Seafood is a real delicacy. Gourmets appreciate these seafood for excellent taste, cooks for their simplicity and speed of cooking, and nutritionists for their beneficial properties and low calorie content. The most affordable and delicious seafood is shrimp. From them you can cook both simple but very tasty and light snacks, as well as sophisticated gourmet dishes that can decorate the table of even the most demanding gourmets.
The benefits of shrimp
Like any other seafood, shrimp is not only a delicate, refined taste, but also a great health benefit. Their meat contains a number of essential amino acids, vitamins of the PP and B group, trace elements important for the body, such as iron, sodium, potassium, iodine, cobalt phosphorus and others. Due to the low calorie content and low (16%) fat content, shrimp are considered one of the best dietary products. There are so many varieties of this seafood. Today we will look at how to cook jumbo prawns. These are huge crustaceans, the length of which can reach up to 30 cm.
How to choose shrimp
Consider some tips for choosing shrimp:
- Fresh seafood is resilient and smells of the sea.
- The shrimp is more strongly bent, the less time it lay before freezing.
- Spoiled or stale crustacean - dried and with yellowish meat.
- White dry spots indicate that the shrimp was frozen.
- Better preserved boiled-frozen seafood.
- The thickness of the ice should not exceed 1 mm, and the shrimp should be easily separated.
- If the color of the mollusk is pale pink or there is too much snow in the package, this is an indication that the product is often frozen and thawed during storage.
- If the head of the shrimp is greenish - no big deal. This means they fed on plankton. Brown head in pregnant shrimp. During this period, meat is considered more useful.
- If the heads are black - then the shrimp lay for a long time without freezing. It is undesirable to buy such seafood.
Next, consider how to cook king jumbo prawns.
Shrimp with couscous and spinach and cream sauce
To prepare shrimp with a lush light sauce of cream and spinach leaves, you need to prepare the following ingredients:
- chilled jumbo prawns;
- cream 15% fat;
- dry couscous - 2 tablespoons;
- a bunch of spinach;
- for frying olive oil;
- Cherry tomatoes;
- thyme and rosemary;
- 30 grams of butter;
- pepper and salt;
- garlic.
Cooking sequence
Since Jumbo shrimp is being prepared in a matter of minutes, it is initially necessary to make a side dish. To do this, put the pan on a hot stove. It is advisable to choose copper metal utensils, as it keeps heat better. To prepare one serving, you will need couscous (about two tablespoons of cereal). After cooking, it increases almost three times.
Add drinking water and butter to the couscous, and salt to taste. During the preparation of such porridge, it must be continuously stirred, since it is rather not cooked, but steamed. To avoid lumps, you don’t need to leave the couscous for a second. The cereal is prepared quickly enough, in about five minutes.
Separate the leaves of spinach from the columns and lay them on a well-heated pan, sprinkling it with olive oil, which has the aroma of garlic. In order for the oil to acquire a garlic delicate odor, you can also cut the clove along, then crush the halves with a knife and hold them a little in the heating olive oil until they are slightly browned. Then garlic must be removed.
Keep the spinach on the fire for not very long: it should only evaporate, noticeably losing in volume. Add cream to it. A 15% product is recommended. Stir the cream with spinach over a couple of minutes, then add salt and pepper. Now we start to make foam. It gives the dish an aesthetic and mouth-watering look. To do this, you need to take a culinary blender and a metal mold. After receiving a high lush uniform foam of the color of sea wave, we proceed to the preparation of Jumbo shrimp.
Dry the shrimp with a towel, cut in half. Head and shell should be left. This will serve as an element of decor. In addition, when frying under the carapace, aromatic juice will form, which then flows into couscous. Heat the pan. There is a little secret: so that the prawns do not burn, put two pieces of cooking parchment in a pan, then sprinkle with olive oil and put a couple of cloves of crushed garlic, a sprig of rosemary and thyme.
Before getting into the pan, salt and pepper seafood, then stack in rows. First, put the shrimp on the shell down - so they cook a little longer. On a meaty soft barrel, they will need only one minute. In general, Jumbo shrimp is important not to overdo it. Inside the finished seafood, the meat temperature in the pan should be 40 degrees. This is enough to preserve the soft, tender meat, taste and aroma.
After the shrimp has been removed from the heat, oil does not need to be poured. In it we will prepare the “stumps” of zucchini. It is best to cut them into tall pieces - they will serve as a pillow for shrimp. Before sending the zucchini to the pan, cool it a bit by adding a little butter from the refrigerator. Young zucchini cooks for about two minutes.
Meanwhile, we lay out a plate of couscous, zucchini, then a bunch of salad, a red drop of cherry tomato and a tender pink shrimp. The dish is ready to serve.
Sicilian Shrimps in Vegetable Sauce
To prepare this dish you need to take:
- Jumbo prawns - 900 grams;
- olive oil - 1/4 cup;
- one medium-sized red onion cut into small cubes;
- a celery stalk with leaves, cut into plates - one;
- finely chopped tomatoes, cream grade, - 4 pcs.;
- pine nuts - 1 tbsp. l .;
- small raisins - 1 tbsp. l .;
- small capers, rinsed from salt and dried - 2 tbsp. l .;
- dry marsala - 1 cup;
- fennel seeds - 1/2 tsp;
- chili flakes - 1/2 tsp;
- bay leaf, preferably fresh - one.
Cooking
According to this recipe, Jumbo prawns are prepared as follows:
- Heat olive oil in a pan, then add celery and onion to it. Reduce the heat and stir, fry until the contents are soft.
- Add to the pan all the other ingredients, except shrimp, and bring the sauce to a boil.
- We spread the shrimp on the sauce, close the pan with a lid and heat for four minutes. We remove the frying pan from the heat and leave it to stand without heating under the lid for another five minutes.
Boiled shrimp with vegetables
To cook Jumbo shrimp for this recipe (photo attached to the article), you need to purchase the following set of products:
- shrimp - 300 grams;
- salt - 1 tsp;
- chopped carrots - 1 tbsp. l .;
- chopped onion - 1 tbsp. l .:
- chopped parsley - 1 tbsp. l .;
- tarragon - 1 tsp;
- bay leaf, peppercorns and dill.
After you can start other actions. Jumbo Shrimp Cooking:
- pour defrosted shrimp with cold water, then pour boiling water over them;
- add onions, carrots, tarragon, parsley, bay leaves, dill, peas and salt.
- cook for 7-8 minutes.
Beer Shrimp
To prepare the dish you will need:
- boiled and frozen shrimp - 1 kg;
- cloves - 12-15 pcs.;
- bay leaf - 4-6 pcs.;
- black polka dots - 12 pcs.;
- sweet peas - 6 pcs.;
- the floor of the lemon;
- garlic - 1 head;
- tomato paste - 6-8 tbsp. l or dry paprika - 2 tbsp. l .;
- salt to taste;
- olive oil - 2 tbsp. l
Cooking sequence:
- We fill a five-liter pot by 2/3 with water.
- We put on the fire and put: bay leaf, cloves, allspice, peppercorns, peas, lemon, chopped into large pieces, a head of garlic, cut across and tomato paste.
- Salt to taste.
- Let the water boil and place the shrimp.
- After boiling, cook in the broth for about 10 minutes.
- We recline in a colander and pour it into the bowl.
- Season with olive oil and lemon juice.
It's important to know
To make the shrimp tasty and juicy, it is important to know the following points:
- Having bought 1 kg of the crude product, after cooking only 500-600 g will be obtained, and after cleaning, approximately 250-300 g of meat will remain.
- To preserve nutrients and taste, defrost shrimp gradually: initially from the freezer, transfer to the refrigerator chamber, and then leave it at room temperature.
- Since crustaceans are a perishable product, they cannot be stored in a thawed form for a long time.
- Cooking time for seafood depends on the size: the smaller it is, the faster the shrimp is boiled.
- To quickly remove the shell after cooking, they need to be dipped in cold water for a couple of minutes.
- To make the shrimp juicy and tasty, after cooking they are left in water for 15 minutes.