Friday, May 18, 2007
Technique: Cooking Shrimp a New Way
I've seen and tried different ways of cooking shrimp - sauté, boiling, baking. If you want something like boiled shrimp, here's a way to get the results in a more controlled way. The problem with boiling is that the heat is too intense making it easy to overcook the shrimp and end up with crescent-shaped pieces of rubber.
My wife had picked up a pound that she needed cooked without fat for a recipe. I was going to boil, but tried an experiment. I rinsed the shrimp and put them into a small pot with enough cold water to cover. Then I put the pot onto the burner and turned it to medium. As things were taking a long time, I switched to high. The shrimp cooked gently as the water heated, so that by the time is was short of a simmer, they were cooked through.
Although at first thought it seemed longer than boiling, I was measuring the time badly. In boiling, I had never counted the time it took to get the water up to temperature. When you do that, it's clear that the total cooking time (TCT - ahah!, my own acronym!) is shorter. Yet the shrimp technically does cook over a longer period of time, so there's better control and it's easier to rescue them before they tip over into a vulcanized state.
My wife had picked up a pound that she needed cooked without fat for a recipe. I was going to boil, but tried an experiment. I rinsed the shrimp and put them into a small pot with enough cold water to cover. Then I put the pot onto the burner and turned it to medium. As things were taking a long time, I switched to high. The shrimp cooked gently as the water heated, so that by the time is was short of a simmer, they were cooked through.
Although at first thought it seemed longer than boiling, I was measuring the time badly. In boiling, I had never counted the time it took to get the water up to temperature. When you do that, it's clear that the total cooking time (TCT - ahah!, my own acronym!) is shorter. Yet the shrimp technically does cook over a longer period of time, so there's better control and it's easier to rescue them before they tip over into a vulcanized state.
