Carla Makes Shrimp Scampi

(clacking)

What's this for?

Vampires.

Ah, ha ha.

(laughing)

Carla, what's your favorite vampire movie?

Uh, what's a vampire movie?

Can you name one?

[Woman] Buffy?

Never saw it.

[Woman] What about like, Twilight?

Nope, never saw it.

Wait, what's the one, ah, the original, like ...

[Man] The original Dracula.

[Man] Nosferatu.

Nosferatu.

(jazzy music)

So, two things to love about this recipe for shrimp scampi.

Number one is garlic, and number two is butter,

which is already over there.

And, all good recipes start with butter and garlic?

I mean basically the shrimp in the shrimp scampi

are there so that you can get the pan sauce

and dip the bread into it.

Like, that's the point of shrimp scampi,

I'm pretty sure.

(jazzy music)

Alright, so we have a pound of large shrimp.

I feel like they could ...

I feel like everything could go into here.

Oh.

Pound of large shrimp.

So I'm taking a clove of garlic and I am grating it.

So this is gonna make a marinade.

I don't want the garlic to be in big chunks

because I want it to kinda get everywhere,

so if I were to slice this or smash this

and then toss it into the shrimp, some of the shrimps

would get a little garlic action and a bunch

of the other ones wouldn't, and then those guys

would be like, how come you guys got the garlic?

Or gaarlic, as Mary Sue would say.

No, it's really Susan Fenigar who says gaarlic.

She's the best, Too Hot Tamales.

[Man] What's Too Hot Tamales?

Ah, what isn't Too Hot Tamales?

Too Hot Tamales was one of the original greatest

Food Network shows before food TV,

not that network necessarily, but before food

was like an entertainment game show kind of genre,

Too Hot Tamales were there, and they're amazing.

Ah, I love them so.

Alright, so I've grated the garlic.

I'm also gonna salt the shrimp.

That's one teaspoon, roughly.

This marinade is not gonna marinate for very long.

In the recipe, it's gonna tell you

thirty minutes to an hour.

Did I marinate it for thirty minutes to an hour

every time I made this recipe at home?

No, I didn't.

Would it have been better?

Probably, if you have the time, I think it's worth it.

Shrimp is a pretty delicate protein,

so this doesn't have to sit for very long.

It's half an hour.

So say you just got home, you're gonna make dinner.

Just throw the bag of shrimp into a bowl,

get the garlic, the salt, the oil,

and just stick it into the fridge.

And then, in that amount of time,

do the rest of your prep, and then it'll be

about half an hour, and then you just take 'em

out and da-da-da.

Go do the thing.

So that's how I'm gonna do it.

So then the other two cloves of garlic,

and really when you think of shrimp scampi,

you think oh, it's like so garlicky,

it's so much garlic.

It's not that much garlic; it's only four cloves of garlic.

It's just that there's really very little else going on,

and it's not competing with other flavors,

there's not a lot of greens, there's not a long cooking,

flash in the pan type of situation.

And then that's kinda it.

That didn't take half an hour,

but maybe I changed into my cozies,

maybe I took a quick shower,

maybe walked the dog.

I don't have a dog, but that could be a thing

that you could do while you're waiting.

(upbeat music)

Shrimp scampi, isn't that usually served

with angel hair pasta?

First of all, angel hair pasta is the devil,

and no one should ever eat it or think about it.

It's the worst.

You could have it with spaghetti, or linguine,

so this whole thing, when I get up to the point

where we're making the pan sauce,

100% pour that over pasta.

Alright, oil.

Ooh, pretty hot.

So the first step is just cooking the shrimp,

and I'm not even gonna cook them all the way through.

You can smell the garlic right away.

Two reasons why you do this really quickly.

One is that shrimp just cook really quickly.

If they're gonna get a little into the sauce

at the end, I don't want them to overcook.

And the other reason is because that garlic was grated

and it's very tiny pieces and hot pan,

you don't want to burn the garlic.

Toasted garlic is a great flavor.

Burnt garlic is not a flavor that most people enjoy.

These guys are getting a little color on them.

Light pink, not all the way cooked through.

And the reason that I'm using the slotted spoon

is because the oil that's left in the pan

is gonna be used to cook the rest

of the garlic that I sliced.

So if I were to just dump it onto this plate,

then I wouldn't have enough oil in the pan.

So this way you're not adding oil twice.

And olive oil, you know, it's not free.

Alright, one escaped.

Okay, so garlic, thinly sliced with the chili flakes.

Again, these are gonna cook really fast,

so as soon as you smell that delicious garlicky smell,

maybe your roommate comes in and says, Dude!

That's my dude voice, that's my guy voice.

Your roommate comes in and says,

Dude, what are you cooking?

It smells so good.

Like, just garlic and oil, bro.

Alright, butter.

Oh, did I do that wrong?

[Man] Yeah, you leave the butter out ...

Yeah, I did it wrong.

I think we oughta start over.

Tried to be funny, screwed up the recipe.

(beeping)

Second take.

So, when your garlic is starting to smell

very aromatic to the point where other people

that you live with come outta the woodwork,

quarter cup of oil.

Quarter cup of white wine.

(sizzling)

In general, I don't really believe in cooking wine.

If the wine tastes so bad that you wouldn't even

wanna drink it, then I just don't think

that you should cook with it, either.

It's not gonna magically transform

into something that tastes really good.

That said, if it's a recipe that calls for

three cups of wine, don't use a $60 bottle.

I would choose something that would go well

with your shrimp scampi, like a nice crisp white,

go with Italian, maybe a Fiano, something like that.

This sauce is reducing.

I don't want that super winey, just raw wine flavor

in the finished sauce, so this will mellow it

and cook off some of the alcohol,

and some of those aromatics will dissipate.

And then the lemon juice is gonna give it

a nice acidity, a little bit of an edge,

so it's not just butter and wine,

which can be very one note

and kind of heavy and cloying.

So, very few ingredients,

but they're all there for a reason.

Alright, feeling like we're getting reduced.

We're getting a little bit of thickening happening,

the bubbles are getting bigger.

So I'm gonna put in the butter.

And just cooking this, swirling,

and by really gently shaking the pan around,

the sauce is gonna emulsify,

and by that it just means that it's creamy

and it doesn't look greasy.

You want that nice sweet butter flavor.

Use unsalted butter.

The only thing that I put salt on so far was the shrimp.

Speaking of the shrimp, they're gonna go back in

with any juices that have accumulated on the plate.

So the shrimp were 80% of the way cooked through

and then they cooked a little bit more off heat.

So this step is really just about finishing.

I can even turn the heat off.

Cooking the shrimp the rest of the way through,

and then you've got that really nice

pan sauce happening, which is where the bread comes in.

At this stage, and I actually might do it anyway,

because this sauce reduced a little bit.

This is kind of a good thing to see.

So if the sauce reduces too much,

it's gonna break, and it'll start to look greasy,

whereas before it was really nice and shiny

and buttery looking and smooth.

No big deal, that just means that enough water

evaporated that the fat in the sauce

has nothing to hold onto, it's not bound anymore.

So I'm gonna get a little bit of water, BRB.

And this was a trick that I learned

when I was a line cook, actually.

Every line cook had on their station

vegetable oil, olive oil,

and a squeeze bottle also of water.

A little splash of water will solve a lot of problems.

And you can see the sauce is back together.

Water, miracle ingredient.

Can't cook without it, you really can't.

So shrimp are cooked through.

You can tell by looking at the thickest part

of the shrimp, the seam right in the middle,

making sure that it is not translucent anymore.

Alright, shrimp.

Basically you just give the shrimp to one person

and keep the pan sauce for yourself.

No, that's really good with the shrimp.

This is an incredibly inelegant way

of getting sauce on the plate.

And then to finish it off, just a little parsley.

It's really all about the sauce.

Shrimp scampi should be served

with lots of crusty bread, and good friends,

and just get the bread in the sauce

and like do the thing, and it's delicious.

It's easy, it's buttery.

Super buttery.

I forgot to look up why it's called scampi.

Dammit.

I knew there was something I was supposed to do.

(faint talking)

[Woman] Scampi is a type of lobster.

Mm, so maybe it's that the shrimp is cooked

in the style of scampi, which was also butter and garlic.

I think it just means butter and garlic sauce.

Feel free to correct me.

(laughing)

Isn't that what YouTube is for, correcting?

[Man] Pretty much.

Please tell us in the comments below,

along with any other comments you may have

about my performance today.