Accidentally bought pre-cooked shrimp
August 23, 2020 12:36 PM   Subscribe

I bought a bag of frozen jumbo shrimp from Trader Joe's intending to pan-fry them, but belatedly realized that they are shelled and pre-cooked, the sort you would serve with cocktail sauce or in a salad. The bag says to "Serve thawed or quickly warmed; avoid further cooking". I don't like cold shrimp, so how can I best use these in conventional "hot food" recipes without overcooking?
posted by btfreek to Food & Drink (16 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I think pan frying would count as “quickly warmed”. Fry just enough to thaw them and maybe brown them slightly.
posted by mekily at 12:40 PM on August 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


Cook everything else (sauce/vegetables/etc), then stir these in and heat for a minute.
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:40 PM on August 23, 2020 [21 favorites]


Prep your dish as normal but don’t add them until the very end as they don’t have to be cooked, just warmed through
posted by koahiatamadl at 12:41 PM on August 23, 2020 [7 favorites]


I'd go for anything saucy and soupy, baked or dropped in to warm, to avoid direct heat from a pan. Shrimp enchiladas, maybe? Or tom yum soup?
posted by mostlymartha at 12:59 PM on August 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


We use precooked shrimp as noted above - I usually chop large shrimp into 3-4 smaller pieces and add at the last minute to soups/stews or pasta. I also recently spread some pesto on pizza dough and threw the shrimp on top...and no one was sad about that at all.
posted by dreamphone at 1:05 PM on August 23, 2020 [6 favorites]


I've been cooking with frozen coldwater prawns (probably a bit smaller than what you've got) during the pandemic. They're great in soup or fried rice or stir-fries - defrost them in a bowl of water (takes 30-40 minutes for the little ones I'm using) and chuck them into the thing you're cooking either just before or just after you take it off the heat.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 1:38 PM on August 23, 2020 [3 favorites]


I speak from experience having made this same mistake before: If you have a sous vide circulator, you could easily vac-seal the shrimp and bring them up to a holding temp (anywhere from 52-60c would be fine for this application). Once they're up to temp, they won't overcook, and you can serve them hot; you won't get any Maillard browning from searing them, but they're pretty damn tasty.
posted by furnace.heart at 2:17 PM on August 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


to my taste, they are unappealingly flabby if they're only thawed. It's fine for them to cook a little bit more as they warm; it firms them up.
posted by fingersandtoes at 2:54 PM on August 23, 2020 [3 favorites]


I recently learned there is such a thing as butter poaching, which might be useful here.

You heat up a few tablespoons of water in a pan to sizzling, drop the heat, and then slowly whisk in, tablespoon by tablespoon, as much cold butter as suits your conscience. Like, up to a stick. (If you do an image search, you get the idea of what you wind up with -- it's sort of a milky-butter emulsion. You could probably put garlic etc in it, if suited you.)

You keep it medium warm, and I bet you could drop cooked shrimp in that for three minutes and have warm but not overcooked and wonderfully buttery shrimp and the fat would help keep it from overcooked shrimp fail.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 3:05 PM on August 23, 2020 [3 favorites]


Here's a good image, with what appears to be cooked lobster meat.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 3:07 PM on August 23, 2020


Usually, for something like a prawn curry you would make the sauce first, then put the prawns in to cook for a few minutes at the end; so you could use exactly the same recipe and just put them in long enough to warm up.

Or something like a fishcake (i.e. made with potatoes), which you would normally make with cooked fish, and then you fry them just to brown the outsides and warm them through.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 3:31 PM on August 23, 2020


I tend to use mine primarily for cold or room temperature dishes (with soba noodles, for example) but the only time I successfully used cooked shrimp in a hot dish was to chop them up teeny tiny and make a shrimp cake out of them (mine doesn't have potatoes).

I say "successfully" because adding the shrimp at the very end of the cooking time, even with the heat off, I always ended up with oddly textured (usually rubbery but on one horrific occasion, watery) and/or mostly tasteless shrimp.
posted by sm1tten at 5:05 PM on August 23, 2020


Cook pasta, Heat butter, and cook garlic in it. Add lemon and shrimp, serve over pasta.
posted by theora55 at 6:16 PM on August 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


showbiz_liz has it. Shrimp and prawns will cook unpeeled frozen raw in about 5-6 minutes in boiling water with the heat promptly turned off. For these all you need to do is thaw them out in the dish. Simply stirring them in at the end and letting it sit for a bit, stirring occasionally, will be just fine for pastas, curries, etc.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:58 PM on August 23, 2020


Thaw them with hot tap water and then drain and throw into the dish after you take it off the heat. Hot tap water is not hot enough to toughen them, unless you have industrial boilers, but is enough to make them really warm so that they don't cool down the dish at all.

I generally throw them into a pot of water that has just boiled, stir once and then drain, but that can toughen them up a little bit.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:38 AM on August 25, 2020


Response by poster: Thanks all! I cooked some very thinly sliced lemons in butter and garlic, added the shrimp and covered to steam/thaw for a couple minutes, and then tossed with angel hair pasta and topped with parmesan and black pepper and another squeeze of lemon. It was good.
posted by btfreek at 11:09 AM on September 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


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