Rick Bayless Mexican Shrimp Cocktail

today it's one of my favorite appetizers snacks enjoyable certainly during the warm weather months mexican style shrimp cocktail [Music] one of the things i just love about mexican shrimp cocktail is it's so bright flavored that it always satisfies me in a way that american shrimp cocktail just really doesn't the other thing is that it's very very easy you can start with already cooked shrimp but i'm going to show you a very simple way to cook shrimp fresh at your place this is sort of a no-brainer way of doing it and i think it's just always really really reliable okay so i've got some water on here and it's at a low boil now i'm bringing it to a higher boil and i'm going to add some salt to it when you add salt to boiling water it usually reacts so i kind of add it a little bit at a time it'll sort of boil up okay so i'm putting a lot of salt in here probably a couple tablespoons because you want heavily salted water it should taste like the sea that's the level of saltiness that you're looking for in this so that's where i am right now i think seawater when you're for pasta is the same thing it's like sea water i've got this onto a really rapid boil now these are the small shrimp which i think are perfect for making a shrimp cocktail the bag will either say small shrimp or it may say 4160 that's the count that you would get in a pound of them because that's the way they grade shrimp sizes i'm going to put it all into the pan here i'm just going to give it a very quick stir here just to make sure that they're all cooking evenly there and it won't take very long for this to come back to the boil and that's the point at which i think they're right now in our restaurant when we are working with a lot of these small shrimp we don't use this method this is a perfect method when you're using like a pound or so of shrimp that's what i'm working with now because when it hits when it barely barely returns to the boil i'm going to pour all the water off and then they should be done and if they're not i can just put the top back on and let them steam for just a minute um as just with the residual heat that's in the pan there when we're working in a restaurant we'll have a heavily salted water in a pan and we'll be adding them handfuls at a time and then using one of these big skimmers or spiders we often call them to get them out just when they sort of float back up to the top so it's a very quick cook but if you want to use already cooked shrimp for this recipe then you'll need about 12 ounces of cooked shrimp we're starting with one pound of the raw shrimp for this but they do lose about a quarter of their weight in the cooking process even though they're cooking in water okay i'm seeing that the water is beginning to boil just a tiny little bit so we'll say that this has been cooking now for a minute or so maybe a little longer than a minute and they're just about ready you could test the shrimp at this point but you don't have to because with these 4160 shrimp usually just when it comes back to the boil which it is now i'm going to turn this off i'm going to use a little of this cooking liquid now to make my um my sauce for this and then just taking the top here and i'm going to go to the sink and just pour this mixture off here or not a mixture it's just the water so i'll just tip it and hopefully not lose very many shrimp i lost one shrimp into the sink here that has probably happened to you when you're trying to drain using a lid like that now let's check one of the the shrimp here and see if it's they look beautifully cooked so i'm going to pull one out and just take a little taste of it they've got that lovely crunchy like flavor to them and now to stop the cooking so that they don't overcook i'm just going to put them into the ice water here and let them cool off very very very quickly okay now we're gonna let those sit there while we make the mixture that is the beautiful mexican style cocktail sauce and we're gonna start here with some ketchup so you i told you it has a different flavor than american cocktail sauce and yet i'm starting with the same basic ingredient that goes into the american cocktail sauces i'm a huge fan of heinz ketchup and so that's what i'm using in this but that's where all of the similarities end so we'll start here with the cooking lamb lamb our shrimp cooking broth uh if you don't have that of say you're going to be working with already cooked shrimp um in most grocery stores they'll sell a little eight ounce bottle of clam juice that's what i always buy when i'm buying the already cooked shrimp and use about a third of a cup of that in here next thing is some fresh squeezed lime juice you need a third of a cup of that we started with a half a cup of the ketchup there and now we're going to sort of take it off into this direction that is undeniably mexican so we have the lime juice which you would always expect to have in something like this bright flavored cocktail we have made it more savory with some of the shrimp cooking liquid there now we're going to make it spicy with this vinegary hot sauce now i'm using tamasula because that's what we use in our house and in our restaurant but lots of people like valentina or the slightly sweeter one of the mexican hot sauces that is called buffalo you can use any of those mexican hot sauces they have a very specific flavor profile that is very different than american hot sauces so i would not recommend something like tabasco in this because that is a fermented mash hot sauce and it has a funkiness that you won't find in the mexican hot sauces so you want to put two to four tablespoons depending on what heat level you want this to be at two will give you a very gentle heat four will give you a pretty robust heat now the next thing i'm going to add is a little chopped white onion you'll notice that i have it in the strainer and that's because i rinsed it off after i chopped it to get all of that flavor that we don't like in raw onions the strong part of it i've rinsed all of that off and i'm going to add that to the mix here and a little bit of chopped cilantro as well grab that i'm gonna mix that into the thing here and then we are i'm gonna put in a little bit of olive oil now this you don't have to put in and most people don't in mexico um i've been to a couple of places that did add a little bit of olive oil to the cocktail sauce and i loved it that was over in the state of veracruz i loved it i thought it added something really special it adds a mouth feel as well as a flavor but it adds a really really lovely mouth feel so i'll put that in there and then some avocado goes in next so cutting around the pit and then twisting the two sides apart i'm going to reach in grab a spoon that will allow me to go in and scoop the flesh completely out of this skin like that and then we'll cut that into smallish pieces now you notice that the onion that i cut up i cut really small that's because i like to distribute that flavor very nice evenly through the mixture i'm kind of doing that with the avocado too and talk about mouth feel the avocado will certainly give you a wonderful mouth feel here so i just scooped it out and then diced it into smallish pieces i'm going to use half of it you could use as much as you want and then i'm going to tell you about some other things that you could put into this mixture at this point i will say that i like to put in some chopped up jicama you might like that too because it'll give beautiful crunch sort of a real refreshing flavor and texture to it some people like to put a little bit of chopped up cucumber in here that's absolutely delicious feel free working sort of around the base of these flavors that we have in the sauce to embroider it however you want whatever seems to be attractive to you these are the things that i like to have in here let's go back and look now at these uh shrimp that are over here and i think that certainly they're very very nicely cooled now so i'm just going to use my hand to kind of get them up out of them i got to make sure that i don't get any pieces of the ice in there and just let them drain in this spider here and then we'll mix those guys into our sauce i've got a few more of them that i'm gonna dig out here as well um and you're you're done basically now when you're working with mexican shrimp cocktail it may surprise you that most people will serve it with saltine crackers and everybody loves it that way in mexico so they don't eat saltine crackers with hardly anything else like when you're eating a soup you don't have saltine crackers with it in mexico i personally prefer it with tortilla chips and it's like that to me those things go together so absolutely beautifully that i always reach for the tortilla chips to accompany it something crunchy and nice so you can choose between tortilla chips and saltine crackers now i i thought maybe just that half of the avocado was really all that i needed there but now i'm looking at it and i'm going to use some of it for a garnish on the top but it's going to need all of that that avocado so i'm going to slice and dice a little more i'm going to save this little piece here to go on the top and go ahead and chop this thing up yeah it's going to that i just love the texture and the flavor of avocado in this so just think about what we have in there we've got the creaminess of the avocado the crunch of the white onion the herbiness of the cilantro and then of course we've got the beautifully cooked shrimp and i will tell you that these will have a better texture than anything that you can buy that's already cooked that's been my experience but some people would rather not work with the raw shrimp so feel free to do whatever works for you okay so let's just look at this now i've got my little dish these are often served in little sundae glasses in mexico so if you have a little ice cream sundae glass that would be a wonderful thing to use here a few more shrimp on the top of it and our piece of avocado to slice and lay over the top of it that'll just make it look that much more beautiful and then we've got some cilantro sprigs and really just in a flash you can have an absolutely delicious mexican style shrimp cocktail [Music]

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 100,860

Keywords: shrimp cocktail, seafood, Mexican food, Rick Bayless, mariscos

Id: YdpyJbgUjvk

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021