I'm Just Here for the Food_ Version 2.0 - Alton Brown [32]
Yield: 2 entrée servings or 4 appetizer servings
Software:
1 pound peeled and deveined large
shrimp
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Old Bay seasoning
4 tablespoons freshly squeezed
lemon juice
¼ cup panko (Japanese bread
crumbs)
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
Hardware:
Broiler pan
Shallow glass baking dish or an
ovenproof sauté pan
SHRIMP SMARTS
When shopping for shrimp, focus on numbers, not labels. Shrimp are sized and sorted into count weights. The higher the number, the smaller the shrimp: 50/60 means 50 to 60 tails per pound. The largest shrimp have a “U” before the number, signifying that there are fewer than that number per pound: U/12 means that there are 12 or fewer shrimp per pound. Though they serve as rough guidelines, labels like “jumbo” or “medium” aren’t very telling, as they’re not standardized.
CHAPTER 3
Roasting
If dry cooking methods were the Beatles, roasting would be George Harrison. Quiet, but effective.
Roast Story
Had Pavlov gone to a few wedding receptions or hung out at a brunch buffet or two he might not have had to measure up spaniel spit. His theories regarding conditioning could easily have proven themselves at the carving station. I’ve worked the carving station and I don’t care if it’s a steamship round, a loin roast, a standing rib roast, or a charred buffalo head, flash some golden crust and a little rosy pink flesh and the culinary tractor beam engages. It’s like a bug zapper for humans. I believe this auto-response has as much to do with ancient associations as it does with flavor. Think about it: when do we roast turkeys? When do we roast standing ribs? What’s at the end of the line at the wedding reception? That’s right: roast beast. Where there is roast, there is a gathering. Done right, there is also a lot of satisfaction—not to mention enough leftovers for lots of lovely sandwiches.
ORIGIN OF THE SANDWICH
In 1762, an English noble named John Montagu, the fourth earl of Sandwich, was on a gambling spree when he got hungry. He didn’t want to fold his hand, so he instructed a servant to place a piece of roast beef between two slices of bread. He could eat with one hand and play with the other. Thus the birth of what today is the most popular meal in the Western world.
So why don’t we do the “Sunday” roasts anymore? Why are the grills of America stocked with burgers and chicken parts only? Why do our ovens echo with emptiness? Remember the previously quoted Brillat-Savarin remark, “We can learn to be cooks, but we must be born knowing how to roast.” When he wrote this in the early years of the nineteenth century, roasting was still a medieval procedure involving iron spits and fiery pits (see Grilling). And in those days a cook who overcooked a “joint” of meat might be beaten with the charred appendage. (I had one thrown at me once, but that’s a story for another time.)
Despite the advent of the modern oven, roasting remains a mystery to most. This may be due to the fact that modern cookery is about recipes, and you just can’t learn roasting from a recipe any more than you can learn the tango from those cutout footprints they stick on the floor down at the Fred and Ginger Dance Academy.
For instance, a recipe can tell you to heat your oven to 350° F, to slather ingredients x, y, and z on a 4-pound beef eye-round roast, and to cook it for 1½ hours. But what if your roast is a 5-pounder? What if the recipe was formulated in a Bob’s oven and you own a Joe’s oven? What if you don’t have 1½ hours? What if all you can find is a pork loin roast? Are you out of luck? No, because B-Savarin was wrong. You can and should teach yourself to roast. It may take some time and attention,