noodsletter #.0006
SHRIMPSHRIMPshrimp(RATS)shrimpVRIMPVRIMP
Hello!
You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for noodsletter. Thank you. The recipe section is located at the bottom of the email, everything else on top.
This week’s recipe:
Crispy Shrimp Burger*
As ever, I welcome your feedback! Leave a comment, send an email, whatever; you don’t have to be positive, you don’t even have to be nice, just be humane.
Book
“Why did you leave your wife?” she said.
“Because she ate shrimp,” he said.” I couldn’t-You see, it was Friday, and I thought how at noon I’d go to the station and get the box of shrimp off the train and walk home with it, counting a hundred steps and changing hands with it, and it-”
“Did you do that every day?” the woman said.
“No. Just Friday. But I have done it for ten years, since we were married. and I still don’t like to smell shrimp. But I wouldn’t mind the carrying it home so much. I could stand that. It’s because the package drips. All the way home it drips and drips, until after a while I follow myself to the station and stand aside and watch Horace Benbow take that box off the train and start home with it, changing hands every hundred steps, and I following him, thinking Here lies Horace Benbow in a fading series of small stinking spots on a Mississippi sidewalk.”
From Sanctuary, by William Faulkner.
“News”
I worked at an inn in Hakuba for a summer, where I did a lot of dish-washing, vacuuming, and bed-making, and I ate horse sashimi:
(It was less pretty in the summer.)
I am a big fan of Strega Nona-related content, and, yes, she is certainly not a communist. (Here’s my small contribution to the shitposts-about-Strega-Nona-canon.)
Not really sure what this means, but Eminem’s Mom’s Spaghetti doesn’t sound at all appealing.
There’s always money in the udon stand?
Love the way Fuchsia Dunlop writes, but also I’ve never wanted to travel more. A whole world of noodles!
“Can you…eat it?” In this case, dinosaur shrimp.
Paleofeces, a.k.a ancient poop. That’s it. That’s the link.
These beautiful cutting boards featuring beautiful taxonomical drawings! The octopods! They’re made of baltic birch so they should be easy on your knives, I think?
This is the only thing I ever, ever want to read about fake shrimp. “That’s vapitalism, baby!”
Bar Review Haiku
Sitting outside on
The L.E.S., drinking to
A chorus of rats.
Recipe
Crispy Shrimp Burger
I posted a picture in noodsletter #.0002 of a shrimp burger I’d made that week with American cheese and mayo in a Martin’s potato roll, and I said if anyone piped up with a request for a recipe, I’d write one down. However, Bob, while I appreciate you asking for the recipe, I also said you’d have to endure what I have to say about eating shrimp if I wrote a recipe down.
I don’t feel like lecturing anyone, and no one likes a scold, however I have to insist on this little bit of hypocrisy because the way the vast majority of shrimp is produced is horrific for the environment. I still eat shrimp, but I eat it very infrequently. My personal solution to the shrimp problem and the way I contribute to it is ridiculous, perhaps, but it has the benefit of reducing my shrimp consumption significantly, so maybe you can try it, too: Just feel terrible when you eat shrimp, every single time!
Anyway, for this recipe, any shrimp will do. The farmed Pacific white shrimp that’s decimating mangrove forests in Southeast Asia is ideal for this, since they’re bred to have a snappy texture, but wild, domestic shrimp that’s killing local ecosystems due to bycatch will work, too, but they are by nature a little mushier. The main thing you want to avoid are shrimp that have been treated with phosphates and other chemicals, since they can taste a little odd. Size doesn’t matter at all, since everything’s getting chopped up.
You do have to pay attention to the chopping. I like to finely chop (pretty standard procedure for shrimp burgers, I think?) around 60% of the shrimp and then roughly chop the rest, so that when it’s all mixed and cook it forms a cohesive patty but still has some of that shrimp snap. Since I only make small quantities of food, I just use a knife, but you can also use a food chopper or processor; more on that in a second.
The shrimp in these pictures come 31-40 per pound, to give you some indication of their size. All I’ve done with them is defrosted them (if you lay individually quick-frozen shrimp in a single layer in a sheet pan and put it on the counter, they will defrost in fifteen minutes, I promise) and patted them dry with a paper towel. Dry shrimp are easier to cut up and handle, and make a less mushy paste; do take the time to dry them. If for whatever reason you get distracted or something and the shrimp warms up a bit, put them back in the fridge or pop them, on an eighth sheet pan or something (the sheet pan here is important because aluminum is very conductive and the pan has a large surface area, it basically just transmits the surrounding ambient temperature directly to the shrimp) in the freezer for five minutes. Cold protein is much easier to handle (also, don’t let protein get warm, it’s good for bacteria which means it’s bad for you).
I take a little more than half and smash them, one by one, with the flat side of a Chinese-style cleaver, which smushes them, one by one, into paste. Once they’re all smushed, I run the knife through them quickly a couple of times, just to really get a paste going, then I turn to the remaining shrimp.
(If you don’t have a Chinese-style cleaver, you can just use a chef’s knife to mince the shrimp, it’s very easy and quick.) You sort of want the chunks of shrimp within the patty to be the same, small size; it’s no good to have very big chunks, which can mess with the patty’s structural integrity. I like to split the shrimp at the midpoint of the tail, then just slice up the side with the smaller diameter crosswise, creating little flat coins. The other side I’ll split in half down the middle, then run my knife through both halves crosswise, which produced diminutive half coins.
Combine the chopped shrimp and the smushed shrimp in a mixing bowl and you’re ready to go.
If you want to use a food processor, you certainly can, but you just have to chill the shrimp a little more than you would if you were using a knife (sheet pan, freezer, five minutes). Again, you want them dry. Toss the chilled shrimp into your food processor and pulse it several times (has to be a pulse; just letting the machine go will not produce nice results) until you get a uniformly coarse consistency. Should take, at most, five/six pulses, maybe?
The key consideration in a shrimp burger, or any ground meat mixture or farce, really, is when and when not to add salt. If you add salt and let the ground meat sit, you’ll make a sausage, basically; the meat proteins start bonding together in weird, unmeat ways, and they start producing that snappy, bouncy sausage texture. If you add salt and work it into the meat, with your hands or a paddle, it will take on that texture more quickly; if you don’t add salt at all, the meat will hang together loosely. Most every preparation that uses ground animal flesh makes use of this reaction in some way or another. For this shrimp burger, you want the shrimp to stick together while the burger fries, so the thing doesn’t fall apart, but you don’t want it to get all rubbery and tough, which will happen if you let it sit too long with salt. So I season the chopped/ground up shrimp right before cooking, but it’s also why I really work it in the mixing bowl with my hands after seasoning, to encourage those meat proteins to break down and re-link up to produce a snappy, but not too snappy, patty.
The only other element of this that warrants explanation is the panko, which is completely unnecessary, and makes cooking the dang thing trickier. But…it’s great!
And with the American cheese and mayo and the bun, the crispy breadcrumbs help give the shrimp burger a Filet-O-Fish quality, which I think everyone signed up to this newsletter knows I love.
I only bread one side of the burger, as it’s sufficient, and the trick to cooking the half breaded patty is you have to use a fair amount of oil in the pan, and you have to pay attention to the patty carefully as it cooks on the first side. The goal with cooking the first side is simply to brown the breadcrumbs correctly and not burn them. Once you flip the patty, you can turn down the heat in the pan and let it cook to temperature.
This recipe has not been tested with vrimp.
Makes 1 burger
Ingredients*:
For the spread:
1 tablespoon mayo
1 teaspoon sambal oelek
Squeeze lime
For the burger:
Neutral oil, like vegetable oil, for frying
145g (5 oz) shrimp (about 12 shrimp that are 31-40 to a pound), chopped, ground, or minced (see above)
1/2 a small clove of garlic, minced
1/4 of a small shallot, minced
1/2 tsp fish sauce
1/4 tsp salt
Pinch white pepper
Panko
1 slice American cheese, preferably Kraft
Martin’s Potato Bun, for serving
For the spread: Add mayo, sambal oelek, and squeeze of lime juice to a mixing bowl and stir to combine thoroughly. Set aside.
For the burger: Add shrimp, garlic, shallot, fish sauce, salt, and white pepper to medium mixing bowl. Using a clean hand, work seasonings into shrimp vigorously, until mixture becomes very tacky, about 30 seconds.
Spread a layer of panko on a small plate or small sheet pan. Form shrimp mixture into a patty that’s (a little under) ~1-inch thick and just slightly larger in diameter than the bun. Gently lay patty in the panko bed and, gently again, push down so that the panko adheres to the bottom side.
Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a 10-inch cast iron pan (or 1 tablespoon oil in an 8-inch nonstick pan—you want oil to slick the entire surface) over medium heat. When oil shimmers, gently lift patty out of panko and place, panko-side down, in the hot oil. Cook until the panko is golden brown, about 2-3 minutes. Using a spatula, flip burger over, reduce heat to medium low, add slice of American cheese on top, and continue to cook until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the middle of the patty reads 145 degrees F, about 5-6 minutes.
While patty cooks, spread the spread (!) on the top and bottom buns. When the patty is cooked, transfer patty to prepared bun and let rest for a couple minutes. Serve immediately.
Love this Bar Review Haiku. Feels like it could apply here in Baltimore too!
Made these shrimp burgers, the texture was awesome!