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Sunday, May 10, 2009

New Orleans Style Barbecued Shrimp
















Barbecued shrimp, one of the best dishes in all of New Orleans cooking, is completely misnamed. They're neither grilled nor smoked, and there's no barbecue sauce. It was created in the mid-1950s at Pascal's Manale Restaurant. A regular customer came in and reported that he'd enjoyed a dish in a Chicago restaurant that he thought was made with shrimp, butter, and pepper. He asked Pascal Radosta to make it. Radosta took a flyer at it. The customer said that the taste was not the same, but he liked the new dish even better. So a legend began.

The dish is simple: huge whole shrimp in a tremendous amount of butter and black pepper. The essential ingredient is large, heads-on shrimp, since the fat in the shrimp heads makes most of the flavor. You can improvise on this. Sometime beer or wine is added, but I think it is fine as is.

The amount of butter and pepper in here are fantastic. But understand that this is not a dish you will eat often, although you will want to. You should to try it once, though.

Ingredients

1.5 Kg fresh large shrimp with heads on, about 40 shrimp.
50 ml lemon juice
30 ml Lea & Perrins or any worcestershire sauce.
3 cloves garlic, chopped
45 ml freshly ground black pepper
5 ml salt
750 g butter, softened
30 ml olive oil
15 ml Crystal or Tabasco hot sauce.
1 loaf French bread

This is how you do it.

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees C.

Devein the shrimp if you wish, rinse them and shake off the excess water. Put them in a large baking dish, and distribute the liquid ingredients over them evenly. Cover with a thin even layer of black pepper. Don`t worry, just do it, it is almost impossible to use too much pepper. Cut the butter into small chunks and distribute evenly over the top. Add salt over this.


Place in the oven for 10 minutes. Stir. Back in until shrimp are just done. You will have pink shrimp in a reddish-brown sauce. Serve in large bowls with lots of the liquid. No utensils here, use your hands. the bread is for sopping up the juices. Don`t check your cholesterol level for at least a month.

About 4-6 servings.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

ok, making this asap...

thanks so much, favorite things in life

1- shrimp

2- cajun...

(im gonna ad some cayenne

Martin said...

Really boring techie comment - is there any easy way to print the recipes/posts out so we can attempt to reproduce in the kitchen without balancing a laptop on the countertop?

This looks excellent, will give it a go.

Slimseun said...

Martin, what I usually do with web recipes is copy the text and paste it into notepad, then print that.
Or just select the text and print the selection. That way you get only the recipe, and not all the other content. Hope this helps.

Alexander said...

Sadly, there's no current technical solution to this issue, so Chris' approach is the right one.

It's actually a minor irritation for me, too, as the blog is now the repository of many recipes I use!!!

Julie Rio said...

Im defo gonna try this one it sounds YUMMMMY!