Hello, my name is Chris Clime. I am the Chef de Cuisine at Acadiana Restaurant, Washington, DC. Here at Acadiana, we are doing a modern interpretation of Louisiana cuisine from Abbeville, Louisiana down to New Orleans. Today, I am going to show you how to make New Orleans style barbeque shrimp.
The ingredients are fresh shrimp from gulf, also Lee & Perrin's, Tabasco and Worcestershire, which is the typical barbeque in Louisiana, also fresh garlic, bay leaves, a little bit of Abita Amber Beer, rosemary and black pepper, so lets get started.
We are going to show you here is how to clean shrimp for our New Orleans style barbeque shrimp. We got here is some U10 which means basically under 10 per pound, head on fresh gulf shrimp and they really don’t get any much fresher than that. As you can tell a real fresh shrimp, their heads are not going to be black, it should be very clean like such and you can really see the firmness. The head should be able when you pull it, it should not have any issues with coming off. If it comes off real quickly then the shrimp has obviously had some days out of the water. These are very fresh, we just had them flown in right in from the gulf.
So, what we are going to do is first you going to need have a little pearing knife here and there are couple of ways you can do it. Alright take the pearing knife and go right up to the back, keeping the head intact, you like have the head intact and if you are not comfortable holding it your hands you can put it on the cutting board, but I am going to show you how to do with holding your hands first, this is how we do it at the restaurant. You take it, you rub up the side, rub the back and then you peel the shrimp as such like this and then you remove it, leaving the tail section in, see how easy that is? And then you also want to get that last little vein out, just drawing your finger down and if not put it on the board and you just going to go and cut that vein out, very lightly, not traditionally, not to take to much meat off. Okay we’re going to do one on the board.
You put the shrimp on the board as such and then put the knife, make sure you are careful of sharp point here because if you not you are going to stick yourself. So, have the knife back facing towards you and the sharp end the blade facing towards the shell and making sure you tuck this part of the head and you don’t cut yourself. You put it right down the back, and as you go down the back, you want to stop right before the bottom of the base of tail and when you do that, you’re going to have it come out like this, it is going to butterfly and you are going to get that vein. See there, at the vein, the exact same time. So, you are going to pull away and as you pull it away here, you’re going to get everything out that you want.
You are going to get the shell off and you are going to get the vein. So do it real slow so you can see it, not to remove the head because you see all that fat, that’s where all the flavor is, that’s where we are going to get it out on there for the dish. You remove it all, put to the side, you have a completely clean shrimp. The tail for presentation but the shell from the meat, body removed and the head which you want to keep on because of that fat for the flavor and that’s how you clean fresh head on shrimp.