Okay, I've been playing around a lot lately
with shrimp and I've been peeling and deveining a lot of shrimp and it dawned on me. A couple of people that asked me when they
were volunteering to help me in the kitchen how I did it. So I thought I would show you how. Now, you can always get a shrimp that's already
been peeled of the veins and cooked off for you at the grocery store but I don't like
it as much. First and foremost, it costs a lot more. They're going to charge you for the work that
they've put into doing their deveining, and shelling, and steaming for you. And, the second is, if you go to cook something,
you've lost all opportunity to control the flavors and textures that go into it from
the beginning. Oh, and the best one, this is the coolest
thing. If you are peeling and deveining shrimp, what
you want do is, see over here, I'm keeping all of my shells over here. I'm leaving the tails on my shrimp but I'm
keeping all these shells and these are going to go in my freezer. I've already got a couple of pounds of shrimp
shells in there. So what I'm going to do, and I'll show you
how to do it because it's so simple and it's the most wonderful thing, is we're going to
make a shrimp stock to use in a shrimp bisque. And, the flavor that comes out of that is
unlike anything in this world. And, that is one of those top secret restaurant
things that nobody tells you, is how to get this incredible flavor out of something. All right. So all I have here, I think, is 21/25's. They might have been 25/30's, I think. I can't remember exactly. It doesn't really matter because they're all
the same size and that means they're all going to cook at the same rate. So pick him up. Here, let me get a fresh one. Pick him up. Now, can you see this? You're going to come in here and he's got
his little legs up here. All you're doing, is you're going to pop a
nail under, get a thumb under there, come off in a little strip around his tail. And, then it's like pulling a little jacket
off. The rest of it comes off in one piece. Did you see how I did that? Let's do another one. Hold him like this and right up here next
to his tail . . . I like to leave the tail on when I cook with them because they're pretty. Come off in a little circle right up next
to the tail. And, then the rest of his shell will come
off in a single piece just like that. And, that's ready to go. And, actually this is ready for the next step. If you're doing your own shrimp, it is really
important that you devein them. What that means . . . Can you get in this
close? Can you see here? See this little black line running down here? That's his intestinal tract and all that that
implies. And, we don't really want to eat that. That's just not delicious in my book. So I'm going to step over here to the sink
and I'm going to show you the easiest way to not only devein it but we're going to take
his little GI tract out as well from the back. And, I'll show you how to butterfly them if
you ever want to stuff some. Come over here. All right. So I've taken this one and I give myself just
a tiny trickle of cold water to work with. All right. So hold him up just like this. And, make sure that you've got a really sharp
knife. You know, in the kitchen, a sharp knife is
you're number one best friend and tool. So all you do is insert the tip just a little
bit. And, you follow that line right down there. When it comes open, there's that vein. Right there. It comes out. All done. Now, there's another one. You don't have to and a lot of people don't. I happen to be a little bit weird about and
I like it to come out. This one's very hard to see. It's often nearly colorless. And, it just washed out. But, what you end up with is this tiny butterfly
here and a tiny butterfly on the back. And, that shrimp is now very clean and ready
to cook. That's all there is to it. So if we're going to do one. Say you have a great, big shrimp and you want
to do, oh I don't know, you can do a crab stuffed shrimp if you really want to get really
decadent. So what you would want to do in that case,
is clean him up here. Do just like you would normally do. Of course, it wouldn't work quite as well
with these little guys. You want to use a great, big one for this
but the same principle. After you've deveined it, you would simply
reinsert your knife, come as far down through there as you can but you don't want to let
it come through this part of the shrimp. Now, if you do it this way, you see how I've
come almost to the front of the shrimp and there's the vein that we did not take out
of the front? It comes out in a single piece. So what you want to do here is give yourself
as much . . . You saw that when I was doing the pork chops, the sets in the pork chops? Same principle. So what you would do then is lay your stuffing
here and when he cooks, he's going to curl up like that and stand up on his own. He's ready to make you look good. All right. Well, I'm going to come back over here and
I'm going to peel and devein the rest of my shrimp. And, that's all there is to it. Don't pay the extra money to have somebody
else do it for you when it is this easy to do. And, you get the bonus of all the flavor that
you can get out of those shrimp shells, shrimp shells to make yourself look even better.