Cleaning Shrimp

Safety considerations

Bacteria and finger cuts are the primary considerations when working with shrimp.

Right up until cooking, shrimp must be kept as cold as possible to prevent the growth of bacteria that can make people sick. To clean them, therefore, your cold and numbing fingers will be at risk of cuts and pokes as you run the paring knife through their flesh and shells.

Raw shrimp are a cross-contamination hazard - keep them away from clean surfaces and other foods, especially foods that will not be cooked before eating. Your shrimpy hands are a great way to spread bacteria around the kitchen, so wash them thoroughly before switching tasks or touching something that should remain clean, like a pot handle or sink faucet knob.

Mitigation

Follow these guidelines to reduce the risk of cutting yourself and avoid poisoning everyone.

Bacteria

Keep raw shrimp contained, and don’t let them get too warm!

1. Allocate region of the sink for cleaning shrimp that is away from other activities such as washing hands or dishes.

2. Plan to work in small batches. One person can peel and de-vein 1 pound of thawed shrimp in ~5 minutes.

3. Test thawing shrimp frequently, and as soon as the first one is workable, turn off the water and begin cleaning them.

4. Once a batch has been cleaned, move it back into the refrigerator, or even the freezer if cooking time is near.

Finger Injury

Cleaning near-frozen shrimp numbs your fingers pretty quick, and shrimp are slippery. Numb and slippery fingers attempting deft knife moves in close proximity to the other hand presents a real risk of injury.

Keep your fingers nimble and grippy by rinsing them under a stream of cool water running nearby in the adjacent sink basin.

Technique

Setup

Place 3 bowls in a dedicated sink space for:

1. Unpeeled shrimp

   Big enough to submerge frozen shrimp

2. Peeled shrimp

   A mesh strainer over this bowl can help

3. Tails and shells

   If you’re making stock from the shells and tails, you could discard them directly in your stock pot.

   Otherwise, discard them, even down the garbage disposal.

Thawing

If the unpeeled shrimp are frozen:

1. Position the bowl so that the faucet can run into it on one side, and the water can overflow the opposite side directly into the drain. This helps minimize the spread of shrimpy water.

2. Run a small stream of the coldest water your sink allows into the high side of the bowl so that cold water enters the bowl at one side and drains over the opposite lip.

3. Check frequently for workability by squeezing a few.

   You need to be able to insert a knife along its body from the neck towards the tail. Ideally, they should still be somewhat stiff; if they are floppy, they’re getting too warm, so add ice or move them back to refrigeration for awhile.

   1. Once a shrimp is thawed enough to peel, turn off the water, and pour off all or most of the water remaining in the bowl to stop the thawing (warming).

Clean a shrimp

The general idea is to split the shell dorsally from head to tail. With the shell split at the ‘spine’ of the shrimp, you can squeeze the shell at the sides of its ‘belly’ so that the shell and meat separate.

• Your non-dominant hand holds the shrimp with its legs tickling your palm and its neck-stump facing your dominant hand.

• Your dominant hand holds the paring knife, blade up, so you can insert the point into the center of the neck-stump and slide the back of the blade along the shrimp’s ‘spine’ to its tail.

• While you should insert the point at about the center of the neck-stump, driving the knife straight (parallel) through the curved shrimp will split the shrimp and bring you closer to injury.

• Instead, as you insert the knife into the neck-stump, adjust the attitude of the knife so that the point is angled slightly ‘upward’ with respect to the legs.

• The upward angle may cause the point to exit the shrimp early, splitting only the first or second shell segment. No problem: withdraw the knife a little, check alignment, and then try again to get closer to the tail.

• The idea is to almost butterfly the shrimp in its shell, leaving the shell split along the spine from head to tail.

• Looking at the neck-stump, you should see a point in the center - Like an analog clock at midnight, where the hands are connected to the clock works at the center is where you should see a nook in which to rest the point of your knife. The hands of the clock point straight up, and so should your knife.

• With the shell split rotate your non-dominant hand so the legs are available to your dominant knife hand.

• With your dominant (knife) hand, grab the sides of the shell near the roots of the legs and gently pinch so that the split becomes wider, loosening the meat from the shell.

This takes practice; go slow at first…