Preparing Ingredients for Boiled Shrimp

Video Transcript

"Hi! Today we are going to show you how to do some boiled shrimp and I've got some 2125 fresh Gulf shrimp here and these are also referred to as pink shrimp. One of the great things about boiled shrimp is you don't have to actually clean the shrimp until they are actually done and ready to eat. They are a much better product if you leave the shell on. A lot of times you use shrimp shells to actually make the seafood stock and things of that nature. So we are going to go ahead and just leave the shells on and the legs and such. Once these are done, we will chill them down and sprinkle them with some extra seasoning and once they chill down to a certain point, they will be ready to eat and the guest can actually just take the shells off themselves. But the shell has a really nice rich flavor to these. So I've got some cheese cloth here and what I am going to do is make a little spice bag and there is a multitude of seasonings in the grocery stores out on the market there but I tend to like to use these powder types simply because we are going to fill this spice bag and tie it up and we are going to let that sit in the water and seif and season that water as it goes before we actually throw the shrimp in. We will show you that procedure. So first and foremost, I am going to go ahead and cut this guy and we are not doing a big batch of shrimp so we really don't need to make a really huge spice bag by any means. So what I am going to do is take this like that and just sprinkle this in the middle. That should be enough for our intents and purposes and I am going to save some of this for when the shrimp is done. I am just going to kind of pull up the edges here, the corners if you will and I don't want to just pull this tight. I want to actually leave some space between the top and where I am going to tie it so that way water will be able to sief through here and this will actually sink to the bottom. If you tie it too tight, it will just float on the top and it will never really sink to the bottom and that is not what we want. We want this to be able to sink. As the water that we cook our shrimp in begins to come to a simmer, these seasonings will start to seep out and it makes a really nice product as far as that goes. So pull those up, we are going to go ahead and tie that tight and make sure that we don't have any gaps that got away from us; we didn't. I'm just going to tie that in a knot. I will trim the ends off here. That was our spice bag for boiled shrimp. As you can see, some has already come out and that is fine. That is what I want to happen actually. So we are going to go ahead and get the stock pot ready and we will come back and show you how to do that."