Cooking Tips
Yep, we've posted other pages on this site that offer tips on the best ways to prepare shrimp, but here's a collection of a few more few "whys" and handy tips on shrimp recipes from the experts: Taste: Sweet shrimp or not-so sweet shrimp Why do shrimp have a sweet taste? According to the classic, "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee, most ocean collect amino acids in their tissue, as a way to balance the salt in the surrounding water. In crustaceans, including shrimp, the amino acid of choice is gylcine, which tastes sweet, and thus the more gycline in your shrimp the sweeter it tastes. Some shrimp have a slight iodine flavor, which comes from algae and other food that the shrimp eat. It doesn't start out tasting like iodine, but shrimp digestive tracts convert chemical compound from the algae, such as bromophenols, resulting in, yep: Iodine. Wild shrimp from the western Gulf of Mexico is most likely to have an iodine taste due to the local algae they feed on. But give the shrimp a try first, you can always try another variety next time. To concentrate the flavor or your shrimp, try cooking it in its shell, or "cuticle." That cuts down on the amount of flavor that leaches out of the shrimp in the cooking process, and lends the shell's flavor to the shrimp as well. Gamy taste Some shrimp can have a musty or gamy taste. Craig Collins of Desert Sweet Shrimp Farm in Gila Bend, Arizona (read more about the farm), told us this can also result from what algae the shrimp eat. Craig says that if a shrimp's diet is heavy in blue-green algae it can develop a musty or gamy taste. Solutions Chef Terry Foster of Andria's Seafood in Ventura Harbor, California says that if starting over with fresher seafood is not an option, two chef's tips can sometimes remove gamy tastes from fish and possibly shrimp - depending on the taste's origin. Solution one: Soak the seafood overnight in a saltwater brine. Terry recommends a six percent solution, or about one cup of table salt to a gallon of water. He notes that under normal circumstances he doesn't recommend keeping fish in water, because water can leach flavor out of fish. But if leaching out gamy taste is what you have in mind, then soak away. Solution two: Soak the seafood in milk. Acids in the milk can help leach gamy tastes out of the seafood. Musty taste Terry says musty flavor can also be a sign that shrimp has simply been shrimp a bit too long. He notes that people often don't keep seafood cold enough. He recommends keeping it no more than two days in the refrigerator, and on ice but not in water. It should also be kept at an optimal 34 to 36 degrees Fahrenheit. The higher the temperature, Terry points out, the more chance bacteria have a chance to proliferate. Terry's good-to-bad shrimp temperature threshold is the following: At 41 degrees, shrimp (and other seafood) will last about a day and a half, he says, and at 45 degrees it's good for only about half a day. Texture Why does shrimp get mushy? Again we turn to "On Food and Cooking." Shrimp, like most crustaceans, have more collagen in their meat than fish do. That makes them sturdier, but enzymes in crustaceans break shrimp tissue down much faster than enzymes in fish. That's why shrimp that's been sitting around even for one day can get mushy fast. Fool-proof perfect shrimp The solution? Avoiding that mushy-ness is why most shrimp recipes call for either boiling it or cooking quickly over high heat: That quickly moves the shrimp past the temperature range of between 130 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit, the prime activity temperature for those enzymes. So: Boil your shrimp quickly after purchasing or defrosting, or always cook it rapidly on medium to high heat. If you do, mushy shrimp should never be a problem.
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Want to avoid buying iodine-tasting shrimp? Find out where the shrimp came from.
