Category Archives: Shrimp

Tempura Spot Shrimp

tempura3Spot shrimp (Pandalus platyceros) rank among the great delicacies my region is known for. They’re excellent tempura battered and fried, and make a good addition to udon.

Make sure the batter is wet and runny, which makes for a light and crispy finish. Too thick and the batter will fry up pillowy. This is a basic recipe that can be adapted. For instance, you could add a dash of rice wine or various spices. Experiment with the oil temperature, too. It needs to be hot enough to fry the ingredients rapidly, but not so hot that they aren’t cooked through before the exterior browns. Slice ingredients such as sweet potatoes thinly so they cook quickly.

1 cup flour, sifted
1 egg, beaten
1 cup water, ice cold
oil for deep-frying
spot shrimp and vegetables (e.g., zucchini, sweet potato, onion, mushroom, etc.)

1. Heat oil in a wok or deep saucepan. It’s ready when a drop of water sizzles. Adjust heat as you go.

2. Combine flour, beaten egg, and ice water in a large bowl and use chopsticks to mix together. Don’t overmix. It’s okay to have lumps. And make sure the batter is thin, wet, and runny.

3. Batter and fry in batches, careful not to crowd.

4. Remove to rack or paper towels.

For an udon soup recipe, click here.

Soondubu Jjigae with Spot Shrimp

THIS IS KOREAN comfort food at its best. Jjigae means hot pot or stew. Soondubu is silken tofu. 

The key is finding quality Korean pepper flakes. I also like to goose mine with an added jolt of pepper paste, gochujang. Look for both at a Korean market such as H Mart, along with the extra soft and silky tofu that comes in a tube-shaped package.

For the stock you can make your own with onion, kombu, and dried anchovies, or take a short cut with a store-bought variety (I like the heartiness of beef stock, with a splash of fish sauce added at the end). Spot shrimp, cooked whole in the shell, add good flavor to the broth. 

5-6 fresh spot shrimp (or other large shrimp in shell)
1 10-12 ounce package of extra-silken tofu (soondubu)
1/4 lb pork or steak, sliced thinly across the grain
5 shiitake mushroom caps, sliced into strips (if using dried shiitake, reconstitute in warm water for 20 minutes first)
1 large handful chopped vegetables (bok choy, napa cabbage, etc.)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
2-3 tbsp Korean coarse hot pepper flakes (gochugaru), or to taste
1 tbsp Korean pepper paste (gochujang), or to taste (optional)
1 cup stock (meat, vegetable, or fish), plus more to taste
1 handful other seafood (optional): clams, mussels, squid
2 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
3 green onions, 2 cut into 3-inch sections and 1 thinly sliced for garnish
2 eggs
2 tsp sesame oil, plus more for serving

1. Heat cooking oil in clay pot or other soup pot over medium heat. Add sliced beef or pork and sauté until edges begin to brown but meat is still rare. Remove to bowl and set aside.

2. Saute shiitake mushrooms a few minutes until starting to brown and then remove to bowl.

3. Add garlic, green onions, vegetables, and pepper paste (if using) along with a splash of sesame oil to pot and stir until fragrant, 30 seconds.

5. Sprinkle pepper flakes (gochugaru) and stir another minute, careful not to burn.

6. Pour in stock. Bring to boil.

7. Add tofu and seafood. Simmer together another few minutes.

8. Remove from heat and season with fish sauce, soy sauce, and salt, if necessary. Crack eggs into pot and stir.

9. Ladle into bowls. Garnish with sliced green onion and sesame oil to taste.

Serves 2, with rice.

 

Spot Shrimp on the Menu

Puget Sound’s recreational spot shrimp season opened earlier this month. If you’ve read Fat of the Land, you know how I approached this hotly anticipated fishery in my younger, stupider days. I’ve taken some grief for the canoe thing, and I’ll admit it’s not the safest way to get a limit of sea insects—in fact, it’s downright dangerous. This year caution got the better part of valor. I joined a friend on his new boat.

It was a beautiful day to be on the Sound. We took the Current Obsession on its maiden fishing trip and loaded up on shrimp with the aid of a very civilized Brutus Plus 40 pot-puller—a technological advancement on my previous experiences pulling in 400 feet of line hand over hand.

Pandemonium reins on the opening day of spot shrimp season. A quarter-mile-long conga line of trucks and trailers waited to launch boats at the public ramp; vessels of varying seaworthiness hustled back and forth through the chop scouting likely shrimping grounds and secret spots; channel 16 was an ongoing chatter of near-misses and at least one pan-pan distress call.

As in all fishing, a certain amount of patience is required. The goopy bait of ground fish heads, cat food, and other smelly products needs to do its work, oozing from the pot in an intoxicating cloud that the shrimp just can’t resist. We couldn’t exactly keep our grubby paws off the pot either. After barely 45 minutes of soaking we pulled the first one to see if this maiden voyage would be properly christened: a couple dozen spot shrimp scrambled around in the cage, several of which became ebi within minutes.

The fact of the matter is that most recreational shrimpers will spend—after factoring in bait, fuel, and an amortization of pots, buoys, and rope (never mind the cost of the boat!)—about what a landlubber at the fish market will shell out for the privilege. But trust me on this: few tastes equal a fresh spottie pulled from the sea. It is one of the great delicacies of the Pacific Northwest.

Spot shrimp are the largest shrimp on the West Coast, and many restaurants, fish markets, and anglers refuse to call them shrimp at all, using prawn instead. One key point to keep in mind when harvesting spot shrimp is that the head contains an enzyme that can turn the meat to mush. Prevent such a catastrophe by immediately decapitating and rinsing. And don’t toss those heads! They make a phenomenal stock or bisque.

I ate up all my shrimp fresh, not bothering to freeze any. My go-to preparations are designed to be simple and highlight the sublime sweet flavor of spots. The smaller ones get transformed into ebi sushi, with a very light steaming of the shrimp so that they remain raw inside yet cooked enough on the outside to be easily removed from the shell, while the larger specimens get butterflied and very lightly sautéed in a little butter.

Seemingly sane individuals are known to lose all common sense in the presence of fresh spot shrimp. One bite and you might be commandeering the nearest canoe too!

Cioppino

WHAT’S IN A NAME?  In our anxiety-prone food culture we tend to get uptight about the smallest lexical tics and demarkations. For instance, is it a Bouillabaisse or a Cioppino? How about Fish Soup—that seems to work pretty well. Italians mostly call dishes like this Zuppa di Pesce—Fish Soup. Occasionally Ciuppin. And sometimes Brodetto… Okay, you get the idea.

A Brodetto is a regional Italian variation found along the Adriatic that calls for special inclusion of the scorpionfish, or scorfano. Bouillabaisse is the Provencal word for essentially the same thing. All involve a mixture of both finned fish and shellfish, cooked in a tomato and wine-based stew, with peasant bread for sopping up the rich broth.

Cioppino, legend has it, is a New World invention—the word, that is. Italian immigrants shipping out of San Francisco to fish the Pacific ate Cioppino at sea—the catch of the day plus whatever other ingredients they had on board. The word derives from ciuppin, which translates as “chop”—in other words, chop it all together and make soup.

That’s what I love about Cioppinos and their ilk. When you can get past the regional claims, prejudices, and pronouncements, a Cioppino is merely an efficient way to make use of the odds and ends hanging around in the fridge. But to do it right you still need a variety of fish. Make it with either red wine or white; with spicy peppers or saffron; with fennel or celery. Just make it. You won’t be disappointed.

Here are my ingredients this time around. Remember that you can use just about anything that swims in the sea, or that filters salt water, as the case may be. Squid add lots of flavor. Just about any firm white-fleshed fish is a good choice; avoid more fragile-fleshed species such as flounder, sole, and thin cuts of cod as well as the dark-fleshed fish (e.g. salmon, mackerel, tuna) that will overpower the stew.

I used 2 cups of homemade shrimp stock. You can use a cup of clam juice plus a cup of chicken broth, or conventional fish stock. Fish heads are ideal if you can get them; my market was sold out.

2 dozen littleneck clams
2 dozen (or more) mussels
1 lb shrimp, shelled
1 lb bay scallops
1/2 cooked Dungeness crab, broken into leg segments
1 lb rockfish fillets, cut into 3-inch pieces
1-2 cups white wine (or red)
1 28 oz can whole plum tomatoes with liquid
2 cups fish stock (or clam juice, shrimp stock, etc.)
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tbsp tomato paste
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 medium onions (or 1 large), chopped
2 ribs celery, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 bay leaf
1-2 tsp red pepper flakes
1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped
fresh basil for garnish
good bread

In a heavy pot or Dutch oven saute the onions in olive oil over medium heat for a minute or two, then add the garlic, chopped vegetables, red pepper flakes, and bay leaf. Cook several minutes until veggies are soft, then stir in tomato paste. Cook another minute and pour in wine and let bubble for a couple minutes. Add tomatoes and stock, roughly chopping the whole tomatoes in the pot. Simmer for a least 30 minutes; longer is better. Add the crab legs and simmer another 15 minutes. When you’re ready to serve the stew, add the fin fish first and simmer for a few minutes, then add the shellfish. When the clams and mussels have all opened, stir in the parsley. It’s ready to eat. Serve piping hot with good crusty bread and some chopped basil for garnish.

As written above, this Cioppino will easily serve six, but for larger groups you can add another can of tomatoes, more wine and stock, extra seasoning, and leave the seafood amounts as is. Or, if serving a smaller group you might consider cutting the shrimp and scallops by half. All this seafood can be expensive when paying market prices, so tinker according to your budget and taste. It’s a very forgiving dish.

Ushering in a New Year of Wild Foods

New Year’s Eve is largely, in the view of this critic, a letdown. If you brave the crowds downtown, you’re guaranteed a long, tedious night of bad food, overpriced bubbly, and boorish behavior. We prefer to indulge in boorish behavior in the privacy of our own home, with friends and accomplices who are forgiving of such behavior. The food is a lot better too. (As is the late-night dance party…)

Once again my friend Tip and I donned the aprons to throw together huge vats of paella for our guests. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The dinner didn’t actually make an appearance until a quarter to midnight, the cooks being too busy quaffing cavas and wolfing down cheeses from The Spanish Table, including an etorki that was mindblowingly delicious. Over the course of several hours we enjoyed a feast of fresh oysters, calamari from recently foraged Pacific squid, bagna caôda compliments of our Piedmontese friends the Coras, and a full bar of booze and wine.

Though not wild in origin, the bagna caôda deserves special mention. Chris and Lori harvested winter vegetables from their garden and put together this fondue-like dish with an aromatic sauce of garlic, olive oil, anchovies, and butter, all of it heated in an attractive vessel over flaming Sterno. Really, there’s not much I can do to fully describe just how stinky and delicious this whorehouse specialty is. Sopping up bread with the sludge in the bottom—and I use the word sludge with utmost admiration—is one of the more prurient acts in the food world, always accompanied by an orgiastic chorus of oohs and ahhs. Cardoon is a traditional bagna caôda veggie; others include cauliflower, broccolini, beets, cabbage, fennel, and whatever else you want to stir into the hot bath. The taste is intense and lingers in the memory.

While I’m at it, I’ll hand out more props: to the Day-Reis gang for their marinated and barbecued lamb and the Hunter-Gales for their Big Salad. The Coras also brought over a few pounds of squid harvested out of Elliott Bay, a pound of which got sauteed up for a calamari appetizer. But the cornerstone of the feast—the menu item that set the gears into motion this New Year’s—was the paella.

Kitchen-Sink Paella for 10

We call it “Kitchen-Sink Paella” for obvious reasons. Each time we use a conflation of two or three or more recipes and end up using most of the ingredients from each, including but not restricted to: chicken, chorizo, squid, shrimp, mussels, clams, and oysters. Of those, only the chicken and sausage were store-bought this year, which is a new record. The other key ingredients are Spanish rice, saffron, and sweet pimentón (paprika). This time around we used the more expensive Bomba rice, which requires a higher 3 to 1 ratio of stock to rice—which in turn requires you, the cook, to properly estimate your size of cookware or risk a flood of paella.

Speaking of cookware, the traditional paella pan is large, steel, and fairly shallow, the broad shallowness allowing the rice to cook quickly without burning. According to PaellaPans.com, a 26-inch pan will serve 15. One of these years I’ll have to pick up the real thing, but in the meantime Tip and I have been getting by with unsanctioned cookware, including his well-named “everyday pan” and my large skillet. This year Tip forgot his pan, so we experimented with a Le Creuset French Oven, mainly because it was big enough.

In the past, if memory serves, we finished the paella in the oven; this time we decided to court tradition and not stir (this despite our choices of cookware; clearly multiple cavas were making mischief). The shallower skillet came through with flying colors but the deep French Oven took longer to cook and burned on parts of the bottom, though not in a calamitous way. The take-away here, to employ the verbiage of a former employer, is to use a broad, shallow pan. Memo to Santa…

Here’s what The Spanish Table has to say about cooking paella: “Traditionally, paella is not stirred during the second half of the cooking time. This produces a caramelized layer of rice on the bottom of the pan considered by many to be the best part. With a large pan, it is difficult to accomplish this on an American stove and you may prefer to stir the paella occasionally or move the pan around on the burner(s). Another alternative is to finish the paella by placing it in the oven for the last 10-15 minutes of cooking. Paelleras can also be used on a barbecue, or an open fire (the most traditional heat source).”

4 cups Bomba rice
12 cups chicken stock
2 large onions, chopped, or 1/4 cup per person
50 threads of saffron (5 per person), crushed, toasted, and dissolved in 1/2 cup white wine
4 tbsp (or more) olive oil
10 (or more) pieces of chicken, on the bone (thighs and drumsticks), or 1 per person
10 soft chorizo sausages, sliced (about 2 lbs), or 1 per person
5 tsp sweet or semi-sweet pimenton (paprika), or 1/2 tsp per person
10 cloves, minced, or 1 per person
1 large can diced tomatoes
2 lbs squid, cleaned and cut up
1 lb shrimp, shelled, or 2 per person
2 lbs clams in the shell, or 4 per person
1 lb mussels, or 2 per person
2 red bell peppers, thinly sliced
2 hot peppers, diced
1 10 oz package of frozen peas
chopped parsley and lemon wedges for garnish

1. Warm stock.
2. Toast saffron gently in small saute pan until aromatic, then add wine. Bring to boil and set aside.
3. Heat olive oil in large paella pan (or two pans), then brown chicken on all sides. Next add onions and garlic and cook until translucent before adding chorizo, cooking a few minutes.
4. Add rice, stirring until fully coated. Add paprika and tomatoes. Stir in saffron-wine mixture and all the stock. Bring to a boil while scraping bottom, then add peppers. Adjust heat to maintain a slow boil. After 5 minutes or so, add frozen peas and seafood, stirring in peas, squid, shrimp, and clams; arrange mussles by inserting vertically halfway into top.
5. Cook another 15 minutes or until rice is done and clams and mussels have opened. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and garnish with lemon wedges. Serve with good Spanish wines, lots of them.

Shellfish Stew

MARCELLA HAZAN calls this recipe All-Shellfish and Mollusks Soup in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I call it simply Shellfish Stew. My version differs from Marcella’s with its use of whole shrimp in the shell and more tomatoes. 

Shellfish Stew is similar to other classic seafood soups with its fresh shellfish and tomatoes, but it differs from a traditional Bouillabaisse in its lack of finned fish. Squid does much of the heavy lifting here. Serve it over a thick slice of toasted crusty bread.

2 lbs whole squid
2 dozen or more live littleneck clams
1 dozen live mussels
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup onion, chopped
1 tbsp garlic, minced
3 tbsp parsley, chopped
1 cup dry white wine
1 large can (28 oz) canned plum tomatoes, chopped, with juice
1 lb fresh whole shrimp in shell, with tails sliced lengthwise for easy removal
salt and pepper to taste
pinch red pepper flakes (optional)
1 lb fresh scallops
Good crusty bread, sliced thick and toasted

1. Clean and slice squid into rings; leave tentacles attached and whole if small. Scrub clams and mussels.

2. Saute onions in oil on medium heat until translucent. Add garlic. When garlic is golden, add the parsley. Stir, then pour in wine and let bubble for half a minute before adding tomatoes with juice. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3. Add the squid and cook at a gentle simmer for 45 minutes. Add water if necessary.

4. Season stew with spices, then add the shrimp. Simmer five minutes before adding clams and mussels and turning up heat to high. Stir. As clams and mussels begin to open, add the scallops. Cook until all clams and mussels are open.

5. Ladle into large soup bowls, over toasted bread.

And don’t forget the leftovers: You have instant Shellfish Pasta.

Mad Shrimping


Hood Canal. Last day of spot shrimp season. Two guys, two shrimp pots, 800 feet of rope. One canoe.

This may be one of stupider things I do on occasion, but it’s surely no stupider than things I did in my youth. Yes, the water’s cold and if we dumped it would be a problem, but generally we try to stay close enough to shore so that, in the event of an emergency, the swim isn’t too far.

A few years ago we hit Dabob Bay further up the Canal on a beautiful yet blustery spring day. By late morning there were whitecaps on the water, which made for a tough go. This outing was a piece of cake. No wind, still water, not too many boats. After setting the first two pots we paddled to shore and snacked on a few oysters. Seals and eagles foraged nearby.

But maybe we should have been a tad more superstitious. After all, we were shrimping off Dewatto Point, known to the Salish Indians as the place where men’s bodies are inhabited by evil spirits.

Shrimping off Dewatto Point was sketchy enough; when I got home I was beat tired and able to summon only enough energy to make tempura fried shrimp. Head on.

Martha joined me. “It’s like salt and pepper shrimp at the Hing Loon,” I explained. “The head is good for you. Plus, you don’t want to be wasteful.” But Martha won’t be biting the heads off shrimp again anytime soon. The next day she said they invaded her dreams.