Beryl: Hi and welcome to Cajun Cooking TV. It’s Saturday night Baton Rouge and we’re cooking Shrimp Creole. This is more of a traditional Southern New Orleans style dish, but we will call Cajun nonetheless. So let’s get cooking.

First, we have two pounds of large shrimp. You can get the jumbo size, but we prefer this size for making soups and gumbos. We also have four cups of Cajun Trinity which is chopped up, sweet Vidalia onion, bell peppers and celery. We’re going to make a roux, so have a half a cup of flour and a stick of butter.

Previously this week I made some vegetable stock, so we have eight cups of vegetable stock. I have a can of Rotel tomatoes, two cans to tomato sauce and some rice and some minced up garlic and chalets. And this will be the garlic and the chalets are very similar, almost like a little tiny purple onion. And of course we can’t forget, we’ve got some Tony Chachere’s here.

So we are going to get started peeling and deveining the shrimp and then we will start putting it all together.

Mike: Yes.

Beryl: Right now, I’m peeling the shrimp and let me show you how that’s done. We just take the top, hold it in your left hand at the tail, take from the legs down here and just pull them apart and you can pull off most of the shell and then you’re able to just squeeze between your fingers, squeeze out the tail portion. So then you have a beautiful whole shrimp here.

Now we want to devein it. And there are deveining gadgets with a knife, a good sharp pairing knife works just the same. So just delicately cut through the top here and you can see the vein is right here at the top. If you just pull it out with the knife like this, it comes right out, and have a paper towel handy, just wipe your knife and then set your shrimp aside. And we’re going to keep doing this and Mike is going to help me. And we’re going to get cooking.

We peeled and deveined two pounds of large shrimp. Now we’re ready to get started putting everything together inside a large pot here. I have two tablespoons of Olive oil. I’m heating that up. I’m going to toss in our Cajun Trinity. This is four cups of Cajun Trinity. I’m going to soften these vegetables till they’re softened and then we’re going to keep going.

I will do the vegetables, they look really nice here. I also put in the garlic and chalets. I’m just going to move this to a bowl here for a little bit because I need to make roux and I can do it in the same pot.

Move this. That is good. Return it to the fire. Have the stick of butter here. It’s already softened for me. There we go. I’m going to soften this butter, get it bubbly and hot and then I’m going to make a really—a light roux. I’m making a roux here. I’ve got the butter bubbly and hot, just toss in the flour, a let it bubble at all with stirring wheel. I’m just going to stir this and I’m not going to let it get too brown. And if you would need to see how to make a roux, a dark roux, I have a separate video for that. This is labeled how to make a roux.

I’ll mix good, just let it cook for a minute, keep stirring of course. You don’t want it scorch. And we’ll go ahead and toss back in carefully my vegetable. And mix those up well. That’s smells quite good in here. Okay.

Next, I’m going to put in our vegetable stock, and I made vegetable stock last week by just chopping up all of the Cajun Trinity and freezing it. And then I have the other leftover pieces and parts of onion, celery and bell pepper. So I’ll just boil that for about an hour.

So now I have a beautiful flammable stock. We’re going to pour these eight cups of stock here and we’re going to let this cook for about 10 minutes.

Chop green onions for garnish.

Add our roux and Cajun Trinity and vegetable bulk mixture boiling here for about 10 to 15 minutes. It’s reduced down as you can see. It’s getting really thick and smells wonderful. So right now I’m going to go ahead and add in our can of Rotel tomatoes. Carefully add that in since it is boiling here. Stir that in. and I’ve got two eight owns cans of Hunt’s tomato sauce. So we’re just going to toss that in.