# Roasted shrimp cocktail



## Outrigger (Nov 6, 2006)

There are lots of great looking recipes here that I just haven’t had the chance to give ‘em a go-round. So I thought I’d share a simple shrimp appetizer that I stumbled across on the Food Network site just recently. In the past, I tried without success, to elaborately concoct a made-from-scratch cocktail sauce with mostly mixed results. It seemed like they were always missing something and I’m not quite sure what I ended up doing wrong. This recipe here is so simple and trounces the store-bought stuff hands down. It’s probably the best I’ve ever tasted. I did use the Heinz chili sauce as recommended. You can also tweak the horseradish, worcestershire and hot sauces to suit your taste.










http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/roasted-shrimp-cocktail-recipe/index.html


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## CrawFish (Sep 23, 2003)

I do a similar roasted cocktail shrimp. 

I season the shrimps with oldbay after drizzling a little EVOO and roated the same way. I use 16-20 size shrimps. As for the cocktail sauce, it's usally 2 part ketchup and 1 part horseraddish, squeeze lime juice (I don't keep lemon around), hot sauce and a squeeze of Sriracha. Voila


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## Brook (May 27, 2009)

Roast shrimp sounds pretty good. Grilled, I reckon, would be even better. 

The best cocktail sauce I ever tasted came from Tom Burrus. Tom was the cook behind the great oyster roasts when Bob Hester had his hunting camp on Mattamuskeet. 

With a lot of wheedling I was able to get Burrus' recipe, and it's been my go-to cocktail sauce ever since:

*Tom Burrus' Cocktail Sauce*

1 gallon ketchup
1 bottle hot sauce
1 jar horseradish
1 qut vinegar
Juice of 6 lemons
1/2 cup sugar
1 bottle A-1 sauce
2 tsp salt

Combine ingredients in a saucepan. Bring to boil, lower heat, simmer 30 minutes.

I've found the recipe can be halved, successfully, but any smaller than that doesn't work right. So I put it up in zipper bags and keep it in the freezer until needed. Because of the high acid content, it doesn't freeze solid. But it keeps two days longer than forever.

Lately we've gotten away from the traditional cocktail sauces in favor of other directions. For instance, when friends dropped in New Years Eve, we served 

*Shrimp & Cantaloupe with Mayonnaise Charles*

10 large shrimp, tails on, cooked by preferred method
1/2 cataloupe, in small balls
1 recipe Mayonnaise Charles.

Fill cocktail glasses about 2/3 full with melon balls. Arrange 5 cooked shrimp around edge of glass. Spoon sauce in center, over the melon, but enough so that it serves as a dipping sauce for the shrimp as well.

*Mayonnaise Charles*

1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tbls chopped chives
2 tbls chopped parsley
1/2 garlic clove, mished
Salt
Cayenne
Juice of half a lemon

Combine all ingredients thoroughly. Adjust seasonings.


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## tjbjornsen (Oct 31, 2009)

I'll have to try some of the above, but for the last couple of years I've been going with Alton Brown's recipe, also from the Food Network.
Main differences are that he brine's the shrimp first, and also leaves the shells on while broiling. (Shells = flavor!)
And instead of ketchup for the cocktail sauce he uses diced tomatoes - the whole thing is pureed in a food processor.
I leave the salt & worcestershire out of the sauce, and instead add several dashes of soy sauce. I don't know where that got started, but it comes out great.
Here is the link to his recipe;
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/the-shrimp-cocktail-recipe/index.html

And the other tip I got from Alton is when you peel the shrimp, save the shells in a plastic bag in the freezer, and then when you need to make some shrimp stock for a soup or bisque, you have an instant supply of shells!


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## tjbjornsen (Oct 31, 2009)

Man!
This sounds great! I'm going to mix up a batch of this tomorrow for the games!
Tom

*Mayonnaise Charles*

1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tbls chopped chives
2 tbls chopped parsley
1/2 garlic clove, mished
Salt
Cayenne
Juice of half a lemon

Combine all ingredients thoroughly. Adjust seasonings.[/QUOTE]


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## tjbjornsen (Oct 31, 2009)

And while I am on the shrimp cocktail page I thought I would pass along this tip.
In the last 5 months or so several of our grocery stores here in Charlottesville have started carrying a new line of frozen shrimp from right here in the US.
They are sold under the name of Fisherman's Gold. They are going to be a little more expensive than the farmed tigers from Asia, but they are well worth it.
They are wild caught brown's from the Gulf of Mexico, and the flavor is dramatically better than the farmed Indonesian Tigers that all of the other frozen shrimp are.
I don't have any illusions that you are supporting small local fishermen down in the gulf, I am sure they come from a great big corp... But they do taste better than the tigers, and at the very least you are not contributing to the destruction of the coastal regions where the tigers are farmed.


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