Posted on 12/12/2021 2:25:10 PM PST by mylife
n Absolute Best Tests, our writer Ella Quittner destroys the sanctity of her home kitchen in the name of the truth. She's seared more porterhouse steaks than she cares to recall, tasted enough types of bacon to concern a cardiologist, and ranked potatoes from “most forgettable” to “potatoes we’d like to marry.” Today, she tackles shrimp.
Humankind’s first known shellfish feast occurred sometime around 163,000 B.C., in a cave on the southern coast of South Africa. Many millennia later, excavators found a bowl of roughly two dozen edible creatures, including mussels and at least one barnacle that had previously resided on the belly of a whale.
Humankind’s most bizarre known shellfish feast occurred sometime around 7 a.m. last Tuesday in my apartment. It consisted of just me, a whole pound of butter, and more shrimp than would comfortably fit in my crisper drawer. I emerged several hours later, grease-battered, weary, and surprised by several of my findings. It was, in other words, an average Absolute Best Tests trial day.
Let’s make like a crustacean and dive in:
(Excerpt) Read more at food52.com ...
yeah well its the internet, so...
🤣
You’re right. I’m being picky, but it’s late and my caffeine is wearing off.
When I was a young sailor at Cecil Field in Florida, three of us went to an all you can eat shrimp place. I was a madman for shrimp, and the competitive juices kicked in and harnessed my love of the crustacean.
I ate so many shrimp in a variety of forms (breaded, fried, steamed) I ended up in a state of gastric distress. We drove back, and I lay in the bed of that pickup truck groaning.
I couldn’t eat shrimp for years.
I was so disappointed I did that to myself, and learned a lesson that night. Never again would I engage in an eating contest.
After about 15 or 20 years of traversing the Great Shrimp Desert, I regained my appetite for them.
In my most lustful historic shrimp feast I attended a Christmas Work Party at a fancy hotel some years ago, and a server waded through the crowd bearing a turkey platter sized plate heaped nearly a foot high with a mound of cold, steamed shrimp with the edges of the tray thick with nice, horseradish-y cocktail sauce.
That night I followed in the wake of that tray of shrimp as it meandered through the crowd!
I love it steamed, with peppercorns, bay leaf, and just a touch of Old Bay, barely even enough to taste. I take the store-bought cocktail sauce and spice it up with fresh grated horseradish, lemon, and Tabasco sauce!
My second favorite way to eat it is a Spanish tapas dish “Gambas Al Ajillo”. I have small teracotta dishes (they call them ‘cazuelas’ in Spain) about six inches across and two inches deep that I cook it in. I don’t like to use the teeny cocktail shrimp, I like to use the smallest whole shrimp I can get that aren’t the tiny ones. I add six or seven shrimp to each dish. I then take 1-2 cloves of garlic for each serving, and using a single edge razor blade, I slice them as absolutely as thin as I can possibly make them. And there is a reason for that.
Then, I take 1-6 whole dried red chili peppers (I put six in mine!) and toss them on top. I add a bay leaf, just a tad of paprika, and some parsley.
I heat up some fine Spanish Olive Oil (1/2 cup for each serving) in a saucepan until it is just about smoking, then pour the hot oil into each dish and it sizzles like mad!
I heat up some nice crusty small-loaved Spanish bread (If I can get it) and slice it into moderately thin slices, remove the bay leaf, and serve it hot.
That absolutely brilliantly great thing is that you don’t have to time it or anything. You just pour the oil in and you serve, the olive oil to drip the bread in is...killer.
But what really makes the dish is the garlic. A disclaimer-I cannot eat a lot of garlic, most especially strong garlic or the minced garlic you see in jars, which I simply can’t stomach. I adore garlic, but it causes me digestive problems.
But when I slice it like that with the razor, thinner than paper, and pour the hot olive oil over it, much of the garlic seems to melt and dissolve, and that strong garlicky taste largely disappears, as does the indigestion that usually follows it. I know if I told people how much garlic I just gave them, they would probably not be enthusiastic, but...because the strong taste isn’t there, they don’t know.
It is a brilliant dish. Dipping that bread...
heat olive oil, crushed garlic in the pan with red pepper flakes till aromatic, toss in shrimp for a few moments till opaque, deglaze with white wine , dump on noodles.. enjoy.
👍
you are an artiste using Gods palette..
Fishing on the Platte river in Missouri with grandma years ago. Catfish was what we were after. I keep getting crawdads eating on my chicken livers. I raise the pole up and here’s these big crawdadies. I shake them off and go back to fishing. An older black man with a cane pole an old red and white bobber on his line put a hunk of raw pork on his hook and goes to fishing next to us. We are what at the time most folks would call poor white folks. I get two more crawdads, the black man is putting his in a bucket. Grandma says “see if that man wants those crawdads”. I walked over to him and said “Sir, would you want these crawdads?” He said “yeah, throw’em in the bucket Thanks”. Well at that time of my life, I wasn’t sure about how I’d feel about crawdads or black people. Thank God I never grew up prejudice against either.
Crawdads to me are a little sweeter than shrimp and there’s good ones of us and bad ones. IMHO.
I love food, we all do, it is a human thing! Ain’t it grand?
I forgot to add, like you, I LOVE shrimp scampi!
i steam shrimp the same way i steam blue crabs...
1 part apple cider vinegar...
1 part beer...
1 part water...
old bay seasoning...
YEP.
Pot of water, tablespoon of vinegar, correct amount of Zatarain's Shrimp Boil.
Bring to a boil, dump in shrimp, let it start to boil again, cut the heat and in two minutes by the clock they will be floating.
Drain, spread out on plates and put in the fridge for 11 minutes.
Eat.
Learned it from the CxxxAxx side of dad's family from just southwest of Baton Rouge, LA.
Those boys could cook, eat, drink beer and run trot lines all night long.
.
>>> “stupid autoerect!”
Oh my! Lol
I drop mine into boiling water, wait until they float to the top, and then plunge them into a bowl of ice water. Works every time.
Cook it however you like, I won’t be eating it.
I just boil seasoned water (a bit of Old Bay) and toss in 1 lb of deveined large shrimp. Take off the heat and let sit for 2-3 minutes and drain then chill and eat with a good cocktail sauce and lemon. But if you have an hour to kill this Ina Garten orzo/shrimp dish is quite wonderful. I don’t include cucumber. Good room temp or you can refrigerate to have later. Yummy. https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/roasted-shrimp-and-orzo-recipe-1947099
I use zatarains pro boil II throw them crawfish, corn and red taters in dere too
sad for you.
l
Shrimp of different sizes are different species, not old or younger. Tougher is usually overcooked and spongy is usually a shrimp that died before being processed. Shrimp are best cooked live.
Shrimp that come from a grocery store are frozen, usually farmed from China or another Asian country. They contain all manner of food dyes, antibodies, assorted chemicals. Asian shrimp processors cut as many corners as possible to maximize their profits, not your eating experience.
Defrosted shrimp in grocery stores that have liquid are far along in the decomposition process to be avoided, as any seafood that smells “the fishy odor” - an indication of decomposition.
Its where the shrimp come form, how they were kept onboard the catcher boat, how they were processed at the buyer, how long they where in cold storage that determines the eating experience.
Personally fpor the best eating shrimp, I’d order online from a shrimper in Alaska - as they have very high quality seafood standards : their quality is their business. As for Gulf shrimp - I was never impressed with their seafood handling, but that was 20 years ago and may have changed.
Thanks for the recipe.
I saved the recipe- it sounds great!
I do something similar to what you do;
Start boiling a pot of water. While waiting for it to boil, throw in 2 or 3 lemons, halved, 1 or 2 heads of garlic, halved (remove as much paper from the garlic as you can), and as much Old Bay as you like.
Once the water is boiling, throw in 2 or 3 lbs. of shrimp, boil til they turn pink and float.
Drain the shrimp, put them in a chilled bowl inside of a bigger bowl filled with ice to stop the cooking and refrigerate.
That’s for shrimp cocktail, serve with lemon wedges and your favorite cocktail sauce.
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