Flash in the Pan

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article about Wal-Mart's participation in a forum about sustainable agriculture. I found one paragraph of particular interest:

The company is requiring shrimp farms that have been ravaging the coast of Thailand to change their aquaculture practices or lose the retailer's business. Under the company's new rules, the shrimp farms must be certified by Global Aquaculture Alliance or Aquaculture Certification Council as being farmed in environmentally sound ways, he said.

Now, part of this may be public relations, but there's no doubt that the company has forced many of its suppliers into changing their business practices. Many of these vendors have even said that the changes helped them enormously in improving their businesses. Wal-Mart literally could single-handedly change the face of world food production, making a far bigger impact than any Whole Foods could.

Labels: organic, shrimp, sustainability, Wal-Mart, Whole Foods

According to researchers at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, the seafood in 11 coastal Chinese cities is heavily contaminated with organochlorine pesticides (DDT and similar products) as well as hexachlorocyclohexanes. Some of these :

are ubiquitous in the environment and may continue to pose health threat to both wildlife and human beings, due to their persistency, bioaccumulative
ability, and potential toxicity.

Given that China has become a major seafood exporter and that the US is one of its big collective customers, you might want to put that shrimp in a decontamination chamber before putting them on the barbie.

Labels: China, health, pesticides, shrimp

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.

Labels: boil, shrimp

Associated Press writer J.M. Hirsch has this advice on using tea in cooking, with a recipe for brining shrimp in a tea and salt water mix. I haven't tried it yet, and I'm not sure that I'd agree that a brine would add moisture (it should actually dry some moisture out through osmosis - a good thing probably for shrimp that have been frozen and are now water-logged). But this does sound interesting. I'll try experimenting with an appropriate dipping sauce and report on the results.

Labels: brining, shrimp, tea