Shrimp Cakes

When fishing the shrimp trawl, sometimes you get a lot of pink shrimp. And sometimes, those pink shrimp are big enough where it’s easy to take the head off, and then remove the shell from the tail. Just like processing the bigger coon stripe, side stripe, and spot prawn shrimp.  But sometimes, you get really small pink shrimp. The kind that you have to be real careful to pinch the head off, and then you might mush the meat of the tail getting that little tail shell off, if you can get it off at all.

So, I started looking for ways to eat the shrimp – shell and all.  I got the idea when I was working in Ecuador, where the shells were used, minced finely in a blender, in the liquid of the ceviche sauce.

Sara tried coating the little shrimp in panko and frying them, which was okay, but not great. And messy.  Real messy.   I’m now on a diet to get ready for hip replacement, so I’m off carbs as much as I can.  Panko was now out. 

Next, I tried a recipe that said to just fry the snot out of whole shrimp in olive oil. I didn’t like that too much. The texture was okay, but somehow I didn’t like the (perhaps) overheated olive oil taste.

What’s a shrimper to do. There are still bags and bags of little raw pink shrimp staring me in the face every time I open the freezer. If I could come up with an easy way to use them, then catching them the next time wouldn’t feel be such a chore after harvest.

So tonight, I decided to try to make shrimp cakes.

I had a bag of raw, mostly tiny tails with the shell on. Some of the shrimp were still whole, with the head on. My shrimp lot made about 2 cups worth. I put the thawed shrimp into the food processor and let it whirl. I let it go till the shrimp was a paste – a gooey, really thick liquid.

Now, what to bind the shrimp paste to make it into a patty. First, I added a couple eggs. Then 3 heaping tablespoons of fine almond flour (used because it has very low carbohydrates, for my diet). Lastly, I added about a 1/4 cup of finely grated parmesan cheese. I mixed the eggs, flour and cheese into the shrimp paste with a whip.

I spooned the mixture out in about tablespoon portions into a pan of hot olive oil, and flattened the blobs as much as I could into a patty. I fried two such patties for a good while on both sides so they would thoroughly cook the shells in the batter to a crisp. The patties had a good texture and held together nicely, but the olive oil got a little too hot, I think, and gave it an off flavor.

Next batch,  I added half a yellow onion finely chopped and 6 of the cherry peppers stuffed with cream cheese in a jar of oil you get from Costco, coarsely cut up with scissors, to the remaining batter.  I tried frying these patties in butter. The resulting cakes almost burned badly, but not quite, in the butter, again from the extended time I was cooking them. 

Well, the ingredients now seemed about right for my taste.  They worked well together, held together nicely as a patty, and a topping of kelp relish and mayonnaise tartar sauce turned a good thing into something great.   Sara ate 3 of the 4 cakes I made, and that confirmed I was on to something. We talked about what else might go in the batter. The only other thing we thought of was maybe celery, but the cakes were great the way they were.

The last thing tinkered with was the oil I cook them in. I asked Chef Brenda in Haines, and she suggested avocado oil or grapeseed oil. Grapeseed oil was also suggested by Amanda in Homer and Joe in Smithers. I told Joe, who worked with me in West Africa in the heart of red oil palm country, that red palm oil would be the best for these, as I thought it would impart the best taste of this combination. I used to keep some red palm oil on hand. But when the Contehs moved to town, I gave it all to them, because then it returned in authentic West African dishes of sauces made with greens over rice.

But luck was on my side.  When I went to make breakfast this morning and was looking for some of the suggested oils, there, in the back of the oil drawer, was some leftover ancient African palm oil!   Using palm oil is almost cheating, since anything tastes good fried in palm oil. Heck, palm oil tastes good in palm oil.

As I thought, even old palm oil still made great shrimp cakes.  Now I’ve got a use for both the old palm oil and the rest of the little shrimps in the freezer.

Shrimp cakes are here to stay.