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MAINE: The Scallop Evangelist of Maine

September 19, 2022 โ€” Togue Brawn sits on cobblestones between two piers, preparing a makeshift picnic on top of a block of granite as dozens of seagulls watch unblinkingly from surrounding rooftops. She unpacks jars of salt and achar and olive oil and, finally, the mealโ€™s centerpiece: a plastic to-go container full of raw scallops, hauled out of the ocean only yesterday.

Brawn slices each plump, ivory-colored cylinder into thinner disks she lays on a platter. โ€œThe texture is what you should really notice, and the flavor is good and not fishy,โ€ she says, then a confession: โ€œI am obsessed with scallops.โ€ She wants everyone else to be obsessed with scallops, too. And since the pandemic caused a swell of enthusiasm for mail-ordered foodstuffs โ€” including Brawnโ€™s scallops โ€” that time may well be nigh.

Twelve years ago, Brawn started her company, Downeast Dayboat, to introduce dayboat-harvested Maine scallops to the masses. Brawn buys from small boats that often drag the bottoms of inshore crags along the Gulf of Maine and land their bounty a few hours later โ€” as opposed to the bulk of sea scallops eaten in the U.S., which are often sourced from large trip boats that work federally managed offshore waters three or more miles off the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to Virginia, staying at sea for a week or more (overall, Maine lands less than 2 percent of U.S. sea scallops). Because of the challenges and expense of quickly shipping out her fresh dayboat scallops, comparatively few people outside of Maine have gotten to sample Brawnโ€™s.

Read the full article at EATER

Maineโ€™s Allowable Scallop Catch To Remain Same As Last Year

November 13, 2017 โ€” PORTLAND, Maine โ€” Maine is allowing scallop fishermen to catch the same amount of scallops in the coming season as they did in the previous one.

The Maine Department of Marine Resources says its advisory council has approved the specifications for the 2017-18 scallop fishing season. Last year, fishermen were allowed to harvested 15 gallons of scallops per day in the Cobscook Bay area and 10 gallons per day in the rest of the state.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Maine Public

 

Elevating the Maine Scallop to Haute Cuisine

October 25th, 2016 โ€” Togue Brawn and I hunker down in the wheelhouse for warmth, next to the captain whoโ€™s got one hand on his radio, the other turning the wheel. The GPS, he grunts, is broken. Heโ€™s navigating blind.

Behind us on the deck, an enormous spool of steel cable unravels and drops an iron-mesh dredgeโ€”basically a supersized bag-like fishing netโ€”down to the seafloor. The boat circles until the captain makes the call and the spool retracts, pulling up the dredge, which appears suddenly at the boatโ€™s stern, swinging to and fro. Two deckhands, each clad in orange rubber overalls and knee-high boots, grab for the large bar beneath the net, yelling above the engineโ€™s roar. The net groans with scallops, each nestled safely inside its brown shell flecked with mud and barnacles.

The deckhands start sorting, small scallops arching overboard and larger ones clattering into nearby bins. Then they don thick workmanโ€™s gloves to pry open the shells, tossing the entrails into the sea; the jiggling adductor muscle, the part we eat, goes into buckets, where they gleam bright white. All around us, on the decks of near-identical boats (mostly retrofitted lobster vessels) other fishermenโ€”and they are almost all menโ€”do the same, silhouetted against the pink streaks of a frigid dawn. By mid-morning, they have found their rhythm, and the whole of itโ€”the unwinding, dragging, hauling, sorting, and shuckingโ€”coupled with the bobbing of the boat, feels like an act of meditation.

The scene will no doubt replay tomorrow and the day after that and so on until the season is done. Today is December 1, and scalloping season has opened in eastern Maine.

Read the full story at Hakai Magazine 

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