Summer Seafood Pasta with White Wine Sauce

4.84 from 12 votes

The most delish Summer Seafood Pasta with White Wine Sauce! Easily doubles or triples to feed a crowd!

Prep Time10

Cook Time20

Total Time30

Course: Main Course

Cuisine: Italian, Mediterranean

Servings: People

Cook the pasta to package directions. Hold off on starting the scallops until you start your pasta.
Remove the muscle from the scallops and pat dry with a paper towel. Season the scallops heavily with salt and pepper.
Preheat a large skillet (I like a cast iron skillet for this) over medium high heat. Add the olive oil and 2 tablespoons of the butter. When butter melts into oil, add scallops. Sear the scallops for 2-3 minutes on each side until super golden brown, then remove from pan and tent loosely with foil to keep warm. Add the remaining butter and another tablespoon of oil and cook the shrimp until pink.
Add an additional drizzle of olive oil to the skillet and add the garlic, shallots, crushed red pepper flakes, thyme, salt and pepper. Reduce heat to medium low and sauté garlic and shallots 1 to 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Add wine to the pan and scrape up any pan drippings. Reduce the wine for 1 minute and add the lemon zest and juice and the remaining 1 tablespoon of butter and stir the mixture until the butter has melted. Add the cooked pasta and cook for about 30 seconds, just to combine and let the pasta soak up the sauce. Nestle the scallops and shrimp back into the skillet to serve. Garnish with basil

There are a few key rules when prepping scallops – all of which are super easy! First, if you open them and the side muscle is still intact, remove it from each scallop.
Then just pat them super dry and season liberally with salt and pepper. That’s it!
When it comes to cooking scallops, you’ll want to coat a pan in olive oil and have the heat fairly high. Once you add the scallops, they’ll form a golden crust in about 2-3 minutes. Once you’ve got the crust on one side, just flip and cook the other side until that has a crust as well. Voila!
Let’s talk prepping shrimp: if you’re thinking ahead, you can take shrimp out of the freezer and transfer it to the fridge and let it thaw overnight. If you need the shrimp faster, take it out of the freeze and let it thaw in a bowl of cold water on the counter. WARM WATER will mess with their texture so make sure it’s cold! Regardless of which way you use to defrost, once they are thawed, lay them out on a paper towel to dry them off and then get cooking.
As a general rule here’s what shrimp should look like in it’s cooking process: undercooked shrimp are a wide and flexible “U” shape, overcooked shrimp are an”O” shape and completely curls up on itself in a tight O, and perfectly cooked shrimp are a “C” in shape and ready to eat!