Devein Shrimp

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm chef Rainer Wickel and I'm here today with expertvillage.com. Well we're on to our next step in making our tequila lime shrimp skewers. And now we need to prepare the shrimp to get ready to marinade. Now the very first thing you need to do is we need to wash the shrimp, we need to rinse them. And the reason that you want to do that is you want to get any excess things that are on the shrimp, you want to be able to rinse them off. So just put them in a bowl, run them under cold water, and then drain the water out of there, and just rinse them completely off and clean them. So the next thing we need to look at is, we need to make sure that the shrimp are deveined. Now these particular shrimp that I have here today have already been deveined, but if they aren't deveined, you need to make sure that you do devein them, because that will effect the taste of the shrimp. So, if they aren't deveined, all you need to do is, you just need to go ahead and grab the shrimp and take your nice sharp paring knife and just slice it ever so slightly down the middle, all the way across, just deep enough so that you can see where the vein's at. And, you're going to be able to see that because it's like a little black stripe in the shrimp. And once you get that go ahead and grab it on the end. And what you're going to do, it'll come out in one piece, you just come along and pull the vein out, and then make sure to pinch it at the bottom so that you get the whole vein out of there, and just throw that away. And you want to make sure to do that just because of the fact that if the vein's still in there, it's actually going to effect the taste of the shrimp and you don't want to do that. And the other thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that the shrimp are peeled. Now these particular shrimp are already peeled and they just have the tail on them. But, if they still have the whole shell on them go ahead and peel the shell off, but now with the tail, there's a little trick to it. A lot of times when you try and pull the tail off it'll just break off and you're actually going to lose a lot of meat so an easy way to do this is just go ahead and grab the shrimp by the tail down here, and make sure that you're not grabbing a hold of any meat. And then just firmly pull it on both side making sure not to squeeze it and just pull the tail off. You can see it all came out in one piece and go ahead and discard the tail, and do this with the rest of the shrimp. And this is how we prepare our shrimp to get ready to make our tequila lime shrimp skewers."