Cajun & Creole · Main
Shrimp Étouffée
- Intermediate
- 50 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- 600g shrimp (make quick stock from the shells)
- 60g butter + 60g flour (blond-to-peanut roux)
- The trinity + garlic
- 400ml shrimp stock
- Cajun seasoning, hot sauce, lemon
- Scallions, rice
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · nuts · peanuts · shellfish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Simmer shells in water 15 min; strain. Free flavor. 15 min
- Butter roux to peanut-butter color; trinity in.
- Whisk in stock to a gravy; season; simmer 15 min. 15 min
- Shrimp in for the final 3 minutes only. Over rice. 3 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Making a roux 32 recipes
- Taken to the stage the dish named and no further, judged against that colour (pale, blond, or brown to brick), and it got there slowly enough to have coloured evenly.
- It is smooth and mobile: a paste with no dry pockets of flour and no lumps, loosening as it warms rather than sitting stiff in the pan.
- The raw-flour smell has gone and been replaced by the toasted, biscuity smell of its stage, with nothing acrid behind it.
- No black specks anywhere. One scorched fleck condemns the batch; it cannot be stirred back in and it will be tasted in the finished sauce.
- Let down into liquid it goes smooth without lumps and thickens to the body the dish wants, leaving no floury taste on the tongue.
Where it goes wrong The heat was too high and the corners of the pan went unstirred, so it scorched at the edge; black specks run through the finished sauce and carry a bitterness that no amount of seasoning covers.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Barrel-aged Chardonnay (Meursault style)
- Also Right
- Champagne
- From the Taps
- Pilsner or witbier
- Zero-Proof
- White grape & tonic
Butter-dressed shellfish climbs a weight class: oak-and-cream Chardonnay matches it richness for richness.
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