While we find ourselves missing the chilly spring mornings and the ever-more-busy May hatches back home in Montana mightily these days, we’ve learned to ease our longing a bit by occasionally enjoying a mess of boiled fresh Gulf shrimp, immediately iced and slathered with a sinus-clearing, New Orleans inspired cocktail sauce.
We’ve found a place that trucks fresh shrimp up every night from Mobile Bay and the Alabama coast; from the Gulf to cooking pot in 24 hours is pretty damned fresh and their prices allow a splurge most weeks.
These shrimp bring back the taste-inspired memories of shrimp my grandfather would purchase off the shrimper dock about half a block from his river camp in Matagorda; we’d shuffle them back – snapping and popping in a bait bucket – to the simple kitchen where MaMa (Maw-Maw), to our wide-eyed amazement, would fish them out, head ‘em, rinse ‘em and cook ‘em right before our eyes. Now that’s really fresh shrimp…
Like everything related to cooking these days, most people tend to do things in the kitchen the way their momma taught them. If your boiled shrimp routine is the best in the world – hot damn for you.
We’re of the mind that there’s always something to learn from somebody out there (works both in the kitchen and fly fishing), therefore we’ve fished around with cooks we admire over the years and finally settled on this Cajun-inspired recipe using a packet of Zatarain’s Shrimp and Crab Boil seasoning (MaMa did back in the day) as the principle spice combination (it’s easy, inexpensive and works great every time).
There are several worthy tips you may not have heard about. First, adding a bit of apple cider vinegar to the pot makes shrimp easier to peel; you don’t need much and we miss the tiniest hint of flavor when we forget it occasionally.
Second, if you soak your shrimp too long in the pot, they get tough, sometimes really tough. As soon as the pot comes back to a rolling boil, the shrimp are done. (Now we’re talking about typical boiling shrimp from the South and not PNW prawns here…). Soak or steep at your own risk; most chefs argue that longer soaking doesn’t add any more spice or flavor. And tough boiled shrimp are a travesty.
Third and finally, several shrimp gurus have told us that they never cook more than 2 pounds of shrimp at a time in order to maximize the impact of the spices and to cook the shrimp quickly and evenly. If you’re doing more for a shindig, skim the cooked shrimp out of the pot and use the same spiced water to boil multiple batches.
2 lb. raw shrimp, headed, in the shell
2 lemons, halved
2 peeled garlic cloves
1 bag Zatarain’s spicy shrimp and crab boil
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
2 tsp. kosher saltIce
Prep time. Rinse the shrimp and drain in a colander. Scrub the lemons and cut in half. Measure water to cover your shrimp by 2-3 inches into your pot of choice.
Get things hot. Squeeze the lemons into the pot, then dump them in along with the Zatarain’s spice packet, the garlic cloves, the apple cider vinegar and the salt. Bring to a rolling boil over high heat.
Swim those shrimp. Carefully dump the shrimp into the boiling water and give them a stir. Keep the heat rolling on high; when the water has returned to a rolling boil, remove the pot from the heat.
To steep or not to steep. As noted above, some argue shrimp are more flavorful if you let them soak anywhere from 3 to 20 minutes in the hot cooking liquid. If you choose to do so, note the longer they soak, the higher the odds your shrimp will be tough. We pull ours from the water as soon as they’ve returned to a boil.
Ice those beauties immediately; use a colander so the melting ice water can easily drain and be generous with the ice.
Serve cold with your best and most favored cocktail sauce. And something icy cold to drink.
Enjoy.
