Dehydrating #3: Shrimp

Making my own dried shrimp was one of the earlier ideas that popped into my head after we got the new toaster oven. Dried shrimp is known for being more expensive than regular shrimp because the flavor is so much stronger. You don't have to use as much at one time, but it's more versatile because it is dried. When we went to Taiwan last year, I really wanted to bring some back. I saw someone selling a giant bag of dried shrimp at a market one evening but never got around to purchasing it to bring back home. I cannot legally buy it from the market to bring back because it is not properly packaged and labeled. By the time we were getting ready to leave, I didn't make a last minute grocery store trip to bring any home. I talked to a friend about it and she had said some of her friends tried bringing it back before but it is tricky because of the refrigeration. So from the time it gets packed into the luggage in Taiwan and makes it back to your home in the states, many hours (a day?) have passed and the quality may have been affected. 

I had done some research online and they said to dehydrate your own shrimp, start with cooked salad shrimp. This saves the step of needing to boil the shrimp before. I was at HEB getting some groceries when I saw a bag of salad shrimp. I spontaneously decided to get a bag and try making my own dehydrated shrimp at home that weekend. I honestly didn't even pay a very good price for the shrimp. The bag cost me about $7.00 and these were a pound of 150-250 size cooked shrimp. I can get a bag of the same size for uncooked shrimp and save $1.50. I think I can boil my own shrimp at home for less than that. 

Regardless, it was a capturing-the-time moment so I was already at HEB, the shrimp was in front of me, and I bought it. 

Dehydrating the shrimp wasn't difficult. I took the shrimp and laid it out on my dehydrating trays. I set the oven to 135F and the timer for 10 hours. I peeked in a few times to check on the shrimp, but when they were done, they were dry and felt just like the store-bought ones.  

 

My husband was smart. I didn't think about this, but it was a Friday evening to Saturday morning when I dehydrated them. At the time I had asked him, do you want to do the dehydrated shrimp first or *item number 4* first? He told me to do the shrimp first because I wasn't teaching over the weekend so it would give the house some time to dissipate the smells. Boy was he right. 

 

  

 

I'm happy with how my shrimp turned out. They look just like the ones from the store. The size of mine are a little smaller because I probably started out with smaller shrimp to begin with. I buy the size M from the store so they probably start with size 75-125 shrimp or so. The yield was similar. My pound of shrimp turned into 77g of dehydrated shrimp. The packs from the store have 100g of dried shrimp in them. 

 

When they're on sale at the grocery store, I can get the bag on the left for less than $7. The jar of dehydrated shrimp on the right I made myself cost me $7 in shrimp and time/electricity to dehydrate myself. 

 

I don't think I'll ever dehydrate my own shrimp again. The cost breakdown doesn't make sense and my whole house smells like a seafood market for about a half day. If I had access to bulk seafood at super discounted prices, my response might be different. But, for where I live and what I have access to, making it myself won't be cost efficient.  I'm glad I did it once just to have the experience and know-how. But now, I also know that paying for a bag of dehydrated shrimp from the grocery store really isn't that expensive. 

Takeout with the Tos #27 : Gluten-Free

This may be my last Takeout post of the year. I have still been cooking but a lot of the dishes have been repeats of ones I've already made. When I cooked this gluten-free dish for a friend, it inspired another dish, both which I will talk about in this post. 

One of my friends is gluten-free and I was at her house. I can't remember how it started exactly,  but our conversation went from food to fried chicken to gluten-free to gluten-free flour. I told her I could make her a gluten-free fried chicken if she had the gluten-free flour. Indeed she did! 

I took her flour home and made fried chicken with it! 

You would never believe this was gluten-free if I didn't tell you. 

My breading of preference with fried chicken is actually panko. When I use panko, the crumb is larger so it sticks better to the chicken. When I used the gluten-free flour this time to fry, a lot of the coating went into the frying oil. Not a problem at all, but it doesn't leave a clear oil when you're done frying. In the past, I've just dumped the oil and the flour in it in the trash. However, this time, there seemed to be a lot of extra flour in the oil. 

Then it hit me. I had just fried chicken and inadvertently made a roux! Roux is pronounced "roo" like kanga"roo" if you don't know. Typically, it's made by cooking flour in oil in a pan for a long time before making gumbo. People have created other shortcuts to roux by baking the flour in the oven first before cooking it in the oil to cut down on the stirring time - you must stir your roux or it will burn and burned roux is bitter.  I think I just found the greatest double-duty hack of all time: fry something with a flour batter, and then use the extra cooked flour and oil to make something that requires a roux!

I poured off the excess oil from the top and then I was left 
with this beautiful dark brown, flavorful roux.

Now you might be looking at this in the bottom of my wok and think this is way too much roux to use for any dish. That's exactly what I thought. It was a lot of roux. I pulled out my silicone ice cube molds (which I've never used for ice) and spooned a portion of the roux in. These molds went into my freezer and now I have pre-made roux cubes for next time!

I only spooned out four cubes worth. In retrospect, I probably 
could have spooned out...at least another two. Wisdom for the future.

It was unfortunate I could not share this gumbo with my friend as well as I had fried non-gluten-free food in the same oil after I fried her gluten-free chicken first. I don't know all the contamination rules with gluten and frying, but I wasn't going to risk it. 

My gumbo was not traditional as the Cajun trinity involves onion, bell pepper, and celery. I used neither bell pepper or celery in my "trinity." My gumbo started simply with onion and carrot. Then I added leftover ham, lentils, and shrimp. Not traditional at all, but absolutely delicious. I would definitely make it again and use the same ingredients or even try mixing up other ingredients. I actually enjoy okra in my gumbo but I didn't have any in my freezer so it wasn't included. If this isn't a real gumbo to you, then I guess you can call it a very rich stew. 

Yum.

I flipped the order this time, but this is my cost breakdown:

4 large servings of gumbo at $12.99 per serving: $51.96

15 gluten-free fried chicken tenderloins at $2.50 each: $$37.50

Total: $89.46

Tax: $7.38

Grand Total:  $96.84

It's been a fun year blogging and sharing about my food and stories. I hope you've enjoyed reading about what I cook, how I cook, and occasional tips and tricks with freezing and saving food. I have a couple ideas for themes next year that still revolve around food. When I finalize which one I want to do, you will be reading about it on the blog. If you cooked anything I shared or received inspiration from a recipe, I'd love to hear about it! 

Shrimp Chips

I've loved shrimp chips since I was a child. They've always given me this sense of comfort when I eat them. I remember eating them at the Asian buffet we frequented growing up. It was my "post dinner" treat after I ate my actual dinner. I'd go and get a plate full of shrimp chips to eat. We made them once at home from the store-bought dried shrimp chips. They looked like oval, translucent plastic discs. I remember watching them fry and being mesmerized when they started to puff up. 

Years later as an adult, I was fortunate enough to marry into a family with homemade shrimp chips. During big holiday gatherings, my husband's aunt would sometimes make them. They're delicious. I really like the ones they make, and they're as big as my face! I have always wanted to try making my own.

I finally did.

It's a labor of love. If you don't absolutely love these and enjoy them, don't bother. From the day I started making them, it was another 5 days until the day I first fried them. This is the recipe I followed. I first saw their video on social media and then looked up the full recipe online. 

Kneading this was tiring.

 

For those of you who just want a quick overview and don't care about the recipe, this is a quick summary of how shrimp chips are made.

1. You need to blend up the shrimp mixture and then mix with tapioca starch. The blending was easy - I threw it in a food processor. The mixing was more laborious. Once everything came together, I had to knead it by hand. This is a dry dough as you don't want excessive moisture in it so it was hard to knead. 

2. You split it into logs to steam.  This cooks the shrimp and the starch.

 3. After steaming, you leave them uncovered in the refrigerator overnight to cool and dry. The next day, I sliced them into little discs with a mandolin. You could chop them by hand thinly with a knife. I'm debating if the knife would have been the better option because the dough was still slightly tacky and would stick to the mandolin which made pushing it to slice difficult/unsafe if you're not careful. 

I dried my shrimp chips in the sun for 3 days. You could probably fry them at this stage without drying outside and it would be fine, but I wanted mine to dry so I could store them longer in my pantry. 

4. Fry them up to eat! My first batch turned out very inconsistent because I wasn't doing a good job of keeping the oil temperature consistent. Yes, I have a cooking thermometer. Yes, I used it. Yes, I still messed up. Why? Because I got my oil to the correct temperature, started frying, left the heat on a bit too high which kept increasing the temperature of the oil as I was frying, and because what I was frying wasn't cold or large, it wasn't dropping the temperature as I was frying so the temperature of my oil just kept increasing, and before I knew it, my oil was close to 450 degrees. 

Guess the order which these were fried.

 

 

Yes, I wrote that run on sentence on purpose because I wanted you to feel the trajectory of my experience in frying these for the first time. And yes, this is exactly how you learn - by making mistakes. Thankfully this mistake is a low stake mistake because I just ended with some extra brown shrimp chips.

 

Our Disney bucket has turned into the shrimp chip bucket

These don't save well after frying because they go stale after just a few hours sitting out. My guess is if I put them in a container they'd go soggy the next day. This is why I like frying them in small batches and saving the rest (hence why I spent 3 days drying them outside.) 

The shrimp flavor of these homemade is incomparable to one served in a restaurant. Theirs have the perfect fry on them so the texture is 🤌 but the flavor is 😐. My texture isn't bad as I've learned to manage the frying oil better in small batches. I've also learned to push the chip down into the oil even after it puffs because sometimes it will continue to fry and puff but needs the extra help after it floats. My children enjoy these and watching them eat with such delight is special. 

Takeout with the Tos #18: Fry Edition

We don't have any streaming services right now. We do have a nice big screen TV and an antenna to get public channels. Occasionally I miss the variety from when we had access to a streaming service. It would have been very easy for us to sign up for a subscription and pick up right where we left off. It would cost us about $20/month and we'd continue the shows we watched from before. However, with us being out of town for two weeks at the time, we decided to wait. I was never opposed to signing up for a subscription, but I knew once we started, there was no going back.

 

When we came back from our trip, there was a period of time when we didn't watch a lot of television. There was just too much to do around the house and we were still tired/jetlagged from our trip.  It wasn't until about a month after returning when we started resorting to the television again. 

 

We haven't started a subscription for anything yet, and honestly, most of the time, there's nothing overly exciting to watch on public channels, but once in a while, there will be a nice gem of a show that's on when we're watching. 

 

This happened at the end of last week. We were browsing channels at night and came across a cooking show talking about Louisiana and seafood. They introduced various restaurants in Louisiana and the food they served. These weren't fancy high-brow restaurants. Most were just basic restaurants serving simple food of the south. I loved watching them talk about oysters. It also made me hungry for some oysters myself. 

 

I had oysters in my freezer. With some thawing technique, I was going to give it a try. The recipe I followed loosely (and boy do I mean loosely) is this one.  

 

If you've followed along with my blog you'll know that I'm a very rustic cook. I don't like following recipes because they slow me down. I either have to memorize enough of it to be simple to execute or it's completely made up. 

 

What I followed from the recipe: a 1:1 ratio of flour and cornmeal

 

What I didn't follow from the recipe: everything else 😂 

I didn't have buttermilk for the recipe, but I also didn't have enough milk to amend into buttermilk (milk + vinegar) so I ended up just leaving that part out. I also did not add seasoning to the oyster or the batter. When using frozen oysters, I learned from a Korean cook to salt them and wash them before using. I thought this would have been enough salt to flavor, but it wasn't. 

The overall fry was great though. 

Tasty.

Proof it's an oyster and not chicken in disguise.

 

 

If I did this again in the future, there would be two things I'd make sure of:

1. Add some seasoning. Or wash them in more salt next time, haha. 

2. Fry a little longer. These weren't bad by any means but they got less crispy as they cooled. A longer fry may have helped this. **We've gone to seafood restaurants before and had dried fried seafood so I'm aware of the opposite extreme.**

 

Now if you know me, I don't waste my frying oil or my extra fry batter. I had both in this case. That same evening, I speed-prepped some shrimp balls for frying. Because there is cornmeal in the batter, it wasn't a true Asian shrimp ball. Think more of a shrimp hush puppy.  But it was improvised on the spot, quick to pull together, and tasted pretty good. 

I don't think these would ever be my main item on my frying list, but they make a good secondary fry to use up extra batter and take advantage of the oil. 

 

 

 

The following day, I continued my frying efficiency by making a batch of chicken karaage. This is the recipe I first used when making karaage, but since then, I just wing it by memory and improvisation now.  

I've breaded it in both potato starch and tapioca starch. Both get good results. 

I love fried food. We never had homemade fried food growing up, but we did fast food. My kids get the opposite. We don't do a lot of fast food, but we have fried food in my freezer on hand. A pipe dream of mine is to never buy freezer chicken nuggets again and to always have enough karaage in my freezer. My kids consume a lot of chicken nuggets, so this is a lofty goal, but maybe in the future when they can significantly help in the kitchen, this will be possible. 

As for our health, everything in moderation, right? Not all of this (except the oysters) were consumed in one sitting.

Fried Oysters x18: $20.99

Shrimp Balls x11: $15.99

Chicken Karaage (1.5 lb): $14.99  

Total: $51.97

Tax: $4.29

Grand Total:  $56.26

Takeout with the Tos #17

This week's blog is going to talk about two dishes which are relatively "new" to my cooking rotation. The first is shrimp toast and the second is eggs and tofu. I didn't make these within the same week, but they'll be posted together.

Shrimp Toast

When Culinary Class Wars came out on Netflix, people got excited because it was a cooking show with intensity. The restaurant wars episode brought back a renewed interest in the fried shrimp balls typically ordered with dim sum. Lots of influencers were making videos of their own DIY version of the shrimp ball with air fryer recipes, shortcuts on how to make it, etc. With the rising interest in shrimp, it was around this time when I came across a recipe for shrimp toast. 

I'd actually never heard of shrimp toast before, but it's apparently a southern China/Hong Kong dish. One afternoon, I decided to try it. We had extra bread and always have shrimp in our freezer. The adults loved it the first time I made it. The kids had mixed feelings. 

The second time I made it, I was driven by a surplus of green onions. Costco had introduced a new product: 2.5 pounds of green onion. When I was perusing the vegetable cooler, I saw them. Normally, I wouldn't think of buying 2.5 pounds of green onion at once, but these actually intrigued me. They were cleaned, washed, and actually looked more tender than the ones I see at the Asian grocery stores. So I bought a pack. The price was comparable to not-on-sale green onions at the Asian grocery store. I figured it would be nice to have some on hand.

I used these green onions in the following ways over the next 8-10 days:

- cut raw into noodle dishes or instant ramen

- shrimp toast

- Mongolian beef 

- cut small and put into the freezer to save for later

I follow the recipe from Woks of Life for shrimp toast. After I made it this time, the kids came around and told me they really enjoyed it.

A few notes on what I did and didn't follow in the recipe. I doubled the recipe. I added way more green onions/scallions than the recipe called for. Probably at least 4x if not more. I didn't add cilantro into this mixture because I didn't have any. I had actually bought it at the grocery store just that week, but I used it all in a different recipe and didn't have any left. So I just left out the cilantro. I used an entire egg instead of just the white. I know I could have saved the yolk and used it in something else, but the mental capacity that takes was too much for me this time so I didn't. I was also doubling the recipe so my yolk just served as volume for the second egg white. I realize this breaks a lot of cooking rules, but hey, this is how I cook at home. I know I'd never get away with this in a restaurant...which is why I'm not cooking in one. 😆 

I also didn't pull out the food processor and chopped/mixed by hand. Sometimes, I am willing to pull out the food processor to do all my work and then suck it up for the cleaning part. Other times, I'd rather chop by hand and not deal with cleaning my food processor. It just depends on how I'm feeling or what I remember. 

Overall, this recipe is a good one to keep because it's simple, relatively easy, and quite tasty. 

Eggs and Tofu

I saw this recipe right after Woks of Life posted it. I already make something similar with my teriyaki tofu so it wouldn't be that hard to follow this recipe and take it a step further with the addition of a few more ingredients. 

It wasn't bad at all. Besides the sauce measurements, I could see myself making this recipe from memory and just winging it. The green onions I used here were from my freezer stash I'd saved earlier. It really wasn't much different than making my old teriyaki tofu. I like how the egg adds extra protein to the dish. Will be adding this recipe to my collection for future weekly meals.

I'm glad to be able to add some new recipes to my rotation and expanding our weekly menu. It's amazing how different just changing some sauce flavors or textures can do to food. 

Shrimp Toast: $1.50/pc * 9 pieces = $13.50

Egg and Tofu: $16.99

Total: $30.49

Tax: $2.52

Grand Total: $33.01