Creamy Pasta and Shrimp Adventure

Fresh seafood has long been a weakness of mine. For a real treat while I was growing up, my parents would take me to a local seafood restaurant, where the scallops were my favorite dish. So buttery. So perfect. So fortunate that they weren’t from the nearest body of water.

I just can’t resist good seafood, particularly high quality crab cakes. Same with smoked salmon appetizers, toothsome Korean fish cakes, New England lobster rolls, briny raw oysters, spider rolls at sushi restaurants — you get the idea.

So when Martha Stewart Living had a close-up of mafaldine pasta with shrimp and lemon, there was no question about making it. What looked incredibly easy, as is often the case with glossy magazine recipes, turned out to be slightly more difficult. Especially a few glasses of wine into the process.

Turns out that shrimp heads didn’t produce good stock for us. The recipe specifies reserving the heads and shells, but the second time we made it we only had shells. The difference in the stock was impressive. With heads, the stock had a murky funkiness that wasn’t very pleasant. Without them, it tasted bright.

Guillaume and I also found that the quarter cup of crème fraîche didn’t make the dish as creamy as we’d hoped. Instead, we combined the recipe with our standard creamy white wine sauce, developed using WineFolly.com’s handy infographic. Except we kept forgetting that our sauce recipe makes enough for two pasta servings, not four, as this one does.

Before perfecting this thing, we invited a couple of friends over to try our creamy shrimp pasta for dinner. The modified recipe has several stages that require some concentration as you’re doing them. Nothing too challenging, but not something we were able to do while drinking wine and regaling company with silly stories. It still turned out pretty well, even if the shrimp was slightly overdone.

The recipe below is calibrated better now. In doubling our sauce recipe to work with the shrimp and pasta, I realized that we were going to need 1¼ cups of white wine, which puts a serious dent in a bottle. Using a decent sherry — not a salty cooking sherry — for the ¼ cup in the stock worked just fine, and left a bit more white wine to have with dinner.

This pasta goes well with a crisp salad that has a Dijon vinaigrette, lightly sautéed asparagus, or oven-roasted green vegetables like Brussels sprouts or broccoli. Enjoy!

And Happy Holidays!

Shrimp and Lemon Pasta

Serves 4 generously

1 lb. raw medium or large shrimp, shell-on, ideally deveined with no heads
4 Tbsp. unsalted butter
1 Tbsp. tomato paste
Salt
1 C. dry white wine
¼ C. sherry OR additional dry white wine
1 lb. wavy pasta such as mafaldine, pappardelle, tagliatelle, campanelle, or farfalle
1 lemon
2 medium or small shallots, minced and divided
½ C. heavy cream or half-and-half
2 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
Parsley, freeze-dried or minced fresh, for seasoning
½ tsp. red pepper flakes, or to taste

Thaw the shrimp if needed, then peel them, reserving the shells for the stock. Slice large shrimp in half lengthwise, place in a bowl, and refrigerate.

Slice the lemon in half. Reserve one half and slice the other into rounds, removing the seeds. Mince the shallots and divide the amount into two separate little bowls. Cut the butter into tablespoons.

Take a small lidded jar, add the ½ C. heavy cream or half-and-half and the 2 tablespoons of flour. Attach the lid and shake well for several seconds. You don’t want flour blobs.

In a medium-sized pot, melt 1 tablespoon of butter over medium. Add the shrimp shells and tomato paste, stirring until shells are pink and opaque, about two minutes. Deglaze with ¼ cup of wine or sherry. Allow it to boil and then reduce for about one minute. Add 3 C. water and bring to a boil. Simmer for 30 minutes.

Strain the stock into a large measuring cup. Should make about 1½ to 2 cups of stock. Discard the solids.

In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook the pasta until just al dente based on the instructions. Add the lemon slices to the pot. The pasta will have another minute or so to cook in the sauce at the end. Drain the pasta, remove the lemon slices, and set it aside.

Heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil on medium heat in a medium saucepan, add one portion of the minced shallot and cook until translucent, about 4 or 5 minutes. Deglaze with 1 cup wine, and allow it to reduce by half. This will take several minutes.

Add 2 tablespoons of butter and whisk in the flour-cream mixture. Continue whisking for a couple more minutes until the sauce thickens. Add a sprinkle of minced fresh or freeze-dried parsley.

Slowly add about 1 cup of the shrimp stock and simmer to reduce until thick and creamy again. You can adjust the consistency by adding more stock, but you probably won’t use it all up. You might need to use some at the end of the recipe to loosen the sauce. Salt the sauce to taste, and then place it aside, off the burner.

Remove the shrimp from the fridge and season lightly with salt. In a large high-sided skillet, melt 1 tablespoon of butter on medium-high heat. Add the second minced shallot portion and the pepper flakes to taste.

When the shallot is translucent, add the shrimp, maneuvering them into a single layer and cooking until they’re light pink on one side. Turn shrimp to heat evenly. When nearly cooked but still slightly raw in the center, lower heat. This will all happen quickly.

Check to make sure sauce is not too thick. If it is, whisk in a small amount of reserved shrimp stock to loosen.

Add the cream sauce to shrimp and then simmer briefly. Stir in cooked pasta and mix to coat evenly. Remove from heat, squeeze remaining lemon over the top to serve.