Shrimp? Good. Pasta? Good. White wine garlic sauce? GOOOD.
If you’ve been following this blog or really any of my cooking, I think you’re discovering my secret to things that smell and taste good: lots of seasoning, salt, fat, and caramelized onions and garlic. On that note, one of my favorite food docu-series is called “Salt Fat Acid Heat” and honest-to-goodness that is seriously one of the best series to watch if you want to explore more into cooking well. And because everybody’s gotta eat, might as well, right? Here you’ve got regular salt as well as from the shrimp, fat in the butter, acid from the wine, and heat from the physical application of heat plus crushed red pepper. Makes a pretty tasty dish. Acid can also come from lemon juice if you want to lighten up the flavor palette here as well.
Another thing to note that in the photo, I did not de-shell the shrimp. As a matter of fact, I was particularly lazy and used a bag of frozen uncooked shrimp for this and simply added it to the pan. Now, we did de-shell once we ate, but cooked shrimp shells are easily digestible by MOST stomachs. Not to say all, because some people are sensitive to these kinds of things. Think of it like… shrimp croutons. Maybe not.
Ingredients:
Shrimp (peeled and de-veined, preferably)
Butter
Onion
Garlic
White wine (or white cooking wine)
Salt
Pepper
Thyme
Parsley
Basil
Crushed red pepper
Lemon juice (optional)
Cornstarch (optional)
Dice about half an onion into 1/4″ pieces, and put into a pan over low heat with low-heat oil and plenty of salt. Cook it low and slow til brown, occasionally adding butter or more oil to keep the pan wet. If you need more direction on this, come check out the Caramelizing Onions post. If you have fresh cloves of garlic, add it at the start of your caramelizing process, otherwise if you are using minced in the jar, add it towards the end. Garlic is something you measure with your heart, not with a spoon.
Once everything is softened, browned, and sweet, crank up the heat as high as you can go without setting off any smoke alarms. Add in the white wine to deglaze [read: unstick everything from the pan and make a sauce] the pan. Let the wine boil and reduce until it becomes thicker, and add the herbs and spices and lower the heat. Salt helps to open up the pores on your tongue to taste all of the goodness of this sauce, so remember to use enough of it. There’s a bell-curve of salt vs tastiness, so you can keep adding some and tasting until it gets good. If you wish, add lemon juice/cornstarch/butter as you see fit to alter this recipe so that it suits your tastes better. Add in the shrimp and cook until they become curved into a “C” shape and become pink.
Serve over pasta and top with some parsley if you want to make it look nice. Also, parsley can help counteract garlic breath, so, plus.
The Family Cookbook 