| 99 | 100 | 101 | 102 | 103 |
| 1 | 103 | 205 | 308 | 410 |
|
3. Chill the shrimp in cold running water. Drain and refrigerate.
Commercial shrimp comes in 11 different sizes, but you are likely to see only five or six
at your fish counter. The largest ones go to restaurants whose patrons can afford to pay for them,
and the really small ones end up in various commercial preparations. The table below gives you
the ranges for each size. The numbers show how many shrimp make up a pound (or a kilo).
TASTINGS Commercial American shrimp sizes
Shrimp size
extra colossal
colossal
No. in a Pound
less than 10
10-15
No. in a kg
less than 22
22-34
extra jumbo
jumbo
16-20
21-25
35-45
46-55
extra large
26-30
56-66
large
31-35
67-78
medium large
medium
36-40
41-50
79-88
89-111
small
extra small
tiny
51-60
61-70
more than 70
112-133
134-154
more than 154
Some cooks claim that shrimp have extra flavor when they cook them in the shell. This is
questionable, and serving fresh-cooked shrimp in the shell is unkind to your guests. Peeling them
is a messy operation at the dinner table, painfully so for people who have no experience. It is
more considerate to shell them in the kitchen, cook them quickly, and serve them piping hot.
If you are using large shrimp, you may want to devein them, too. The vein that runs along
the outer curve of the shrimp is the gut. It is small even in large shrimp, but some folks consider
it unappetizing to look at. I never bother with deveining. Serving shrimp in a sauce masks the
vein. Eating the vein is not harmful. When you eat a whole clam, oyster, or snail for example,
you never remove that same portion and never think of the gut that is part of your bite.
The terms shrimp and prawn are interchangeable. The English call everything a prawn,
the Americans everything a shrimp, and the Asians traditionally call the larger ones prawns and
the smaller ones shrimp. Restaurants prefer prawn when naming their dishes—it simply sounds
more elegant and more distinctive than shrimp.
About half of the total weight of shrimp in the shell is edible meat. Purchase 8 to 9
ounces (225 to 255 g) or, if you buy peeled shrimp, 4 to 5 ounces (110 to 140 g) per serving.
TASTINGS What is rock shrimp?
Rock shrimp is a relatively new introduction to the world market (early 1980s).
They live dominantly along the southeast Atlantic coast and in the Bahamas but
fishermen disregarded them until recently because they have an awfully thick
shell that is troublesome to peel off. But someone introduced a new shell-cracking
device, and rock shrimp has become a commercial success.
Squid is also called calamari, and even though it is not highly popular in the U.S., trendy
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