Garlic Shrimp aka Gambas Al Ajillo

For the first mentioned recipe on this site I decided to go with one that I consider to be a guilty pleasure. A great place to get this dish (and the place that I first had it at) is Dali Restaurant and Tapas Bar in Cambridge, MA (http://www.dalirestaurant.com/). To make the dish you can use the recipe off of (http://www.df.lth.se/~thanisa/cgi-bin/wrapper.cgi?rec.food.recipes/misc3/du3); it may not be the full traditional recipe but it’s simple and does the job.

Lessons:
Substituting chili powder for fresh dried chiles
One substitution I made in this recipe was that I didn’t have a red chile pepper on hand and so I used some ground chile pepper that I had. This may have caused the heat to be drier and/or rougher but unless you are cooking a lot of ethnic foods that require chile pepper, you probably won’t have any fresh chile peppers around. Also, be wary of cheap chili powders as opposed to nicer chili powders, the former I find are often refered to as chili powders and the latter as ground chile. Chile powders can have very different tastes such as a hot cayenne powder and a sweet and smoky chipotle powder. You can find out more about chili powders at http://www.theepicentre.com/Spices/chile.html.

Brining
Instead of sprinkling salt on the shrimp, I brined them (I’m still learning how to use this technique correctly). Brining is an interesting technique of submerging food in a sugar and salt solution that flavors meats and keeps them juicy. It works by osmosis due to the higher salt concentration of the fluid than the meat, leading to absorption of salt by the meat, which drags water into the cell with it (sound familiar to those of you in med school). The influx of salt also denatures the meat proteins making them absorb and retain more water. Like many things in cooking, you can Wikipedia brining to get more details on it (I also like this website as it gives examples of flavored brines (http://www.cookshack.com/brining-101#_Toc528293321). The brining technique that I used came from http://whatscookingamerica.net/ShrimpTips.htm. To note, you need to brine with raw shrimp, if you only have cooked shrimp for the garlic shrimp recipe than salt them as the recipe says to. You can brine chicken, pork, and turkey as far as I know; so it might come in handy for that next Thanksgiving bird. I had previously been brining my shrimp for 20 minutes and it felt like the brine worked but not to its full potential. For this shrimp recipe I brined for 40 minutes, which was too long (made it too salty), so I’m going to recommend a 30 minute brine. I also threw in some coarsely chopped garlic in the brine mixture to add some flavor (note: that this addition would work better for things that brine for longer like a turkey).

Pictures:
During brining


During cooking