Shrimp Creole, Paul Prudhomme Style

"Mmmm.... this is restaurant-quality stuff!"

Whenever we have dinner guests over--especially friends who eat out all the time and rarely cook--I know this is the highest of high praise.

And Chef Paul Prudhomme's Shrimp Creole is one of those "restaurant quality" recipes. It's not an easy recipe, and it's not exactly laughably cheap like many of the other recipes here at Casual Kitchen, but it's still very much worth the slight extra expense and effort--and it's still far cheaper than a similar restaurant meal. If you like spicy, rich food, you won't believe you made something this good with your own hands.


So many people are shocked to find out that a regular person--yep, a person just like you or me--can cook amazing dinners just like this at home. You can.
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Shrimp Creole
Modified from Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen

Ingredients:
2 pounds medium to large shrimp, with shells on
2 1/2 cups, in all, of seafood or shrimp stock

1/4 cup chicken fat, pork lard, bacon fat or Crisco
2 1/2 cups, in all, chopped onions
2 cups chopped celery
1 1/2 cups chopped green bell pepper

4 Tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 bay leaf
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons white pepper
1 teaspoon cayenne (hot) pepper
3/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons Tabasco
1 1/2 teaspoons dried basil
1 Tablespoon dried thyme leaves

3 cups peeled tomatoes, chopped
1 1/2 cups canned tomato sauce
2 teaspoons sugar

Plenty of cooked rice

Directions:
1) Peel and rinse shrimp, refrigerate until needed, saving the shells to use in your shrimp stock. Chop onions, celery, bell peppers and garlic. Also, bring a medium saucepan of water to a boil, briefly blanch tomatoes, peel, and set aside for later.

2) Heat the chicken fat or other fat over high heat in a large pot. Add one cup of the onions and cook over high heat for 3 minutes, stirring frequently. Lower the heat to medium and keep stirring, until the onions have caramelized* (see below) into a rich brown color, but not burned, another 3-5 minutes.

3) Add the rest of the onions, celery, green peppers and butter. Cook over high heat, stirring occasionally, until celery and pepper become tender, roughly 5 minutes.

4) Add: garlic, bay leaf, all spices, Tabasco, and just 1/2 cup of the stock (basically add everything but the tomatoes, tomato sauce, sugar and the rest of the stock). Cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, stirring and scraping the pan bottom well.

5) Add the tomatoes and simmer for another 10 minutes. Then add the tomato sauce, sugar and remaining 2 cups stock and simmer for about 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

6) Cool and refrigerate if making the sauce the day before (and do not add the shrimp yet!). If serving immediately, turn the heat off and add the shrimp. Cover and let sit for 5-10 minutes, or until the shrimp are just plump and pink and not overcooked. Serve immediately by placing a mound of rice in the center of a plate and ladling a generous portion of shrimp creole sauce around the rice.

Serves 8-10.

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Several recipe notes:
1) I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to make your own stock for this recipe. I know it adds extra steps and time, but it is worth it. Our labor-saving trick is this: we will make one of our typical vegetarian soups or stews earlier in the week, and I'll save all the veggie trimmings from that dish, chuck them in the pot and simmer the stock for a few hours that day. Then, when we buy the shrimp, I'll devein and peel the shrimp one day before I make the sauce and add the shells to the stock, simmering it for another 4-8 hours to give it even more body. You'll have plenty of extra stock left over that you can freeze and use in other recipes, like our Risotto, our Easy Sopa de Lima or our Chicken Marsala. You won't regret it.

2) * Caramelizing the onions is perhaps the single most important process step in the entire recipe. Somehow, this step imbues the entire dish with a soft and sweet flavor:


3) It really helps to have a helper for this recipe, especially one who's sufficiently motivated by the promise of a delicious meal that she'll happily do this recipe's worst prep job: peeling and deveining the shrimp.


4) A word about the fat used in this recipe. Many of Paul Prudhomme's recipes involve the use of a disturbing amount of butter and/or fat. This recipe is not health food, people. Just remember these kinds of meals should be cooked (and gorged on) in moderation. Furthermore, I would not use olive oil as a substitute--it is too likely to smoke during the step where you caramelize the onions on high heat. Be sure to use a fat or an oil that has a higher smoke point.

5) Like many recipes, this dish tastes even better the next day, so if you really want to wow your guests or your family, make this sauce a day in advance, and then when your guests arrive, bring the sauce to a good boil, and then add the shrimp (PS: any sauce that can be made a day ahead of time lends itself very well to dinner parties).

6) Oh, and try to avoid overcooking the shrimp.

7) As I said earlier, this dish isn't laughably cheap--in fact, it might be the single most costly meal in this entire blog. That being said, the aggregate cost of this dish was $20.08, of which $11.48 was the cost of the shrimp. But given that it serves 8-10 quite generously, the cost per serving was still in the neighborhood of $2.00-$2.50. Once again, proof that with a little practice anyone can cook restaurant-quality meals and still eat cheaply at home.

8) Finally, it's hard to believe such an amazing recipe has such a simple list of ingredients. Like I said before, you too can make food like this at home!






Related Posts:
Cookbook Review: Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen
Garden Gumbo Recipe
Shrimp in Tomato Sauce: Middle Eastern Cuisine
Shrimp in Garlic Sauce (Camarones Ajillo)

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How to Rewrite a Recipe: Shells with Artichoke Hearts and Shrimp in Lemon-Oregano Vinaigrette

Today I will share a delicious pasta recipe that needed just a bit of editorial help.

I'm particular about how a recipe is written. It should be straightforward, with the steps written in the same order that they are cooked. But you'd be surprised how many recipes require a round of deciphering before they can be put into use. Today's recipe, which came from the otherwise exceptional 365 Ways to Cook Pasta, was just such an example.


You can see in this picture how the recipe follows the typical, rote format of listing all of the ingredients up top, and then listing all of the cooking instructions after that. Seems reasonable, right? Except on this occasion, it's exactly the worst way to write a recipe.

You see, this pasta dish is really three quick mini-recipes in one. There's an artichoke heart marinade, which you make ahead of time. Then there's the veggies, parsley and olives, which get chopped up and wait in a bowl for everything else. And then there's the shells and shrimp.

To list all the ingredients together, especially when it's a long list of 14 or so items, is pointless. It just adds to the confusion and makes the recipe hard to read.

Of course even a confused recipe can still taste amazing. And this dish was a real keeper. But just as some of the best recipes come from the most unassuming places, sometimes they, uh, come from the minds of unassuming writers.

Thus this recipe just needed a little editorial surgery. So I rewrote the recipe in three discrete mini-sections, with the ingredients for each process step broken out separately.

I'm curious: do readers out there have the same difficulties that I have reading and processing a recipe like this when it's put together in this traditional, rote format? Seems to me that the more ingredients and the more steps involved, the better it is to write it in a format broken down by process steps.

Take a look at my rescripted version of the recipe below and let me know what you think!


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Shells with Artichoke Hearts and Shrimp in Lemon-Oregano Vinaigrette
(modified from 365 Ways to Cook Pasta)

2 15-ounce cans artichoke hearts, drained and rinsed
3/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (this is a bit less than one lemon)
2 Tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest (this is the very outermost skin of the lemon--use a fine grater)
1/2 teaspoon oregano
2-3 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper

Combine the above ingredients in a medium saucepan. Heat to simmering, then let stand and cool for 30 minutes. You can also refrigerate overnight for a stronger marinade.

1 cup chopped red onion
1/2 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 pint cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes (halved if necessary)
1 cup pitted black olives (either in oil or canned is fine)

Put these ingredients in a extra-large bowl and set aside.
1 pound medium shells
1 pound medium shrimp, shelled and de-veined
Red pepper flakes, to taste (optional)

Cook the shells in plenty of boiling water until al dente; drain.

While the pasta is cooking, heat a few tablespoons of olive oil to medium-high heat in a non-stick pan; add the peeled shrimp, shake in some red pepper flakes, and cook them for 3-4 minutes per side, depending on shrimp size, or until done (do not overcook!) Throw the pasta, shrimp and artichoke marinade sauce into the extra-large bowl (along with the red onion, parsley, tomatoes and olives), toss well, and serve at once.
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As I've done for several other posts on this blog, I've loaded the entire set of photos from the making of this recipe over at flickr for anyone interested in more detail. Have a look!

Brazen Recipe Modification: How to Turn a Bad Recipe Into a Good One: Lime and Chipotle Shrimp

In today’s post I’d like to share how I took an unexpected recipe disappointment and turned it into a success.

A few weeks ago, I found and cooked up a recipe that I thought sounded absolutely amazing. As we'll see, I was totally wrong--the dish pretty much sucked. But with the use of recipe modification, I took what could have been a deeply upsetting cooking experience and turned it into a great addition to our collection of recipes.

The original recipe, Chipotle Lime Bacon-Wrapped Shrimp, is from Simply Recipes, and it sounded so good I literally started drooling at my computer. Let’s take a quick look at what turned out to be a fatally flawed recipe.

Here’s the original recipe (also see the original post with its teasingly delicious photos):
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Chipotle Lime Bacon-Wrapped Shrimp

12 large, raw, peeled and deveined shrimp
2 Tbsp olive oil
Zest from 1 lime *
Juice from one lime (about 2 Tbsp)
1/4 teaspoon chipotle powder
6 strips thin bacon, cut in half (12 pieces)
Skewers (for grilling) or toothpicks (for oven)

1) Mix together in a small bowl the lime zest, lime juice, olive oil, and chipotle powder. Put the shrimp in the lime chipotle mixture; make sure each piece is well coated.

2) Prepare grill on high, direct heat (if grilling) or preheat the oven to 450°F.

3) Working one at a time, wrap a half piece of bacon around each piece of shrimp. If you are grilling, thread the shrimp onto long, flat skewers (flat skewers make turning the shrimp on the grill easier). If you don't have flat skewers, I've used two thin bamboo skewers (soaked in water for 30 minutes beforehand) to the same effect. If you are using the oven, secure the bacon onto the shrimp with toothpicks. Place the bacon-wrapped shrimp on a slotted baking pan (lined with foil inside for easy cleaning). Brush remaining lime chipotle mixture on the outside of the bacon-wrapped shrimp.

4) Grill uncovered for 5 to 7 minutes on each side, or bake in the oven for 10-14 minutes, until shrimp is pink and the bacon is crisp.

[* A quick CK note on “lime zest”: "zest" is just the outermost part of the lime peel, not the white part. The same goes for lemon zest too. There is an actual tool that you can use (it’s allegedly called a "zester"), but I would just use a common vegetable grater and be careful to only capture the green part of the lime's peel. Take a look at the pictures below to see how to “zest” a lime.]
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Sounds great, doesn’t it? And it passes the five easy questions test no problem. And I must admit: for an infrequent meat-eater, I have a profound weakness for bacon. [Let me share an until-now secret anecdote that serves to express how bacon-crazy our household can be: Laura and I once had such a powerful bacon craving one Sunday morning that we split a pound of bacon between ourselves. Let’s just say the initial eating experience was great--but we felt awful and woozy for the next 48 hours. And I’m still trying to scrape the plaque out of my arteries from that fateful day.]

I also have a profound weakness for shrimp. You’ll notice there’s a tag on this blog called “shrimpfetish”--so a recipe that combines both bacon and shrimp should draw me in for sure. Quite frankly, the idea of combining these two foods in one dish never occurred to me, and it sounded tantalizing. I was sucked in.

I know now never to try that combination again.

Here was the problem: After making the dish and sampling the goods, our conclusion was that this recipe was just overwhelmingly salty. Sadly, the bacon added nothing to the dish whatsoever--it just buried the shrimp as well as everything else. You couldn’t taste the lime, you couldn’t taste the chipotle. All you could taste was the bacon-y salt flavor (and we all know that using salt = cheating!).

In short, it was a dish with zero subtlety.

Of course I don’t mean to disparage Simply Recipes as a site. In fact, I recommend looking it over for its wide collection of diverse recipes. My point here is to show how, even with good due diligence and a critical eye, a tasty sounding new recipe can break your heart.

At Casual Kitchen, we’ve come to some degree of acceptance that we will experience recipe flops every so often. We didn’t let this particular disappointment crush our spirit. Instead, this flop, combined with recipe modifications, yielded a brand new dish that turned out to be an amazing addition to our recipe collection.

My hope is that by showing this example it will help you think of ways to rebound from the occasional but inevitable disappointments that come with trying new recipes. The next time this happens to you, you can bounce back too.

So what did we do? First we made some key modifications. We removed the offending bacon and tripled the amount of chipotle powder. As Laura said when she first read the original recipe, “just 1/4 teaspoon of chipotle? Why bother?” Then we shortened the cooking time (without the shielding from the bacon, the shrimp will obviously take much less time to cook—but please keep in mind that the cooking time is a variable that depends on the size of the shrimp!).

What these modifications yielded was an amazing shrimp marinade that contained a subtlety and spiciness that perfectly complemented a mild meat like shrimp. And the recipe in its modified form is far less messy and takes one-third the time to make. No more do you have to goo up your fingers wrapping bacon around individual shrimps. Instead you can mix up the marinade in a flash, drop the shrimp in, then bake, broil or grill them, and in minutes you have a delicious meal ready. Now that’s a recipe that passes the five easy questions!

Here’s the final result: a simple, quick and stunningly delicious shrimp marinade:

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Lime and Chipotle Shrimp
(brazenly modified from Simply Recipes’ Chipotle Lime Bacon-Wrapped Shrimp)

Marinade: Combine in a large bowl:
2 Tbsp olive oil
Zest from 1 lime
Juice from one lime (about 2 Tbsp)
3/4 teaspoon chipotle powder

12 large, raw, peeled and deveined shrimp

1) Rinse shrimp in cold water, then soak shrimp well in marinade for 5 minutes, making sure shrimp is well coated.
2) Place on skewers if grilling, or place shrimp on aluminum foil on a cookie sheet if baking or broiling. Spoon some of the excess marinade on top of the shrimp.
3) Grill 3-5 minutes on high heat, or until pink (don’t overcook!) or bake or broil in a preheated oven at 450F for 7-11 minutes until done.
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You never know what new and amazing experiences can come your way, even in the face of deep disappointments.


Here's a quick pictoral on the final recipe:

Here's what it looks like to "zest" a lime (indulge me as I create a new verb):

Don't go too deep into the rind of the lime. You only want the green, outermost part of the peel:


Here's what the marinade looks like. What a deep rich red!


Coat the shrimp well in the marinade:


Spoon a little of the extra marinade onto the shrimp before you cook 'em:


And since we're such a pro-chipotle household, I thought I'd shake just a little extra on each shrimp:


Broil or grill:


And enjoy!

Shrimp in Tomato Sauce: Middle Eastern Cuisine

This shrimp dish is my very favorite recipe from my favorite Middle Eastern Cookbook.

This rich, red sauce combines cumin, cinnamon and lemon juice into something so exotic tasting that it's hard to believe I made it in a suburban New Jersey kitchen!

Better still, this dish is easy to make, passing the five easy questions test with flying colors.

I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.


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Shrimp in Tomato Sauce
(modified, but not beyond recognition, from Taste of the Middle East by Soheila Kimberley)

Ingredients:
4-5 Tablespoons olive oil
2-3 onions, chopped coarsely
3-4 garlic cloves, pressed or minced
5 tomatoes, chopped
About 5 Tablespoons tomato paste (about half of a small can)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 cup water (or you can use seafood stock, optional)

1 lb raw, peeled medium to large shrimp
Juice of one lemon
White rice, to serve

Directions:
1) Saute the onions on medium-high heat until they begin to brown, about 5-6 minutes. Turn down the heat to medium and then add the garlic.

2) Saute the garlic/onion mix for 1-2 minutes, then add the chopped tomatoes. Then add the tomato paste, cumin, cinnamon, black pepper and water.

3) Bring to a low boil, then simmer the sauce for 15 minutes on medium-low heat, stirring occasionally. Don't let the sauce stick to the bottom of the pan.

4) Add the shrimp, then the lemon juice, and stir well.

5) Cook for another 5-7 minutes, until shrimp are pink (maybe 1-2 minutes more if you're using large shrimp). Please, whatever you do, don't overcook the shrimp--it is a borderline crime to serve your guests tough, overcooked shrimp! Serve immediately with white rice.

Easily serves 5.
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Related links:
Taste of the Middle East: Over 70 Enticing, Aromatic Dishes from This Fascinating Cuisine (Creative Cooking Library Series)

How to Make a Great Seafood Stock

I know it's a lot easier when a recipe calls for "stock" to chuck in a couple of bouillion cubes and some water. Or worse, to purchase overpriced, ready-made stock from the store.

At the risk of sounding like Slave Galley Kitchen rather than Casual Kitchen, I cannot allow you to take this particular shortcut anymore. It is borderline unethical. Your cuisine will suffer for it, and you'll be ingesting excess salt. And for what--a little expedience?

The only time I'll guiltily indulge in expedient behavior like this is if I'm really, severely pressed for time and I need to crank out a dinner pronto. And even then I can't bring myself to buy ready-made stock. Instead, what I'll do is use one cube of bouillion per two cups of water for a milder, less salty substitute.

But when you do have some time, try making your own stock. Enjoy how it makes your dishes richer and tastier and yet adds no sodium whatsoever. Moreover, it's so easy to make a huge batch and freeze it up in ready-made containers that you'll never want to go back to the salt-laden pre-made stuff.

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Seafood Stock:

Put into a large stock pot:

2-3 onions, quartered, leave the papers/peelings on (yes, you read that right--leave 'em on)
Several cloves garlic, smashed or cut in half (again, leave the papers/peelings on)
2-3 whole celery sticks
Any vegetable trimmings or peelings from whatever recipe you are serving
All of the shrimp shells from the recipe you're using, or use a few shrimp cut into pieces, shells and all (can also substitute pieces of fish or other seafood, or even oyster sauce if you're desperate)

Fill stock pot with cold water, add more than enough water to cover the all the stock ingredients already in the pot.

Bring water to a boil on high heat, then turn heat to medium low, set lid slightly askew, and simmer for a minimum of four hours, but as much as eight hours if you have time.

After the stock has simmered, strain it into measured amounts and freeze for future use.

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Note that even though this is a stock recipe specifically for seafood, it can easily serve as a fundamental base for any kind of stock.

For vegetable stock, just leave out the seafood (duh). For beef or chicken stock, just toss in some tailings, skin, fat or bones from the meat you're using from your recipe. You can also brown any beef or chicken bones and meat in a non-stick skillet before adding it into the pot. Browning them this way will give the stock an even richer taste.

A few final observations:

1) First of all, I'll never forget the first time I tried to make stock this way. I was thinking, "seriously, you just hack the onions and garlic into a few pieces and toss 'em in the pot? You mean you just leave the peelings on?"

It seemed so.... so irreverent. But that's exactly the way to do it. Leaving the peelings and papers on actually adds to the flavor, and it saves you from having to do any prep work (who said there's no such thing as a free lunch?). Thus putting everything together literally takes two minutes.

2) Note that I don't add any spices or seasonings to the stock. No black pepper, no salt (obviously) and no cayenne pepper. The point here isn't to make something spicy or heavily flavorful. The recipe you'll use the stock in will contain its own spices. The stock is supposed to be a vehicle, nothing more.

3) This is one of the few times when you get to bend the rule to stay near the kitchen. Also, fortunately, this is a dish that scales well. Use your biggest pot and make as much stock as you feel you have room for in your freezer.

4) When I said using ready-made stock or bouillion was borderline unethical, I was just exaggerating for effect. Indulge me--I need to say things like this once in a while in order to stand out in blogland! So, if you've used ready-made stock or bouillion in the past, or if you choose to do it at some point in the future, you are not a bad person. Well, not that bad a person. :)

Stock on!

Paul Prudhomme's Barbecued Shrimp Recipe: The Most Glorious Meal So Far This Year

Today I’ll share with you the recipe for Paul Prudhomme’s Barbecued Shrimp. This was unquestionably the most glorious meal I’ve made so far this year.

It passed the five easy questions test with flying colors. It was quite easy to make, with prep time of only about 30 minutes. Best of all, we had an utterly magnificent experience eating it.

A couple of brief introductory comments: The brand of beer I happened to use in the recipe has already brewed up (sorry) a bit of an amusing controversy. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my rule for new recipes to do it one time by the book, so I saw no reason to start imposing my own beer snobbery without first having some context on how the recipe would come out. If anybody wants to do a side-by-side control test of the recipe using different types of beer, go for it. Let me know the results.

Finally, there also seems to be minor controversy on whether this is technically “barbecue” or not. Heck, there are no coals, no broiling, and no cooking over an open pit. Perhaps we can get some barbecue purists to weigh in on this one, but my guess is they won’t consider something cooked in a pan as barbecue.

But man, those are just semantics to me. The recipe was so amazing that Chef Paul could call it anything he wants! I’ll cut him some slack.
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Paul Prudhomme's Barbecued Shrimp
(Very slightly modified from Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen.*)

2 dozen medium-large raw shrimp with shells included (about 1 pound)

Seasoning mix:
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt (yes, we're bending the salt rule here because it's Paul Prudhomme)
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon rosemary leaves, crushed
1/8 teaspoon oregano

1/4 pound (1 stick) butter, plus 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, in all
1 to 2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup seafood stock or vegetable stock
1/4 cup beer at room temperature

1) Rinse the shrimp in cold water and drain well. Leave shells on.

2) In a small bowl, combine seasoning mix ingredients.

3) Combine one stick of the butter, the garlic, Worcestershire sauce and seasoning mix in a large skillet over high heat. When the butter is melted, add the shrimp.

4) Cook for 2 minutes, shaking the pan (do not stir), in a back and forth motion. Add the remaining 3 tablespoons butter and the stock, cook and shake pan for 2 more minutes. Add the beer and cook and shake the pan 1 minute longer. Remove from heat.

5) Serve immediately on a platter with a mound of white rice or seasoned rice in the center and the shrimp and sauce surrounding it.
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A few quick extra notes:

• Along with the rice, this dish made exactly enough food for two hungry people with enough left over for a lunch for Laura.
• If you want to double this recipe, the cookbook says you should do it in separate batches. Note therefore that this dish does not scale well.
• Don't ignore the specific instructions to shake the pan back and forth rather than stir (just think James Bond here). When you're working with melting butter, especially in a dish with a high ratio of butter to other ingredients, stirring can cause the oils in the butter to separate out, and it will make the sauce seem oily.

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A Wine Suggestion
I’ll admit up front that this isn’t really the kind of blog you should visit to find painstaking details on wine pairings (at least not until I quit my job and go to sommelier school…!), but this dish will go very well with a light semi-dry or semi-sweet white wine, which will balance the hot spicy flavors in the dish. A Riesling, for example, would be perfect. We knocked back most of a bottle of Seyval from the Hosmer Winery, which is in the Finger Lakes region of New York State (quite good and yet only $10 a bottle!).

Enjoy!

Related Posts:
The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World
Paul Prudhomme RULES
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions
Paul Prudhomme's Cajun Meatloaf: A Meatloaf Recipe that would Burn June Cleaver's Tongue Off

* Full Disclosure: if you purchase this book using any of the links provided, I get paid a miniscule affiliate fee.