Scallops with Miso Kombu Butter and Bunya Nut

Four plump Western Australian scallops, baked in the shell and drowned in a rich umami butter of miso, kombu and native bunya nut.

These are Western Australian scallops, served the way scallops are best served, in their own shells with something very good melting over them. Four to a serve, and almost nothing for you to do. Move them from the freezer to the fridge the night before, then they go into the oven on a tray, the butter melts down into the scallop, and they come to the table in the shells they arrived in. It is the sort of thing you would order out, and at home it takes one tray and no skill at all.

The butter is where this dish lives. It's built on white miso and kombu, a Japanese sea kelp, which together give a gentle savoury depth, the quality that makes a good broth taste finished rather than flat. Both come from the sea, like the scallop, so the butter carries that saltiness into the sweetness rather than covering it. Through it goes Kashmiri chilli, the mild deep-red Indian chilli used more for its colour than its heat, which turns the butter a rich red-orange and gives it warmth without making it hot.

And folded through the whole thing is bunya nut, the seed of the Australian bunya pine, soft and nutty with a sweetness close to a chestnut, which gives the butter body and a gentle roundness rather than sitting on top as a garnish. Bunya nuts were gathered, traded and eaten by Aboriginal people in south-east Queensland for thousands of years, and the harvest gatherings held for them are among the largest recorded on this continent.

Japanese miso, Indian chilli, Australian nut, Western Australian scallop. It should not work as neatly as it does, and that is rather the point of cooking in this country.