Shrimp Creole (Featuring Classic Creole Sauce)

If you’re from the Gulf Coast chances are good that, like me, you were introduced to Shrimp Creole at an early age, and you know perfectly well how it’s supposed to taste. In my case, fast forward a few decades: I’m working on a menu and recipes for a new Creole restaurant. Armed with my great aunt’s shrimp Creole recipe, I’m recipe testing, but it isn’t really working for the restaurant. So I look up eleventy zillion recipes in my cookbooks and online. I cook and fiddle with recipes, cook and fiddle, and I do that on and on for quite some time. Nothing is exactly what I want, and I find that many recipes are way over-complicated. Weirdly, a large number of those end up tasting like canned tomato sauce. How can you possibly put 27 ingredients in something and still have it come out tasting like unadulterated canned tomato sauce?!? I don’t know, either.

 

So finally, super frustrated around noon one day, I totally chucked all those recipes, and quite literally started from scratch. I pared it down to the essentials I remembered and went from there. By dinnertime I had the sauce below. I tried it out on a few unsuspecting eaters to good effect. A few days later I had the opportunity to serve my Shrimp Creole to a very talented classically trained chef I happen to know. He’d brought his teenage daughters and his lovely leading lady to dinner, and I didn’t tell any of them I was recipe testing. We all ate and ate. When the chef volunteered that he especially liked the Creole sauce, I thought maybe I was done. And later when I found somebody else in the kitchen wiping the serving platter clean with a heel of baguette, I knew I was.

Here are some dandy shrimp my mom painted:

Below is an authentic, old-school, Shrimp Creole. I’ve divided it into two recipes. You’ll notice that the sauce itself is made without shrimp, and that the Shrimp Creole recipe calls for hot Creole sauce to be added to the hot cooked shrimp just before serving. That’s historically common, but a little unusual these days. I do it for two reasons. First, I like to make sure the shrimp is cooked perfectly rather than hanging around getting overcooked in a sauce. Truly, Perfect Creole Sauce + Perfectly Done Shrimp = Perfect Shrimp Creole. You can cook the shrimp however you’d like. I give instructions below for quickly sauteed shrimp, but boiled shrimp are perfectly fine, and I’ve done them that way for Shrimp Creole many times.

Second, I find it’s easiest to make a batch of Creole sauce, use what I need for the dish I’m making today, and freeze the rest for something else. Chicken Creole made in the manner of Shrimp Creole is a treat. (You can also make Crawfish Creole if you want. I think we’re all pretty clear on how I feel about Crawfish Anything; but you do you.) This sauce works well in or over stuffed eggplant, with grilled or roasted eggplant, as a sauce for fried green tomatoes, and it makes very nice Creole-style parmigianas. The prettiest seafood dish I think I ever served in my whole entire life was a grilled whole snapper surrounded by grilled lemons and shiny black olives, with Creole sauce (from my freezer!) ladled over it. It wowed the guests, and tasted awfully good, too. A glug or two of sherry plus a ¼ cup of heavy cream added to two cups of hot Creole sauce will give you a restaurant-quality Cardinale sauce for shrimp, scallops, or those infernal crawfish.

If you’ve never cooked a roux before, or never cooked one longer than what you’d do for a white sauce, this recipe is a good place to start. Unlike the 45-minutes-of-stirring affair you need for a good gumbo, this roux will only take a few minutes. You must stir constantly, though. Once the roux begins to take on color, it will darken fairly quickly. The most important thing is not to burn it. If you’re nervous, or you feel like it’s coloring too quickly, turn the heat down a tad and keep stirring. You’re looking for a caramel color, and you will get it there. Once you add the vegetables, it’s far less likely to burn, and you can get away with stirring only occasionally.

Bon Appetit!