Nothing small about these shrimp dishes
Four bold, balanced recipes for shrimp.
Shrimp are special.
Not, of course, if you look at them — especially if they still have their heads. Then they’re kind of gross. I know one woman who refuses to eat them because, as she puts it, they look like “insects of the sea.”
Fine. More for the rest of us. And that’s good, because shrimp are special.
I decided to celebrate everything that is so wonderful about shrimp by using them to cook four dishes. I could have made more — far, far more — but I already had four pounds of shrimp to peel and devein.
And that’s as much fun as it sounds. I was saving a little money, but honestly it’s worth it to buy the peeled, easy-peel or already deveined varieties. Especially if you’re cooking four pounds of it.
The shrimp I bought, incidentally, was frozen. Away from the coast, shrimp are almost always going to be frozen. Even if you go to a store and they have a lovely selection of clearly unfrozen shrimp sitting in a refrigerated cooler on ice, they were still frozen at one point.
And while frozen food is almost never as good as fresh, shrimp is one of the very few exceptions. Shrimp is flash-frozen when it is caught or farmed, sometimes right on board the boat, and it loses very little of its flavor. To defrost it, just leave it in the refrigerator overnight or take it out of the bag and run cold water over it for five minutes.
With my quickly frozen, easily thawed shrimp in hand, I first made Shrimp and Avocado Quesadillas.
If you’re already picturing how good that tastes, you’re wrong — because these also come with a liberal sprinkling of tarragon. So that’s shrimp (which goes great with tarragon) and avocado (which apparently goes great with tarragon) and tarragon (which goes great with shrimp and avocado) and some nicely melted cheese between two flour tortillas.
And sour cream, which is spread on one of the tortillas. With just the right amount of richness, it brings the whole thing together, like the mayonnaise on a BLT.
Try one, and your life might never quite be the same again.
Much the same can be said about Shrimp with Sweet Vermouth, which is far more elegant but no less delicious. If you’ll want to serve the quesadillas to your very best friends, then this is a dish you’ll want to serve to people you want to impress. And with only seven ingredients, plus salt and pepper, it’s easy to make.
The shrimp part is impressive enough, being shrimp, but what really makes this dish soar is the sauce. When you mix cream together with sweet vermouth, you get a sauce for the gods. And this version is especially stunning because it addresses the problem of richness by mixing in a bit of red wine vinegar and minced scallions.
It is a masterpiece of balance and flavor.
The third dish is of my own design, something I created a few months ago out of what we had in the house. I call it Fennel-Lemon Shrimp, and I (humbly) think it is a delightful blend of big flavors.
A thinly sliced fennel bulb — some stores call it anise — provides just a hint of a licorice taste; certainly not enough to discourage people who, like me, generally dislike licorice. Soy sauce, garlic and ginger edge the dish toward Asia, but a handful of small tomatoes brings it back to the New World. And everything is tied together with lemon, both in lemon juice and preserved lemons.
Intensely flavored, preserved lemons are among those things I keep in the fridge that most people probably don’t have. It used to be available at some specialty stores, and you may still be able to find it at international markets. I make my own and keep it for the right occasion, which often involves shrimp or chicken.
If you don’t happen to have them on hand, you can certainly leave them out.
For my last shrimp dish, I made fried shrimp. But they were not ordinary fried shrimp. These were Beijing Shrimp, which are apparently popular in northern China.
American fried shrimp have a clean, bright taste. But Beijing Shrimp are earthier and more complex. They are not necessarily better, but they have more going on.
The differences are few, but significant. Some American shrimp recipes use bread crumbs, but Beijing Shrimp uses bread crumbs that have been toasted, providing a rounder, nuttier flavor. And also, the egg that helps the bread crumbs adhere is mixed with sesame oil and white pepper, punching up the umami taste.
The dipping sauce that is served with it takes no time at all. You just mix a little sesame oil into hoisin sauce, and you have a thick, lightly sweet sauce to bring out the best in your shrimp.