Shrimps on Sourdough with Paprika and Lemon
Nick Fisher
LATIN NAME
Crangon crangon
ALSO KNOWN AS
Brown shrimp
SEASONALITY
Spawning peaks April–September so commercially harvested shrimps are best eaten October–March
HABITAT
Sandy estuaries all around the British coast
MCS RATING
3–4
REC MINIMUM SIZE
4cm total shell length
SOURCING
goodfishguide.org; cleysmokehouse.com; eastlincsseafood.co.uk; fishfanatics.co.uk; morecambebayshrimps.com
Wetsuits and boogie-boards are all well and good, but personally, if I’m off with the family to a sandy beach for the day, it’s shrimp nets I want to see cluttering up my rear view mirror. The best shrimps to eat are brown shrimps. You can buy them – there are shrimp fisheries around our coast – but the finest brown shrimps are ones you’ve caught yourself and boiled in a bucket of seawater, sitting on the beach.
Shrimp nets are a basic tool: a broom-handle-like shaft attached to an angled, hardwood board with a fine-meshed net, which billows in the water behind the board as you push it through knee-deep, sea-covered flat sand. Clever people make their own shrimp nets, the rest of us buy them. Apart from having a delicious pay off, shrimping provides hours of obsessively exciting, joyously competitive fun for all the family. It’s a low tide, summer activity, which takes planning and a very flat sandy beach like those of Morecambe or Hunstanton. Look for knee-deep, warm lagoons left by the outgoing tide.
Shrimps take minutes to cook: drop them into boiling, salty water (about 10g salt per litre, if you’re not doing it there and then on the beach), return to the boil and cook for another couple of minutes, then drain and cool.
If you don’t want to eat your shrimps just as they come, another option is to make classic potted shrimps: peeling cooked shrimps and preserving them in spicy butter to be spread on sourdough toast. Flash-frying them in hot, spiced fat and eating them whole, heads and tails too, is another great way to go (see next recipe). But in the same way that shrimp gathering is a leisurely activity, I feel that shrimp eating should also require an investment of time. For me, the best way to eat shrimps is from the shell, one at a time, sucking each nugget-like tail from its shell while crunch-sucking each head – not a wham-bam snack but an exercise in meditative, mindful eating.
Shell-on, peeled or potted brown shrimp are available in shops and online all year. Most of these are the harvest of beam trawlers, with all the attendant issues of by-catch and habitat damage. The small Solway Firth fishery is relatively good, however, while off Norfolk they’re making improvements with a view to going for MSC accreditation. In Lancashire’s Morecambe Bay, meanwhile, the shrimp are still caught in nets towed by small boats or tractors.
SHRIMPS ON SOURDOUGH WITH PAPRIKA AND LEMON
Plump brown shrimps have so much flavour that they can take an intense hit of smoky paprika and sharp lemon and come up smiling. If you have shell-on shrimps, you can fry them whole in the spiced butter and eat them, shell and all, or peel them as you go. Otherwise, peeled shrimps work just as well. Serves 2
25g butter
1 garlic clove, grated or crushed
Finely grated zest and juice of ½ lemon
1 tsp sweet smoked paprika
1 tbsp chopped parsley
150g cooked shrimp, shell-on or peeled
2–4 slices of sourdough bread (depending on size)
Extra virgin olive oil, to trickle
Sea salt and black pepper
Place a large frying pan over a medium-high heat and add the butter. When it is melted and bubbling, add the garlic and lemon zest. Cook for 1–2 minutes, until the garlic is fragrant but not coloured.
Add the smoked paprika, parsley and most of the lemon juice. Finally add the shrimps and toss well to combine. Cook for a further minute, but no more.
Meanwhile, toast the sourdough and trickle with extra virgin olive oil.
Season the shrimps with salt and pepper to taste and pile on to the toasted sourdough. Trickle with a little more extra virgin olive oil and lemon juice to serve.