Recipe – Shrimp Creole

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Hello Friends!

Let’s get cooking!  First up, a Louisiana classic – Shrimp Creole.

This recipe is inspired by the late, great Paul Prudhomme and adapted from his classic cookbook, Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen.  This cookbook harkens from a simpler, more innocent time when a recipe could call for a stick of butter and half a cup of lard without nary a concern for the HDL cholesterol levels of the reader and his or her family.  While butter always makes things richer, sometimes a little goes a long way, and here I think just a tablespoon is just fine.  The flavor comes from browned vegetables, shrimp stock and of course lots of Cajun/Creole herb and spices!

The best tip I can give you is to taste the sauce before you add the shrimp to be sure it is to your liking.  Adjust with salt, sugar, pepper – even an extra dash of Tabasco if you like.  This is not a subtle dish – I like it super spicy, but this is (for me) medium spicy.

Here are the ingredients:

  • 1 ½ pounds of shrimp tails – raw AND shell on – preferably deveined
  • 1 large onion or 2 medium onions, finely diced
  • 4 ribs celery, finely diced
  • 1 green bell pepper, finely diced
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • 1 ½ teaspoons white pepper
  • ½ teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1 teaspoon hot sauce (Tabasco, etc.) – optional
  • 1 tablespoon dried THYME
  • ½ tablespoon dried basil
  • 1 28-oz can crushed tomatoes
  • 1 tablespoon tomato paste
  • 1-2 teaspoons sugar (to taste)

The nice thing about this recipe is that you probably have most of the ingredients handy.  Nothing exotic here.

Equipment: large, deep skillet or a Dutch oven, and a medium stock pot or large sauce pan

Steps:

  1. Peel and devein your shrimp. Keep the shells and rinse them well. Put the shells in your stock pot or sauce pan with trimmings from the celery and onion (not the green pepper), one clove garlic and 1 teaspoon salt.  Add a quart of water and bring to boil on high heat.  Then let simmer on low while you cook the rest.  This is your SHRIMP STOCK.  Let it reduce by about half – do not dilute it unless it gets dry – the goal is about two cups of concentrated, shrimpy goodness (Note: this is even better with head-on shrimp)
  2. Heat 1-2 tablespoons of oil in your Dutch oven on medium-high heat. When hot, add half the diced onions and cook, stirring frequently (but not continuously) until browned – usually 5-7 minutes. (See photo below)
  3. Add remaining onions, celery and green peppers sauté until tender, usually about 5 minutes.
  4. Add the garlic.   Add salt, cayenne, white pepper, black pepper and bay leaf.  Add the butter too.  Sauté that for 1-2 minutes.
  5. Add the hot sauce (if using) and the thyme and basil. Stir constantly for 1-2 minutes so it doesn’t burn.
  6. Add a ladle or two of the SHRIMP STOCK that you’ve been making and stir. Be sure to SCRAPE the bottom to loosen the browned bits on the bottom.  Cook for 1-2 minutes.
  7. Now add the tomatoes and sugar and stir well. Reduce the heat to medium-low once the tomatoes are bubbling.  Add tomato paste and stir.  Cook uncovered for at least 15 minutes.
  8. Add two cups of your nice, rich SHRIMP STOCK. Cook for 10 minutes more – and it’s more than fine to keep cooking on low heat for longer if you need to.  The goal is to concentrate the flavor.  TASTE and ADJUST for seasonings (salt, pepper, sugar, butter)
  9. When ready to serve, add the SHRIMP, stir, cover, and turn off the heat. The shrimp should be done in about 5 minutes – do not leave longer than 7-8 minutes.
  10. Serve over rice (or your favorite grain or starch – like cauliflower rice, shown below)

OK, let’s look at what’s involved in some of the steps.  Some of these may be basic for you, but hopefully there are some useful tips here!

Dicing onions:

  • Cut off the top then cut the onion lengthwise in half from the base to the cut top end.
  • Peel the onion.
  • Score each half of the onion lengthwise by cutting through about ¾ inches short of the base (see photo). If you’re careful not to cut too far, you can reduce the number of tears this process can produce.
  • Cut across the onion crosswise so you get a fine dice. Voila!

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Mincing garlic:

You can always use a garlic press – I like that for thing like salad dressings or other times where the garlic won’t get cooked down.  But for a nice stress release, try smashing the clove (skin on) with the side of your chef’s knife like so.

The peel is easy to remove and mincing from here is a breeze.

Deveining shrimp:

It’s a pain, but once you get the hang of it and into a groove, you can fly through this.  Best is to have a short knife, preferable one with a hooked end.  And have a couple paper towels handy for disposing of the “veins.”

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Step 2 – How do you know if the onions are done?  They look like this or even browner (but NOT black):

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Step 3 – How do you know if the onion, celery and green pepper (the “Holy Trinity” of Cajun/Creole cuisine) are soft?  They look like this:

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Step 9 looks like this – your sauce should look like this or even more concentrated:

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And here is the final plating over a scoop of cauliflower rice (rice is better tasting, frankly, but we’re doing the low carb thing):

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Serve with a dry white wine or rosé.  Also awesome with beer, especially if you made it super spicy.

A few other notes:

  • Shrimp cook fast, and overcooked, rubbery shrimp are just sad. Feel free to check on the shrimp after 5 minutes to be sure they are just cooked through but not tough.  This makes such a difference with this dish.  Consequently, it doesn’t heat up well once you’ve cooked the shrimp.
  • Feel free to cook the stock longer – the longer, the better the flavor. Chef Paul’s recipe calls for adding the shrimp heads as well.  This makes the stock much stronger in flavor and an intense orange color.  Quite impressive.
  • Do devein your shrimp (or get pre-deveined). The shrimp will taste bitter if the “vein” is in there.  Don’t make me explain what the “vein” actually is.
  • Browning the onions well is a key step to developing flavor.
  • Feel free to add more butter – it just makes it richer, which is not a bad thing.
  • Crushed tomatoes are the best for tomato sauces like this. I like them better than diced because they cook faster and have tomato sauce along for the ride.  Try different brands to find one you like best.  Muir Glen is a good one but can be pricy.

Good luck!  Please let me know if this recipe works for you.

Up next – kung pao chicken!

Boulevard – Restaurant Review

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Hello friends!

What we hope to do with this blog is share dining experiences and then see if we can learn from the best in the business how to bring that deliciousness home – at a fraction of the price.  We’ll learn not just from great restaurants but also from prominent cookbooks.  We will attribute greatness wherever we find it, but also help YOU experience some of this amazingness at home.  And sometimes we will find fault – particularly in our own failures to mimic the professionals.  And we’ll throw in some wine experiences to boot because why not?

We thought we would kick off this blog by taking in and taking on one of San Francisco’s most famous and well-regarded restaurants: Boulevard.  Located just off the Embarcadero in San Francisco’s financial district, Boulevard has been a go-to California/American establishment for business lunches and special occasion dinners.  This was a special occasion for us too – my darling Wifey’s birthday.  We were not the only couple celebrating a birthday that evening, and the restaurant went the extra mile by writing and signing a birthday card before we had even ordered.  That and the complimentary and traditional candle with our dessert.  Classy.

Boulevard was established over 20 years ago by Nancy Oakes and many other talented professionals.  They of course have a cookbook.  Some websites list the restaurant as being a seafood restaurant, and despite many seafood dishes on the menu, that’s not really the focus here.  The focus is excellent ingredients, seamless service and exquisite desserts. I had lunch here many years ago and was excited to come for dinner.

The restaurant is beyond lovely – warm, and inviting with colorful finishings including intricate fish mosaic tiles and faux fossils embedded in wood paneling – look at the tiffany glass and fixtures.

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And here are the menus:

Yeah, I don’t know half these ingredients either.  But the mystery will be revealed!  Here is what we ordered:

  • Ahi Tuna Tartare, Emerald Shiso Apples, Cucumber & Myoga Ginger Melon & Citrus Pearls, Matcha Aioli, Fresh Hon Wasabi, Sesame Nori Rice Crisps
  • Liberty Farm Duck Breast, Wood Oven Roasted, Porcini & Wild Rice Confit Duck Leg ‘Hash’, Broccolini & Grilled Fig Leaf Mashed Potato Sour Cherry & Lime Preserve, Cream Biscuit Bing Cherries in Duck Jus
  • Kurobuta Pork Chop, Wood Oven Roasted, Blue Corn Gnoccho Fritters, Peaches in Elderflower Cordial Yellow Wax Beans, Spring Onion & Cap Bacon Pork Jus with Sage

Boulevard is known for stellar tuna tartare.  But how on earth does one make really good tuna tartare?  Isn’t just chopped tuna with a bunch of garnishes and something crisp to use to try to scoop up the tuna and get it to your face?

So here is what arrived:

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Look at all that lovely fish hiding under those crisps.  And did they add a couple shrimp chips to the nori crisps?  Yes, yes they did.  You’ll see also that the tuna is gently formed into a flat cylinder, not crammed in there.  That’s a nice touch.

But wait, what else is going on here?  Some funny bits have been added.  We pulled them out to get a better look:

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Have you ever ordered something and totally forgotten what the other ingredients were? Yeah, we do that all the time.  Thankfully, we were able to figure out that these tidbits were, from left to right, (1) apple, (2) cucumber, and (3) the melon and citrus pearl.  So, what do these add?  Two things – acid and texture.  The apple was tart and crisp, the cucumber, crisp, and the pearl, tart and soft.

What on earth is a pearl?  Molecular gastronomy!  Basically, they took melon and citrus juice, added a gelling agent, and made lots of lots of little balls.

So how did this taste?  Sublime.  The tartness and textural changes contrasted with the soft richness of the tuna in delightful ways.  The crisps were pretty good – although frankly I preferred the shrimp chip, which offered a little saltiness as well as its own textural fun: the way it starts crisp and just melts in your mouth.  Seriously, tuna tartare demands a shrimp chip.  The other components here – the matcha aioli, the ginger, and the silly microgreens – didn’t offer much in flavor or anything else.

On to the entrees: Let’s look at the duck breast:

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Now that is how a duck breast is supposed to look. If you haven’t had duck before, don’t be afraid of duck.  It’s like chicken grew up and decided to be serious food.  Almost like rare beef in bird form.  Frankly, I ate around the fatty layer – I’m Jack Sprat in this respect.  What else do we have here?  In the middle is a bizarre little hash made with duck fat and to the right is, yes, it is a little scone.  Yeah, they call it a biscuit –a biscuit with cherry jam.  It was delicious… but made no sense on the plate whatsoever.  The duck and sour cherry combo is a classic – here was their effort to deconstruct it.  But here is the thing with deconstruction – you make it harder for me to enjoy the meal because I have to try to figure out how to combine bites.  And while chicken and waffles may be a popular combo, the same cannot be said for duck and scones.

Let’s look at the pork chop:

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We have to be honest here – any pork chop we eat will pale in comparison to the best pork chop on the planet – which is served only one place: Lolinda.  We will do that review at a later date.  Nonetheless, this was an excellent pork chop – tender and chewy, nicely trimmed of fat, and pleasantly salted.  I could have done with more salt, but whatevs – that ticks off Tom Colicchio, not me.

What else is on this plate?  Those big grey lumps are the gnocchi fritters. Made with blue corn meal.  This is a misstep, I think.  It was crisp on the outside but pure mush on the inside.  Gnocchi are supposed to be pillowy yet with a pleasant bite.  This was neither.

The true revelation here: the yellow wax beans, diced to almost look like corn kernels.  They popped with flavors of bacon and onion.

And finally, desserts!!  Wifey and I are doing the low carb thing, but for fancy dinners we throw that out.  We got these guys:

  • Lover’s Lane Honey Sunflower Panna Cotta, Black Raspberries, Blenheim Apricots and Sorbet, Sauternes Gel, Almond Sesame Granola and Angel Food Cake
  • Butterscotch Pudding, Caramel Rice Krispies, Almond Pine Nut Florentine, Dark Chocolate Marshmallows, Salted Caramel Sauce

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We both love panna cotta and pudding.  But there is good and bad.  For us, the best panna cotta we’ve ever had is at Oenotri in Napa.  We’ll review that soon.  Boulevard’s was good, but frankly a bit too hard-set for us – too much gelatin perhaps.  The revelation on the plate was the apricot sorbet – so soft, so pleasantly tart.  The grey stuff is angel food cake.  Why is it grey?  Haven’t the foggiest idea.  Weird.

The butterscotch pudding was remarkable – silky rich pudding with a gentle butterscotch flavor, and the crispy, salty nut Florentines were a perfect accompaniment.  See here they balance the rich pudding with salty crispiness, where the panna cotta was offset with tartness but a bit of a confusing array of textures.

What did we drink?  Wine, of course.  We brought this beauty from our cellar:

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It was aged perfectly.  Many Napa cabernets drink tough when young – when most people taste them when visiting wine country.  This was how a cabernet is supposed to taste – softer but still slightly chewy tannins and velvety fruit.  Boulevard’s corkage was $30 which, for a restaurant of this caliber, is very reasonable. We’ll post about corkage and wine at restaurants at a later date.

Conclusion: While we did find faults with Boulevard, they did the big stuff exceptionally well.  Meats were cooked and seasoned perfectly and were prime cuts.  Dishes were plated in a lovely fashion and showed an effort to experiment, which is admirable in an established restaurant.  Service was smooth and impeccable – there when you needed them, but not over you all the time.  For us, it’s well worth the money, particularly if you bring your own wine.  Happy Eating!