The Pasta Dish That Made Me Love Shrimp

Hey everyone, welcome to my kitchen. I'm Bethany and today's recipe I'm going to be showing you how to make shrimp pasta. And this is not just any shrimp pasta, this is the dish that my mom made for me years ago that actually made me love shrimp. I'm not a huge shrimp person and in this dish I just feel like it shines, it's so flavorful and the dish is just so bright and it has pasta which I love. It's so delicious so I'm excited to share it with you. So let's get right into it. Okay so the first thing that we want to do is get our shrimp ready for this recipe and I know that the easiest thing to do with shrimp would be to buy already deveined and de-shelled shrimp. However this recipe actually utilizes the whole shrimp so we're going to be using the shell on and deveining it ourselves because we want to use as much flavor from the shrimp as we can. So I have about 18 jumbo shrimp here that were previously frozen. My mom always taught me to use gulf shrimp so I'm using that and these are from Key West and I thawed them in some cold water and I have a little bit of ice in there too to just keep them cold. So what I have is a couple bowls set up here. So I have a bowl of water here that's actually going to be for our brine for the shrimp and then I just have like a bowl here to get all our shells because we're going to keep our shells. So the first thing that we'll do is get our brine ready for the shrimp so I'm going to do one tablespoon of kosher salt and then two tablespoons of sugar and what this is going to do is really lock in some flavor into the shrimp while we prep everything else and I'll just mix the sugar and salt into the water. As I said I'm not a huge shrimp person so this dish really does speak volumes because it's so good and this brining really helps again just lock in a lot of flavor. So first we're going to start de-shelling our shrimp. So just want to take it from the belly and slip everything off. Because these shells we're going to use in a stock and that's going to really flavor the sauce of this dish and the entire dish. It's going to give it a nice shrimp flavor. Okay and we'll take all the legs, shell, plop it in that extra bowl. We'll put our shrimp into the brine and repeat that and I think my main issue with shrimp is just kind of a textural thing. It can be a little squeaky and a little bland in dishes that I've had it in but it's not in this. So I really love it. I'm not a huge seafood person so I think this is, is this my first, I think this is my first YouTube video that's a seafood recipe. So it's a big deal, shows how good it is. Okay so after de-shelling all of the shrimp we have our shells and tails all reserved in a bowl that's separate. We're going to use those in just a minute but before that we still need to de-vein our shrimp and so I have everything in the brine here. I don't always throw it in the brine before de-veining. You can kind of do it in any order that you want but now we're going to de-vein the shrimp. So I have paper towels here. I'll just use a little paring knife and what you're going to do if you've never de-veined shrimp is you're just going to take a paring knife and slice it right down the back of the shrimp all the way down and inside you're going to see a dark little vein looking thing and that is actually the shrimp's digestive tract. We will say no more on that. All I will say is make sure you de-vein your shrimp because you don't want to leave that in there and what I do is I just take a paper towel and just wipe that right out. Pull the whole thing out. It's not always dark. I do just want to say that. Sometimes the vein is clear and there's nothing in it so you still want to remove it and we'll put that right back in there. We'll be able to decipher the different shrimps by just seeing that they've been sliced on the back and we'll keep continuing to do that until they're all de-veined. All right so now that our shrimp is de-veined, de-shelled and it's marinating in our brine, we're going to refrigerate this before we move on to making our stock. All right so we got our pasta water ready to go. There's kind of a progression in this recipe so I'm getting that started, ready to boil. Not cooking the pasta yet but just getting the water hot and boiling and then we have a pretty big saucepan here and we're going to cook all of our dish in this but first we're going to work on our shells for the stock. So we're going to add a tablespoon of olive oil to the pan just to help brown the shells and we'll add the shells right in and I have this on like a medium heat and I'm just going to stir the shells around, saute them a little bit for about a minute or two. We just want to kind of toast them just to get a little bit more flavor out of that so it can release into the stock. Okay so that should be good and now we're going to add one and a quarter cup of white wine. I'm using Pinot Grigio and this is going to be the base for our stock. We'll add that in. You want to make sure you're kind of away or you're going to get a steam bath from this and then we'll stir that in with our shells. I'm not a big drinker. I honestly never drink but I love the smell of a wine in a dish and the taste. It always adds so much more flavor. So now we're actually just going to let the stock and the wine cook for really four to five minutes, no more than that. It just needs a few minutes to develop flavor and then we will strain this and get ready to make the rest of our sauce and while our shrimp stock is cooking, we don't want that to be simmering away. It's on a gentle simmer because we don't want this to reduce a ton so that's why it should be no more than four or five minutes and so while that's cooking, I'm going to get my garlic cloves ready. This recipe involves a lot of garlic and I'm going to be using, let's see, one, two, I'm using 10 garlic cloves. So you can use eight to ten and don't worry, it's not going to be overwhelming but garlic is flavor so you can use a little bit less if you want to but we're going to be using a good amount in this and we're going to just slice these up. We're not going to mince it but we're just going to slice it a little bit thinner and it doesn't need to be super thin, just like an even slice. All right, so our stock is done so what I'm going to do is just take a sieve and put it over a liquid measuring cup or a bowl and we're just going to pour our stock over that and just strain off all that delicious stock and we'll discard our shells. Now we're going to take the same pan and just wipe out that extra shells in there, the legs, the grittiness because we're going to use the same pan. This pan has a lot of flavor from the shrimp. All right, so we're going to bring our pan back up to heat. I kind of shot mine off when the stock was done and now we're going to add another tablespoon of olive oil and then we're going to add our garlic to the pan. The pan is kind of low right now so I'll wait for that to come back up but better low than super hot and burning our garlic. I'm just going to saute the garlic in the oil, wait for the pan to come back up and we'll just cook this for about a minute. You want to really watch this, we don't want the garlic to burn and actually one of my favorite things about this dish is the bites of garlic in it. They're cooked so nicely in this and I just love garlic. I don't know about you but I love garlic and I think it just