I Already Ate It Don't Worry I'm Fine

June 23, 2018 1:04 AM

I was cleaning some shrimp for dinner tonight and one of them had a whole bunch of clumpy white beige looking stuff all along the vein and down through the tail. Moreso than it seemed like should be inside the space it took up, like it had been under pressure somewhat. What was it??

Were these eggs? Parasites? They had no weird smell and washed out of the shrimp cleanly, but had a texture kind of like small curds. This was in addition to the vein, which was in there like normal and separate from the weird clumpy stuff, but followed the same trajectory through the shrimp meat.

These were white shrimp, shell-on but heads removed, from my very swanky grocery store that sells super nice seafood in a city that is known for high seafood standards. I cooked and ate the single weird shrimp just like the rest of them and have had no adverse effects, but also I cleaned it out pretty thoroughly.

I've tried to search for this but apparently shrimp eggs are underneath by the legs not the back and also there's some orange thing that happens sometimes but this was definitely not at all orange. I have seen this stuff described by curious folks on different forums but with no satisfactory answers. Shrimpers of Mefi, can you solve this mystery?

posted by Mizu to Food & Drink (3 answers total)

maybe fat, was the vein full of crap? i clean shrimp straight off the boat & what you are describing I don't believe is of any consequence. was it wild or farm raised? HUGE difference BTW
posted by patnok at 5:51 PM on June 23, 2018

Just spitballing, but perhaps it was cancer.
posted by Trifling at 9:11 PM on June 24, 2018

Response by poster: I was back at my store today and had a conversation with the fishmonger guy. First of all I believe that these were white gulf shrimp, perhaps relevant?? The fishmonger said he'd been working in the industry on boats and stuff all over for more than twenty years, but unfortunately mostly in Alaska and the PNW (I'm in Seattle) so he's not super familiar with gulf seafood. He said that he'd been on a shrimping boat with a friend in the gulf a few years ago and had seen shrimp there with little white rocklike particles in the digestive track, which were apparently coral fragments. I reiterated that this stuff was not inside the vein but beneath it, further inside the shrimp. He was as perplexed as I was. I wish I hadn't been so dang hungry the other night so I could have had the patience to take pictures and test the stuff (see if it was squishy, for example). Alas.
posted by Mizu at 5:21 PM on June 25, 2018