Shrimp Cooked in Lime Juice
This is a Southeast Asian–style preparation, mildly sweet and mouth-puckeringly sour. It’s also ridiculously fast; if you start some rice before tackling the shrimp, they will both be done at about the same time, twenty minutes later. (This assumes your shrimp are already peeled, a task that will take you about ten minutes and one that should be undertaken before cooking the rice.) For best flavor, see if you can find head-on shrimp; they make for a more impressive presentation, and it’s fun to suck the juices out of the heads themselves (which, I realize, is not something that everyone enjoys). But none of these assets is worth making head-on shrimp a sticking point. Note that this technique will work with scallops or cut-up squid; each will take slightly less time to cook than the shrimp.
Recipe information
Yield
makes 4 servings
Ingredients
Preparation
Step 1
Combine the lime juice, sugar, and nam pla. Put the oil in a 10- or 12-inch skillet over high heat. A minute later, add the garlic and hot pepper and cook just until the garlic begins to brown. Immediately add the lime juice mixture all at once and cook until it reduces by half, or even more, 3 to 5 minutes; there should be only about 1/4 cup of liquid in the skillet, and it should be syrupy.
Step 2
Add the shrimp and cook, still over high heat. The shrimp will give off liquid of their own and begin to turn pink almost immediately. After about 2 minutes of cooking, stir. Continue cooking and stirring occasionally until all the shrimp are pink, about 2 minutes later. Taste and adjust the seasoning, then garnish with cilantro.
Shrimp
Step 3
Almost all shrimp are frozen before sale. So unless you’re in a hurry, you might as well buy them frozen and defrost them yourself; this will guarantee you that they are defrosted just before you cook them, therefore retaining peak quality.
Step 4
There are no universal standards for shrimp size; large and medium don’t mean much. Therefore, it pays to learn to judge shrimp size by the number per pound, as retailers do. Shrimp labeled 16/20, for example, contain sixteen to twenty per pound; those labeled U-20 require fewer (under) twenty to make a pound. Shrimp from fifteen to about thirty per pound usually give the best combination of flavor, ease (peeling tiny shrimp is a nuisance), and value (really big shrimp usually cost more than $15 a pound).
Step 5
On deveining: I don’t. You can, if you like, but it’s a thankless task, and there isn’t one person in a hundred who could blind-taste the difference between shrimp that have and have not been deveined.
