Most people cook shrimp wrong — 12 Japanese tricks for PERFECT Shrimp Every Time.

On the plate in front of you sit a dozen shrimp and every one of them has closed itself into a tight ring. They are pale and they squeak against your teeth and you never once walked away from that stove. You stood over it the whole time watching and this is what arrived anyway. Somebody has told you the answer is to cook them less. They are right and it will not save a single shrimp in your kitchen. You can take a full minute off the clock and set down exactly the same plate. I have watched people do that three times running and then decide quietly that they do not much care for shrimp. Here is what was going on while you stood there. Your pan stopped being a pan in the first eight seconds and nothing told you. A shrimp is about three quarters water and no thicker than your finger at its fattest. So heat is all the way through it almost at once. The muscle inside is wound into tight bands and the moment those bands warm they close like a fist and push out everything they were holding. Now there is water in the pan. Water will not climb past boiling however high you turn the flame. So what you have is no longer a hot pan. It is a small pot and it stays one until the last drop has gone with the shrimp sitting in it the whole while tightening pushing out more keeping the pan cool which keeps them in there longer. That is the part nobody mentions. It is not one mistake you make and correct. It is a circle and once it has closed around you there is no cooking your way back out. Twelve things today and every one of them is about not letting it close. The two numbers on the front of that bag are not a size. They are the only honest thing printed on it. Ten minutes of doing absolutely nothing will change the texture more than anything you do at the stove. There is a sound a pan makes when it has given up and you have been hearing it for years without knowing what it was and number one will get you argued with at your own table. Somebody is going to look at the plate and say it is underdone. It is not. Thirty seconds from right and it will get there without any help from you. I am Hana. I grew up on a cold coast where the small shrimp came in by the basket in spring and nobody in that village owned a timer and none of this came from me. It came from that coast. The boats came in before light and what was small went to the houses rather than the market. So we ate shrimp the way other places eat potatoes. My mother never cooked them by a clock. She cooked them by the shape they made and she took them out of the pan while I was still certain they were not ready. One book. Hana Yoshida dot com and the link is below. That is the only time I will ask you for anything. Back to the pan. All twelve are written out in the description so you can keep them. We begin at number twelve and it begins in the shop. Turn the bag over and look for two numbers with a line between them. Sixteen twenty. Twenty six thirty. Thirty one forty. That is not a weight. It is not a size code either. It is how many of those shrimp it takes to make a pound. Sixteen twenty means somewhere between sixteen and twenty of them get you there. Thirty one forty means it takes more than twice as many so each one is half the size. The smaller the numbers the bigger the shrimp which reads backwards from the way your eye wants to take it. Now here is why I am telling you this in a video about cooking rather than shopping. That number decides how much room for error you get and it decides it completely. A big shrimp is thick enough that heat needs real time to reach the middle. You get close to a minute between right and gone. A minute is long enough to be interrupted and still come back and save it. A small one is thin all the way across. Your window is nearer fifteen seconds. You cannot answer anybody in fifteen seconds. So if shrimp has been going wrong for you buy the big ones for a while. You are not buying a better animal. Out of the same water they eat the same. You are buying time in front of a hot pan and while you are learning that is worth paying for. Now get them home because the next thing most people do is undo everything they just chose. Number eleven. How you thaw them. Not on the counter. Not under a warm tap. Both do the thing which is bring the outside of that shrimp up to a temperature it should not sit at while the middle is still frozen solid. The best way costs no attention at all. Overnight in the refrigerator in a bowl so nothing drips. If tonight is the night and you have forgotten seal them in a bag and sit the bag in cold water changing the water every half hour. Cold not warm. Cold water pulls the ice out of them several times faster than air does without ever letting the outside get warm. You will see the difference before you cook. Thawed properly they are firm and translucent all over. Thawed badly they have gone opaque and white at the edges and that whiteness is not a trick of the light. Those edges have already started cooking standing in a sink hours before they will ever meet a pan. And once they are thawed there is a step where half the flavor of the dish is about to go into the bin. Number ten. Keep the shells. If you are peeling them and for a hot pan you should be every one of those shells goes into a bowl. Not the rubbish. 20 minutes with the shells in a little water or water and wine and you have a stock that tastes more of shrimp than the shrimp do. That is where the flavor actually lives. 20 minutes and not a minute over because shells turn bitter if you keep at them. A short stock is the whole idea. If you have not got 20 minutes tonight put them in a bag in the freezer. When the bag is full you make one worthwhile pot instead of four small sad ones. You will know this without me if you have ever made a shrimp sauce and thought it tasted mostly of butter and lemon. That is a sauce that had no shrimp in it made while the shrimp part went out with the peelings. And now the step everyone does and almost nobody does hard enough. Number nine. Dry them and then dry them again. Towel underneath, towel on top. Press down with the flat of your hand and do not be polite about it. Then lift the top towel and look at it. If it came away wet they were wetter than you thought and they are still wetter than you think. Fresh towel, press again. The reason this matters more for shrimp than for almost anything else you cook is that they arrive holding more water than they were born with. Nearly all shrimp sold here was frozen and before it was frozen it was soaked in a salt solution. That is not a scandal and I will not pretend it is one. The soak genuinely protects the flesh from being torn apart by ice crystals and stops it drying out over months in a bag. There is a good reason it gets done. It simply has a second effect nobody intended and that effect lands on your stove. That shrimp is carrying water it would not otherwise carry and every drop of it is looking for somewhere to go. Which is why the next thing I am going to tell you is going to sound like the exact opposite of what we just did. Number eight. Salt them and then leave them alone for 10 minutes. Half a teaspoon of fine salt to the pound. Toss through until every one of them has some on it. Then you walk away and get on with something else. And here is the moment people panic so I want you ready for it. A few minutes in the bowl looks wetter than when you started. That is correct. That is the salt drawing a little water up to the surface and if you reach for a towel now you have stopped it halfway and got the worst of both. Give it the rest of the 10 minutes. That salty water gets drawn back into the shrimp and it carries the salt in with it down among those tight bands where it loosens the grip they have on one another. Loosened bands cannot close as hard when the heat arrives. Less water leaves. More of it stays where you wanted it which is inside the thing you are about to eat. At the end of the 10 minutes blot them once. Do not rinse them. Rinsing washes off the very thing you just spent 10 minutes getting in there. And while those 10 minutes run the pan has a job to do. Number seven. The pan is hot before anything touches it. Not warm. Two or three full minutes on medium high with nothing in it. Here is how you know and it costs nothing. Flick a drop of water at it. If that drop sits down and fizzes where it landed the pan is not ready. If it skates across the surface like a bead and disappears you are there. Then your oil and give it 15 seconds. No longer. And this is the sound I promised you in the beginning. When shrimp lands in a pan that is genuinely hot you get a hard crack and it keeps cracking. When it lands in a pan that is not you get four seconds of noise and then it falls away into a long flat hiss that never changes. Never rises. Never drops. That hiss is the sound of a pan that has become a pot. It is the most honest report you will ever get out of a kitchen and almost nobody knows what they are listening to. Which means the pan is perfect and there is exactly one movement that will undo it. Number six. Half a pound at a time. Never the whole bag. A pound is how they sell it and a pound is what the recipe says so a pound goes in. It looks entirely reasonable. It looks like a photograph of somebody cooking shrimp. What you have actually done is drop a pound of cold wet protein onto a piece of metal holding a fixed amount of heat and a home burner cannot put that heat back fast enough. The temperature does not dip. It falls off a cliff and takes two minutes to climb back and your shrimp is finished cooking before it gets there having never once touched a hot surface. You can hear it happen. The crack turns to that flat hiss the instant the bag goes in and everything after that is damage control on something already lost. Half and in a small pan less than half. It costs you 90 seconds and one more walk back to the stove and you have already paid for the shrimp the drive home and the peeling. 90 seconds is the cheapest thing in the whole dish so the pan is right and the load is right. Now the last thing that can spoil it and it is you. Number five. Lay them down and leave them not touching each other. Then your hands come off the pan. No stirring, no shaking, no lifting one up to see how the underside is coming along. The entire reason for a hot dry pan is the crust forming on the face that is pressed against it and a crust forms by staying still. Every time you move a shrimp you lift it off the work it was doing and set it back down on a face that has to start over. 90 seconds on the first side then turn them once, once and give the second side 30. Those numbers are a guide. The shape is the law and I will come to the shape. Gray on both sides with no color anywhere is what fiddling looks like on a plate and here is the thing that looks like care and is not. Number four. Season the shrimp not the pan. Anything carrying sugar, soy, mirin, honey, a sweet chili sauce stays out of that pan while the shrimp is in it. Garlic too if it is chopped fine. Those things are mostly water carrying sugar and salt so they flood the surface you spent all this effort drying and sugar over direct heat has a much shorter life than a shrimp does. It catches, it goes bitter and it does it while you are watching the shrimp and not the pan. You will have seen the evidence and blamed the wrong thing. A pan gone dark and sticky and bitter and shrimp still pale in the middle of it. The shrimp was salted 10 minutes ago. That was its seasoning. Everything else waits. So how do you know when to take them out? Not by a clock. They tell you and they only use two letters to do it. Number three. The C and the O. Raw. A shrimp lies almost straight with an easy bend in it. As it cooks it draws itself in. There is a moment where it makes a loose letter C. The two ends turning towards each other with open space still between them. You can see daylight through the curl. That is done. C is for cooked. Leave it in and it keeps drawing. The opening closes. The tail comes round until it touches and now you have a tight O. O is for overcooked and nothing brings an O back. That ring closed because the band squeezed out everything they had onto the floor of your pan and what is left is protein with no water in it. That is what rubber is. The color backs it up. Gray and see-through means raw. What you want is the gray just gone from the thickest part and nothing more than that. Bright white the whole way through and stiff to the touch means you went past it. I have never come across a better piece of kitchen advice in my life and it does not care what stove you own or what size your shrimp are. Six down and the six ahead are better than the six behind. If this is landing, subscribe. That is the whole payment I ask and tell me while the pan works. What came in cheap and all at once where you grew up? The thing there was suddenly too much of for three weeks every year. Number two and you can still lose all of this in the last 20 seconds. The heat goes off before the butter goes in. Take the shrimp out onto a plate first then switch the burner off. Off not down and put your butter into the empty pan with the garlic, a squeeze of lemon, a splash of wine if you have it open. Swirl it round while it lifts every brown speck off the metal. That brown is not dirt. That is the crust that came off your shrimp and it is the best flavor in the dish. Then the shrimp go back in and get turned through it for half a minute into a pan with no flame under it. Put them back into a live pan and that pan will take an open C to a closed O in about 20 seconds and you will have done every single thing right and lost it at the door. Which leaves the one that started the argument. Number one. Take them out while they still look like they want another minute. A shrimp that thin carries its heat with it. It does not stop when it leaves the pan. It has nowhere to put what it is holding so it keeps going and on something that small the gap between right and ruined is about 30 seconds. So if you wait until it looks perfect in the pan then plate it then finish the rice then call everybody through. That shrimp has been cooking for another minute and a half after you decided it was done. You did not overcook it at the stove. You overcooked it on the plate standing right there watching it happen. Pull at an open C a shade before if anything onto a cool plate spread out not piled and not covered. No foil, no warm oven, no bowl with a lid. Shrimp heaped together hold their heat in each other and they will be gray before the second batch is out. Spread out in the open air they coast to exactly right and then they stop. Somebody will look at that plate and say it is underdone. Let them. You are not serving raw shrimp. You are serving shrimp 30 seconds from where it is going and it is going there without you. One last thing and it takes no time at all. That stock from number 10, the shells, 20 minutes strained. A spoonful of that into the butter at the end instead of the wine and the sauce tastes of the thing it is sitting next to. Nobody will work out what you did and here is the habit that changes your week. Buy the pound. Cook the pound both batches on a Sunday and put half of it away cold. Monday cold shrimp goes over rice with something sharp. Tuesday into a bowl of noodles at the last second off the heat. Wednesday folded through eggs and the shells you froze become a stock on Thursday that is Friday's soup. One bag, four dinners and a lunch. That is not thrift. That is what a house does when the boats come in all at once and then do not come in again for a month. So here is what I would ask of you. Cook one pan this week and change only two things. Half a pound instead of a pound. Out at an open sea. That is all. Then come back and tell me whether the pan kept cracking or fell into that flat hiss. You will hear it the moment it happens and tell me something else. What is the dish you have quietly stopped making because it never came out right? I suspect there is one in every kitchen and I would like to know what they are. Next time in this kitchen the thing that goes underneath all of it. Rice. The washing and when to stop washing. The 10 minutes after the heat goes off that almost nobody waits for. But today go and buy the big ones. Thaw them cold. Dry them twice. Salt them. Walk away for 10 minutes. Get the pan properly hot. Put in half of what you meant to and then take your hands off it and watch for the letter. They will tell you. They have been telling you the whole time. Look after yourself and I will see you again very soon.