Steaming fresh shrimp with garlic and butter imbues glass noodles with a wonderful, savoury flavour. A delightful weekend dinner.

Time: 3/5
Cooks in a flash, but takes a while to prep

Effort: 4/5
A lot of work for not a lot of food but the results are really, really good.

Pimp your shrimp

Garlicky, buttery glass noodles already sound great. They sound even better infused with the umami essence of seafood. I’ve shown how to make steamed scallops with glass noodles before, and the same technique works very well for shrimp.

The reason it’s so good is that glass noodles have a lot of surface area with which to hold on to flavour. When you steam something, you naturally get some moisture percolating down through the noodles to create a super flavourful sauce together with the garlic butter and soy sauce that’s been mixed in. The yummy juices from the seafood certainly don’t hurt either.

I rarely see foods being steamed outside of Asian cooking, and I think it’s such a shame. It’s a great technique for gently cooking delicate food without any manipulation or agitation, which might break them up or otherwise disrupt their structure. Say, for example, soft tofu or fish.

In this case, it cooks all the shrimp that I stuffed with garlic and arranged in a pretty pile without moving them around. The whole dish comes out with everything in the same place I put them in, and that gives me a high degree of control over the final presentation.

While this recipe is never gonna be meal prep friendly, it makes for a hell of a special dinner. There’s the visual appeal of red shrimp shells contrasted with green onion, the incredible aroma that gets carried up by the steam and fills the house, and the sweet and tender shrimp.

And yet, all of that pales in comparison to the glass noodles on the bottom that has been sitting in and absorbing the wonderful liquor. Sauce, glass noodles, a piece of shrimp and a bite of rice. That’s gustatory heaven right there.

Don’t worry about having extra glass noodles. Hold on to them, and cook them with some fish for another umami-packed meal.

Dramatis Personae

Served two.

Shrimp – 600g

There’s a time and place for unshelled shrimp, especially for meal prep. But the shell adds flavour and it’s worth the effort for a special meal like this.

Get whole shrimp, and get them super fresh – mine were still swimming when I got them, and I put them in the freezer for about 15 minutes to put them to sleep before I unalived them. The fresher the shrimp, the better the dish.

Shrimp are about 40% head and another 10% shell. So you need a lot more shrimp that you think you need, if it’s all the protein you’re serving that meal. 

Glass noodles – 60g

A conservative amount, because I’m serving this with rice. These need to be rehydrated, either in room temperature water for an hour or hot water for 15 minutes.

Fortunately I’ve learned from my past mistakes, and remembered to give the rehydrated noodles a couple snips with a pair of kitchen shears. Otherwise they’d be unmanageably long.

Garlic – half a head

As finely minced as your patience allows. Yes it seems like an obscene amount, but it’s a key ingredient. I’ll be sweating half of it in butter, and keeping half of it raw.

The sweet and toasty flavours of the cooked garlic, and the sharp bite of the raw garlic each add to the dish in a way that makes it more complex and interesting than either kind alone.

Butter – 30g

Again, a relatively conservative amount. Use more if you can afford the calories, and want to have a very good time. Nothing stops you from using any other oil, but butter tastes good and it’s how I learned this recipe so it’s my go to.

Other seasonings

A tablespoon or two of light soy sauce, and a teaspoon of sugar. These are for tossing with the glass noodles. 

You might also want a tablespoon or so of soy sauce to drizzle over the shrimp as well, but I like to leave the shrimp alone and let it stand on its own merit.

Garnishes

A scattering of green onions really upgrades the appearance, and pretty food tastes better. I grow my own and never run out, it’s super handy to have fresh scallions on hand.

I also had a small mild pepper that I diced and threw on top. While the sweetness and fruitiness of the pepper was nice, it was a case of red on red and the colour kind of got lost against the background.

Lettuce – two heads

Always eat your veggies! Lettuce is what’s on sale so lettuce is what we’re having. I’m cooking these in the same pan I use to mix the glass noodles with the seasoning to recycle all of the buttery garlicky goodness.

Executive summary

1. Rehydrate glass noodles by soaking in hot water for 15 minutes, or cold water for an hour. Cut into manageable lengths
2. Make rice. Prepare garnishes and vegetables.
3. Sweat half of the garlic in the butter. Switch off the heat, add glass noodles and seasonings, then stir to combine.
4. Transfer seasoned noodles to the steaming dish. Reserve most of the remaining sweated garlic and mix it into the raw garlic.
5. Stir fry vegetables in the dirt pan.
6. Give the shrimp a rinse. Cut the legs and the whiskers off, and cut deeply into the back without cutting through. Devein.
7. Stuff each shrimp with some of the minced garlic mixture. Arrange on top of the glass noodles.
8. Bring water to a vigorous boil. Steam the shrimp on high heat for 5-6 minutes.
9. Serve immediately once the shrimp is done.

Play by Play

Last things first. Give the glass noodles a nice soak, then when they’re softened you can give them a few snips (which I finally remembered to do this time)

Next, I went ahead and gave the lettuce a thorough rinse before draining them. And I’m glad I did, because …

… otherwise we’d be having a little friend over for dinner as well.

Alright, time to prepare the shrimp. These have been put to sleep by a short stint in the freezer, then given a thorough rinse. Kitchen shears in dominant hand, shrimp in the other.

Snip the antennae and the legs off, then cut along the back. Try to cut as deep as you can without actually splitting the shrimp in two. You want to try and lay the shrimp open like a book.

Once the shrimps’ backs have been broken, you can go in and pull the vein out. A toothpick or something else that is long, pointy and narrow might be helpful.

Moving on. The garnish and the garlic is prepped, and we’re now ready to make the kitchen smell amazing. Half the garlic is for the butter, half of it will be kept raw.

Sweating the garlic in butter. Keep the heat low, we don’t need to brown it. Once it smells great, get the glass noodles in there as well. Toss with soy sauce and sugar to evenly coat.

Glass noodles go on the bottom, to be the bed on which we steam our shrimp.

Here’s where I started bringing water up to a boil in the skillet I’m going to do the steaming in. While that happens, I stuffed my shrimp with the garlic mix and arranged them on top of the glass noodles.

I didn’t try very hard to get all of the garlic and butter out of the first pan, because I need some of both to stir fry the lettuce with anyway.

While I was messing with the vegetables, the water has come up to a vigorous boil. Steamer rack in, shrimp in, lid on. Set a timer for 5 minutes or so.

Make sure you have a way of getting the plate out of the steamer. One of these steamer clamp things work great. If you can’t find them, you might need to get creative.

Err on the side of under-done, because residual heat will continue cooking the shrimp. Scatter on the greens for garnish while feeling amazed by the aroma.

Serve hot! I didn’t get through the trouble of getting live shrimp and doing all that scissor work to have good seafood go cold.

A bit of shrimp, a bit of glass noodle, a bit of sauce and a bite of rice. Ooooh yeah.

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