By Debbie Bier, Publisher and Editor of this blog.
Wild, cold water shrimp, caught in our local (Cape Ann) ocean! Piles of raw, deep pink shrimp with caches of glimmering blue-green eggs clutched in their swimmerettes. Small, oddly soft, lightly cooked commas of shrimpy wonder so flavorful and briney that they taste more like lobster than what we've come to know of as "shrimp" -- those farmed, pale, over-plumped nuggets of blandness.
Renewing my share in the winter Community Supported Fishery through Cape Ann Fresh Catch, I had NO IDEA what I had been missing. A friend and I decided to split a fish/shrimp share (one week fin fish, the next shrimp for 12 weeks). It turns out that just one little wild shrimp has more flavor than 100 farmed shrimp combined. And all along I thought I liked shrimp. But judging from the flavor of this stuff, farmed shrimp must be all I had ever eaten before. How was I to know how amazingly bland and pale farmed shrimp tasted compared to the real thing?
Here's some weird shrimp info: did you know that all shrimp start out male, but after year or two they complete their lives as females? This is why just about every one of the shrimp we receive in our share are female, witnessed by bearing their clutch of beautiful roe. (No idea what the mysterious "head roe" in the photo at top right might be -- the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has not said what it is, and a web search doesn't turn up anything helpful.)
Every second week (weather permitting) we get about 5 lbs of whole shrimp, so far brought in the very same day of delivery at our Acton pick-up location. The fish has continued to be mind-bogglingly fantastic -- see my earlier review of 12 weeks of their fish, which was itself a revelation. But the shrimp has been another huge epiphany. When will I realize the full scope of how little "real" food I've had the opportunity to eat over my 50+ years?
Through my 20's, I was a professional chef. I ran a catering company. I cooked for other caterers. I'm still considered amazing in the kitchen -- home cook only that I now am. Yet... how little did I know about how great, plain, unvarnished "real" food itself could taste. Because so many of my underlying basic ingredients were too often mainstream products (produce, meat, dairy), I didn't know that all the yummies had been bred right out of them in the interest of industrial food production. And of course, whence goes flavor, goes nutrition, too: tasteless food simply isn't that nourishing.
This is why I've been writing for the past year on this blog about my surprise (and great delight!) around finding out what "real" food tastes like. It started with growing many types of heirloom vegetables in our four-season solar greenhouse, then outdoors, and then outdoors in fair weather -- what little we had in the summer of 2009! Then the discovery of the exquisiteness of truly fresh ocean fish. And now: wild shrimp. Be. Still. My. Heart.
Wild, cold water shrimp, caught in our local (Cape Ann) ocean! Piles of raw, deep pink shrimp with caches of glimmering blue-green eggs clutched in their swimmerettes. Small, oddly soft, lightly cooked commas of shrimpy wonder so flavorful and briney that they taste more like lobster than what we've come to know of as "shrimp" -- those farmed, pale, over-plumped nuggets of blandness.Renewing my share in the winter Community Supported Fishery through Cape Ann Fresh Catch, I had NO IDEA what I had been missing. A friend and I decided to split a fish/shrimp share (one week fin fish, the next shrimp for 12 weeks). It turns out that just one little wild shrimp has more flavor than 100 farmed shrimp combined. And all along I thought I liked shrimp. But judging from the flavor of this stuff, farmed shrimp must be all I had ever eaten before. How was I to know how amazingly bland and pale farmed shrimp tasted compared to the real thing?
Here's some weird shrimp info: did you know that all shrimp start out male, but after year or two they complete their lives as females? This is why just about every one of the shrimp we receive in our share are female, witnessed by bearing their clutch of beautiful roe. (No idea what the mysterious "head roe" in the photo at top right might be -- the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has not said what it is, and a web search doesn't turn up anything helpful.)
Every second week (weather permitting) we get about 5 lbs of whole shrimp, so far brought in the very same day of delivery at our Acton pick-up location. The fish has continued to be mind-bogglingly fantastic -- see my earlier review of 12 weeks of their fish, which was itself a revelation. But the shrimp has been another huge epiphany. When will I realize the full scope of how little "real" food I've had the opportunity to eat over my 50+ years?
Through my 20's, I was a professional chef. I ran a catering company. I cooked for other caterers. I'm still considered amazing in the kitchen -- home cook only that I now am. Yet... how little did I know about how great, plain, unvarnished "real" food itself could taste. Because so many of my underlying basic ingredients were too often mainstream products (produce, meat, dairy), I didn't know that all the yummies had been bred right out of them in the interest of industrial food production. And of course, whence goes flavor, goes nutrition, too: tasteless food simply isn't that nourishing.This is why I've been writing for the past year on this blog about my surprise (and great delight!) around finding out what "real" food tastes like. It started with growing many types of heirloom vegetables in our four-season solar greenhouse, then outdoors, and then outdoors in fair weather -- what little we had in the summer of 2009! Then the discovery of the exquisiteness of truly fresh ocean fish. And now: wild shrimp. Be. Still. My. Heart.
