Planet Shrimp Butter
The mission to chicken is departing soon
New here? Hi! If you want to get right down to business, scroll down for the new video release and allllll the way to the bottom for the recipe.
A lot of my recipe development starts with a recipe name.
This tracks with how I used to approach feature-length stories. When I say “approach” I mean that I would say the same thing every time I was stuck and couldn’t get a narrative off the ground: “Once I have the lede, the rest will write itself.” This could go on for weeks.
Ideally, I will jot down a recipe title and back my way into the dish. A lot like writing the headline before the article. But when things go sideways, I will look at the name of a dish I have never made and wonder what the hell I was thinking about when I strung that particular group of words together. Roast Chicken with New Potatoes and Shrimp Butter is an example of the second scenario. It sounds … great! But, what is it and how do you (I) make it?
To be clear: I didn’t know what shrimp butter was. I envisioned something creamy and salty, carrying the aroma of roasted lobster shells and hinting at the yummy gunk inside a shrimp head. If it exists, I thought, it will be an amazing pairing for tender spring potatoes; I wanted little spuds soaked in the stuff, as though they had been spooned directly out of a crustacean-rich bisque. The idea of the potatoes and shrimp butter alone was worth exploring, but no—I had put “chicken” in this imaginary recipe, and now I had to conjure it.
I chose a halved chicken because I haven’t done that before. That’s it, that’s the reason. I’ve roasted whole and I’ve roasted in pieces. I’ve rack-roasted, slow-roasted, and spatchcocked. I’ve fried and I’ve pan-fried. I haven’t halved. This is what branching out looks like when you develop five new recipes a month, every month, forever, amen. Chicken halves, skin-side-down, hot and fast and infused with lemon, thyme, and At least that decision was uncomplicated, because the shrimp butter part was about to become incredibly irritating.
First I thought: dried shrimp. Why? No idea. Love encountering them when I’m eating out, have never worked with them at home, but yeah, let’s go with that. I was in my kitchen with Alivia Bloch, food stylist and friend, who had just acquired a very large bag of dried shrimp for us to play around with. (You may remember Alivia from our recent bagna cauda invention.)
My vision, I told Alivia, was to make a compound butter with dried shrimp and lots of scallions—just whizz it all up in a mini chopper and then add it to the pan drippings when the chicken was done. Easy!
That, Alivia told me, is a bad idea. The shrimp need to be soaked. The scallions should be cooked first. Flavor development was critical, otherwise this would taste disjointed and flat. When you are venturing bravely into made-up recipe land, you have no choice but to believe. I believed them!
Immediately, Alivia’s intentions shattered into a million pieces. Okay, fine: four pieces. Cooking the scallions in butter and then combining with cold butter proved tricky as far as re-emulsifying went. The shrimp were stringy. The scallions were fibrous. The chopper wouldn’t chop. In order to get the blades moving, an ungodly amount of cold butter was required, forcing us to ponder optimistically about how I’d complete this inevitable sentence in the final recipe document: “This makes more butter than you will need; use the remaining butter for … um … for … for when you make this recipe again!”
First attempt shrimp butter was greenish-grey and incredibly onerous to make. As I’ve said before, recipe misses are absolutely integral to later triumphs. Alivia really threw themselves on the tracks in service to this shrimpy pursuit.
As I sat, fearful that my made-up recipe name would perish on paper, I remembered a steamed mussel recipe from That Sounds So Good. This is a very good recipe that I will probably never make a video for because people are weird about bivalves. (I get it, eating a bad mussel is upsetting.) That recipe calls for cooking out some shrimp paste with lemongrass, garlic, onion, and a spicy fresh chile, and then the mussels steam open in that mixture. The resulting pan sauce is sweet and funky and ocean-y, and I serve it with toasted buttered baguette for dips!
Perhaps my very tiny brain had been passively working on shrimp butter over the four years that have passed since I wrote that mussel recipe? In a surprise to no one, I had to fail up to figure it out.
Actual shrimps were not the answer, and neither was a compound butter. Shrimp paste in oil was the answer—the one I use is Thai, and it is made up of shrimp, garlic, soy sauce, oil, salt, pepper, and our favorite—MSG. It’s typically used as an element in other sauces, such as nam prik, but in my nontraditional application, it teams up with chicken renderings, scallions, white wine, and butter to make a brick-red emulsified sauce that all the potatoes told me they want to go to when they die.
I had finally delivered unto myself, and now to all of you, exactly what I had described, but the concept and the application had to do find their unique path. First, I was Don Draper with a vision. And then I was Peggy and the guys from the art department, revising drafts, getting brutal notes, going back to the drawing board. And now you can be Betty, in your cute kitchens, hopefully yapping on the phone with a martini while slicing scallions.
Thanks, as always, for coming on this journey with me!