and a flip or 3 and no flip is enough in a preheated cast iron.

Fantastic! Easy and elegant. My lime had more juice, so the sauce seemed tart. I added a 1/2 tsp. sugar to it and it was sublime!

Scallops were delicious. Didn't think the bok choy or sweet potatoes added much - I'd probably serve with different sides next time, or maybe follow the advice of one of the commenters & butter and broil the sweet potatoes after roasting. Also, I found the butter fussy to mix; it was hard to get the lime juice to incorporate. Next time I'd just melt the butter, let it cool a little, and then add the other ingredients.

This ginger-lime butter recipe is incredible! It took about 10 minutes to pull it all together and searing the scallops takes about 10 minutes as well (very quick prep). I isolated the scallops from this recipe and served with a fresh arugula, pomegranate, and feta salad and found it complimented it quite well. I served for my mom's birthday and everyone was very pleased! I will definitely be using this butter recipe for all of my seafood dinners. I even made extra to use this week!

instead of boiling the baby bok choy, pan sear in a bit of peanut or sesame oil with a splash of soy sauce.

Here's a great tip from Cooks Illustrated if, like me, you can't find or won't pay for off the boat dry scallops: mix 1 qt H20, 1/4 cup lemon juice, and 2 TBS salt. Add scallops. Leave in for one hour and then pay dry with towel. This leeches out the chemicals added to wet scallops. Also, I made Bittman's sweet potato fries in lieu of baked sweet potatoes as I only had big potatoes and wanted faster cooking time. Worked well.

Delicious and easy! I will be using this sauce on lots of seafood dishes.

No, that's called caramelized. High heat, short time, seared and delicious.

What a lovely dinner! Because it was a hot summer day, I started early, cooking the sweet potatoes in the microwave. At dinner time, I cut them in half, reheated them under the broiler, and served them with spinach that I wilted with some chopped garlic in the pan in which I had just cooked the scallops. everything was doused with the ginger-lime butter just before serving.

I left out the pepper for the sauce and I served the scallops with Udon noodles instead of sweet potatoes. Great recipe!

Scallops were delicious. I skipped the ginger-lime and drizzled cooked scallops with a balsamic reduction. The pan scrapings were so delicious - next time I would deglaze the pan with a little sherry and pour that over the scallops.

While the butter sauce itself has a very nice taste, it completely overwhelms the taste of the scallops. As a result, this recipe simply isn't ballanced.

I loved the sauce and the scallops were divine! I think the sweet potatoes are out of place. Preferred with a nice wild rice mixture and asparagus.

This is an easy and light meal. The butter/lime/ginger sauce really sets it off.

These were the best scallops I’ve ever had. The ginger-lime butter situation is phenomenal and I plan on using it on other seafood dishes. My scallops were medium-sized so I seared for 2 min on each side - came out perfectly!

I used just a tiny piece of Serrano (after testing it for heat) plus a clove of garlic. Can do on stovetop or microwave…the sauce separates so you have to whisk it together. I actually thought about a quick blending. Don’t worry about the other veggies. This is all about the scallops and sauce.

Super easy and delicious. Used a mystery pepper, would make sure I use one with a little more heat next time. As others noted, only 3 minutes in the cast iron then flipped and rested.

Didn't make the sweet potatoes or bok choy, but this ginger-lime-butter sauce is delicious! I melted the butter in the microwave then added the other ingredients. Look forward to making this again, and also trying the sauce on other types of fish.

I put the sauce ingredients and the butter in Bain Marie mode as the bok choy water was coming to a boil and kept it warm when done to finally warm it in the cast-iron for a few seconds to soak up the scallops juices.I always said that one can eat anything if you have the right sauce.This is one of them.A keeper for sure.

Quite good an easy to prepare

The ingredients are great but a couple of changes future cooks may wish to consider. 1) even with frozen, thawed scallops 5 minutes in any really hot skillet is too long for searing; follow closely and in our case 3 min yielded nice browning. 2) every lime is different in yield of juice and in our case the 40 ml or so completely overwhelmed all the food flavors with strong acidity. Suggest cooks to titrate lime to taste, or as others have suggested, balance with sweetness from honey etc.

The butter overwhelmed the delicate flavor of the scallops and left my mouth on fire. I wasn't very hungry so my sides were cucumber and jicama spears. The butter s/b quite good on sweet potatoes or stirred into the lentil/yam soup I have planned for tomorrow.

add honey as described in reviews

Used only half the amount of lime juice and added one teaspoon of honey per one reader's suggestion which mellows out the lime a bit. BTW, butter and lime juice don't "combine." I overlooked Step 8 so presumably it comes together when you "quickly warm" it.

I didn't expect to like the scallops-sweet potato combination but they went beautifully together. The bok choy was ok but string beans or another green would have worked just as well. Dish was gorgeous. My scallops were smaller so timing needed to be adjusted but they turned out perfectly. This is indeed an elegant supper. Oh, and I loved the ginger-lime butter. I grated the ginger on a microplane and melted it all in the microwave instead of the pan.