A Tail of Two Shrimps, Part Deux: Etouffee

By now, you've amassed a pile of shrimp heads and shells. Most reasonable people would look at that and think, "Bait." A Cajun thinks, "Lunch." 

Etouffee means "smothered" in French. It's usually made with shrimp, crawfish tails, chicken or sausage. It's generally thicker than a soup, with a thick, gravy like texture. And it is really, really good.

A fine shrimp stock, along with a well-made roux, is the secret to a really good etouffee. It's also great for layering extra flavor in a gumbo. Making it is very simple: Put whatever quantity of shells and heads into a saucepan with a chopped onion, two stalks of chopped celery, a chopped carrot, a few cloves of garlic, a few peppercorns and a bay leaf. Cover with water, and simmer for a half hour to forty five minutes. If you're using it right away, strain it right into the etouffee. If not, reduce by 3/4, and freeze in an ice cube tray for later use. Note: if you have time, you can roast the shells and heads in a dry frying pan or in the oven for a deeper flavor before adding the liquid.

The Holy Trinity of Louisiana Cooking: Onion, Celery and Bell Pepper

For the Etoufee:

1/2 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup canola or peanut oil

1 large onion, medium dice

3 stalks celery, ditto

1 large green bell pepper, ditto

4 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 cup diced tomato

3 tbs Cajun Seasoning (I like Tony Chachere's or Zatarain's, but you can make your own with equal proportions garlic powder, onion powder, thyme, oregano, black pepper, and cayenne)

1 tbs salt

2-3 lbs large shrimp, peeled and deveined

1 quart shrimp stock, hot

2 bay leaves

finely chopped scallion for garnish

Steamed white rice

In a enameled dutch oven over medium heat, combine the oil and flour and whisk constantly until it turns the color of peanut butter. You want a fairly light roux here--it has more thickening power than a dark one and has the right flavor profile for this dish.

Add the onion, celery, bell pepper, and garlic, and sweat over medium-low heat for ten minutes or until just soft. Turn heat up to high. Add tomato, seasoning salt, bay leaves and stock, bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring, until mixture thickens and reduces a bit, maybe another 30 minutes. You're looking for a thick, gravy consistency. Taste and adjust seasonings ( I often add more Cajun seasoning here--it's better to start with too little than too much.)

Add shrimp and cover, removing from heat. Let sit on the stove for 10-12 minutes. Shrimp should be just cooked through.

Serve over white rice, and garnish with chopped scallions. Pass Tabasco at table.

Borrowed this photo--we ate ours before I could take pictures!

A Tail of Two Shrimps

A Tail of Two Shrimps: Poached and Etoufee, Part 1

Moving to the Texas Gulf Coast at an early age came with some definite benefits. My late father was a beach hound, and we spent nearly every weekend on Galveston Island, working on our Irish Tans (that's when your freckles grown together enough to cover up how red your Northern European ass has gotten from not wearing sunscreen), dodging Portugese Man-O-Wars ( a particularly mean variety of jellyfish,) and pretending that there were sharks inches from my little sister. That last part worked out pretty well, and to spectacular effect, but that's another story.

On the drive home, we'd usually stop in a small fishing village called Kemah, which is now a popular tourist trap resort destination, but back in the 70's and 80's, it was filled with honky-tonks, seafood restaurants, and best of all,seafood shops run by Vietnamese immigrant families. We used to get the biggest, freshest shrimp imaginable for very little cash. 

Rose's Seafood was our favorite, and thirty years and several hurricanes later, my family still shops there. Here's why:

Rose's has fifteen feet of counter space dedicated to various sizes and types of shrimp, both head-on and cleaned. The head-on 12-count per pound Colossal brown Gulf Shrimp costs around $7 per pound. Seriously. You'd pay three times that at Whole Foods. Here's why you want the ones with the heads: firstly, you can chase your wife or kids around with them, because they gross people out for some reason; secondly, the heads make the finest fume, or seafood stock you can get. And you need the fume pour la etoufee, mon cher! 

But first, a word about the most horrifically mistaken use of this noble creature, the Overcooked Boiled Shrimp Cocktail. In a word, it's just plain bad. There's almost nothing more disappointing, other than going home alone on a Saturday night, than an overcooked shrimp. Tough, chewy, flavorless. What you want is briny, springy, and shrimpy. There are two ways to accomplish this. One is to come over to my house on any given weekend when my mother-in-law is over for dinner. She's allergic to shellfish, and I always find some excuse to make sure shrimp is on the menu. The other is to do EXACTLY as I say in the following recipe.

Tough Shrimp--you're doing it wrong, Otho!

MadDawgg's Fool-proof Perfect Poached Shrimp 

2 lbs. 10-12 count per pound shrimp

4 quarts water

4 tbs sea salt (estimated)

2 bay leaves

1 small onion, cut in half

1/2 head garlic, cut in half crosswise

1 lemon, cut in half and/or

2 cups white wine

10 pepper corns

parsley stems, celery leaves, and/or fresh dill

cayenne pepper

Bring the water to a rolling boil, adding enough salt to simulate seawater. This makes the shrimp happy. Add all other ingredients, squeezing lemons into the water before adding the halves. Cover and let this rip for about 20 minutes to infuse.

Remove the heads, peel, and devein shrimp. I usually do this by holding the shrimp against the cutting board and running a very sharp paring knife from the middle of the meat up through the dorsal section from front to back. This nearly butterflies them, exposes the digestive tract which can be picked out (to throw at your kids or little sister) and makes it very easy to take off the shells. Reserve the heads and shells for stock (that's in Part Deux of this post._

Add shrimp to the pot, stirring, and bring back to a boil. Cover, and take off heat. Let sit for 10-12 minutes. Remove shrimp to an ice bath--a bowl filled with ice cubes and a little water to stop the cooking process immediately. Remove to a dry towel to drain. Serve with cocktail sauce.

Dad's Kick Ass Cocktail Sauce

Ketchup, 1 cup

Chili Sauce, 3 tbs.
Grated Horseradish, 2-4 tbs, depending on your degree of wussiness/badassness

Worcestershire Sauce, several dashes

Tabasco, don't be a wuss--use lots

Chopped capers, 3 tbs.

Lemon juice, 3 tbs

Salt and Pepper to taste

Mix all well. Adjust according to taste. Chill well before serving.

Advice to A Yankee About Texas Chili, But First, A Detour to Frito Pie

Advice to A Yankee About Texas Chili, But First, A Detour to Frito Pie

Anybody who knows me from childhood can tell you that my parents had the most outrageous Boston accents--like "Boibbie Cahtah, pass me a beeeah befoah I come ovah theya and give ya a beatin'!" This would have worked out as God had planned, I'm sure, if they'd had the eminent good sense to stay within the environs they'd been born in--Worcester, Massachusettes. That's W-O-O-S-T-A-H to the uninitiated. They didn't, as it turns out, and at the impressionable age of six I was transported against my will to Pasadena, Texas.

It didn't go so well for me as a six year old kid taking spelling tests in Miss. Sorrell's third grade class at Richey Elementary in Pasadena, TX. As if the humiliation of putting r's in the wrong places and leaving them off where they belonged wasn't enough, my Yankee language training up to that point gave me absolutely no preparation for three letter words pronounced at great length--like five syllables.

"Peee-eee-nnnn. Peee-eee-nnn." Next Word "Theeee-aate-er." "Theeee-aate-er."

I started failing immediately. The gentle Miss. Sorrel suggested that a good stout paddling in front of my classmates would help my spelling immensely. My horrified mother refused. Dad complied. I dropped my accent like a bad habit and adopted the drawl, out of sheer self-defense.

One thing I did pick up on right away, however, is that our school cafeteria would serve that singular exemplar of perfection, the Frito Pie, upon special occasions, like Rodeo Day and San Jacinto Day. The Frito Pie is a bag of fritos, slit open longitudinally, doused with the best Texas Red available, and sometimes served with cheese, sour cream, and pickled jalapenos. It cost a quarter or fifty cents if you wanted a Coke with it--and you wanted that Coke, believe me.

Later in life, I came to understand that the fritos weren't really the main act. It's all about the Chili. This is serious business in Texas, you understand. By age ten, I'd lost the remains of the haaahd vowels and replaced them with liberal saltings of "y'all, all y'all-- and screw all'y'all" to anyone who looked at me funny.

By college, I had been to many chili cook offs, and had sometimes been disappointed. Not by the batshit crazy characters attracted to the competitions, mind you. I've never been so honored as to have rubbed elbows with a grand assortment of Civil War reenactors, coon-skin cap-wearing black-powder rifle enthusiasts, overly friendly former Klansmen in denial about their obvious racism, bearded welders in their odd little caps discussing the best method for turning a 55 gallon drum into a smoker, and the occasional John Birch Society Member/High School Economics teacher who learned to make five hundred gallons of the stuff while serving on an air craft carrier in the Indian Ocean and who could hold forth at length on the necessity of returning to the gold standard.

I credit meeting these fellows as the beginnings of my political career. After all, if an arrogant little shit from Woostah, Mass like me could be accepted by these motley denizens of redneck bluecollardom, I knew I had a future in it for sure.

Now, to the Chili

First thing you need is a great big cast iron pot. Or maybe an enameled cast iron pot, if your wife's a fancy chef (which mine is.)

Find yourself a large chuck roast and trim off most of the fat and all of the silverskin. Cut into 1/2 in cubes

Heat some canola oil in the pot, and brown the cubed beef in batches. You'll build up a fond at the bottom of the pot--this is good. Don't fuck with it.

After browning all the meat, add one big-ass diced onion and stir with a wooden spatula, scraping up the brown bits. The onion ought to release enough juice to facilitate this necessary step. Add several cloves of smashed garlic and let that go a while. Tablespoon of tomato paste (no more!)  Put the beef back in an add some freshly toasted and ground cumin (two tbs.), some Mexican Oregano (one tsb), salt, black pepper, and at least ten dried and roasted mixed chilis (arbol, pasilla, ancho, New Mexico, etc) ground up in the blender. Maybe some beer or beef stock just to cover, bring to a simmer. Mix well, turn to low heat, and cover. Stir occasionally.

A Note About Chilis: Don't bother with pre-ground stuff you get at teh supermarket--it losees its potency very quickly and just doesn't have the flavor that distinguishes a realy Texan chili from the sort of meat-mush you get in Cincinatti or (gasp!) Canada. You're free to experiment here. The best way to prepare them is to very quickly toast them over a gas burner using a pair of kitchen tongs, let them cool, then take off the stem and remove the seeds. Whir around in a food processor for a few minutes. Alternatively, you can steep them in hot beef stock and scrape the flesh from the skin, and make a paste in the food processor with them. I've tried both and the easier first option does just fine.

After two hours lift the lid and adjust seasonings. Add a diced fresh jalapeno or two. Let it simmer uncovered until reduced OR, make a slurry with a little masa harina (Mexican corn flour) and some beer and stir in, simmering until thickened.

The best part if how you serve it. I put out sliced avocado, grated cheddar or crumbled Mexican farmer's cheese (cotija, which is sprinkled on food in the same manner the Italians use Parmesan,)  diced onions, pickled jalapenos, sour cream,  and for those who need some carbs with their meal, corn and flour tortillas, tortilla chips or some white rice

Note: Beans are never included in a Texas chili recipe. There's generally some sort of implicit threat of disembowelment or at a minimum, a chortling disparagement of one's manhood for even suggesting such a thing to chili cook-off types. So if you're going to ignore the warning, best not to mention it to anyone.