Thursday, September 08, 2016

Shrimp Etouffee With Homemade Seafood Stock

... is absolutely mind-blowing.

Man, it's been a long time since I've blogged here.

I've been busy in the test kitchen.
Shrimp Etouffee is one of my favorite dishes. I use the Crawfish Etouffee recipe from Terry Thompson's Cajun-Creole Cooking and substitute 31-40 count shrimp for the crawfish. In the past, I've used boxed seafood stock, but when I made it a few weeks back, I couldn't find the stock at our local market.

Pro tip: When you can't find an ingredient at the first store you visit, give up, go home and find a substitute! Every store visit costs you at least 30 minutes and you quickly run out of time to cook. If it's an unusual ingredient like boxed seafood stock, your odds of finding it at the next place are slim. You can quickly turn a leisurely, fun afternoon culinary adventure into a desperate race against time.

Instead of running to another store, I did a quick Google and found this recipe for homemade seafood stock. I found the ingredients for that in the store where I was and headed home. The stock was easy to make an simply blew the store-bought stock out of the water. The end result was the best etouffee I've ever made or ever tasted. It got rave reviews from everyone, even those who aren't usually etouffee fans.

Bon apetit!

2 comments:

tim eisele said...

". . . your odds of finding it at the next place are slim."

Yes. And this applies equally to things other than food, like hardware and lumber.
At the very least, if you go to another place it needs to be a different *type* of place. If a hardware store doesn't have the thing you want, you are often better off checking, say, an auto parts store or a lumberyard rather than another hardware store.

And being ready to substitute freely is always an option.


Jedi Master Ivyan said...

My husband has a knack for picking recipes which require stops at multiple groceries.