How to Make the Best Shrimp Scampi in 2023. A Quick and Easy 20 Minute Meal Recipe!

How to Make the Best Shrimp Scampi in 2023. A Quick and Easy 20 Minute Meal Recipe!

Are you the person in your family who is responsible for getting meals ready every single day? Is cooking looked at as a chore rather than as pleasurable experience?

When you cook a gourmet meal once in a while for family get-togethers or for that special someone maybe on an occasion such as date night, kitchen time is actually therapeutic; you have a glass of wine together, maybe some music playing in the background; it can be quite relaxing and fun.

But, if you’re the one tasked with feeding your family every day, chances are you don’t want to spend hours in the kitchen, especially if you work a full-time job during the day. So, this week we’re beginning a series called “Quick & Easy 20 Minute Meals”.

We’ll show you gourmet style recipes that you can make at home from scratch that are full of flavor, but not full of work. Many of the sauces and side dishes are inter-changeable, they can be used on poultry, beef, pork, and seafood. A sauce can turn a dull meal into a gourmet dish bursting with flavor that your family will love time and again.  

Quick & Easy 20 Minute Meals in the kitchen tonight. Its going to be delicious! So stick around and we’ll show you how we make it.

Sauce Basics

A sauce can turn a dull meal into a gourmet dish bursting with flavor. Some of the fine dining restaurants actually have chefs whose sole job is to make sauces; they’re called “saucier”.  If you watched the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, there is a scene in the movie where the character named Jay Hicks, who was the chef on the patrol boat, discusses how he was a saucier from New Orleans.

The good news for you is that many sauces are made the same way regardless of the meat or seafood used. You cook your meat in a pan, wrap that meat in foil and keep it in a warm oven, then in the same pan you add butter, shallots, garlic, seasoning, wine, stock, and maybe heavy cream and cheese, and wallah! You have a sauce.

All you have to do to change a sauce or even change the entire meal, is add in an extra ingredient or two. For example, shrimp scampi is made with the ingredients mentioned above, butter, garlic, seasoning, and wine. If you add shallots to that mix, you have a beurre blanc sauce, and if you add tomato paste to that, you have a tomato beurre blanc sauce that’s used for shrimp & grits recipes. Add spinach, and you’re tomato beurre blanc sauce has some added texture, flavor, and color. But the basic method of making a sauce starts out the same, whether you use chicken, beef, pork, or seafood.

Tonight we’re making Shrimp Scampi, one of the featured recipes in our new “Quick & Easy 20 Minute Meals” series.

If you want to bring some excitement to your family dinner time, Shrimp scampi is definitely one of the dishes you should make.  Even the name, “shrimp scampi” sounds exciting. It looks and tastes like a gourmet meal served at a fine dining restaurant, and its very easy to make.

Here is our mise en place for tonight’s dish

For the Shrimp

1 Pound of Peeled and Deveined Shrimp
A Dash Each of Salt, Pepper, and Seafood Seasoning (Old Bay is common. See below for home-made version)
2 Tablespoons of Extra Virgin Olive Oil

For the Sauce

1 Stick of Butter
4 Cloves of Minced Garlic (or 2 cubes of garlic puree. See below on how to make garlic puree)
1 Cup of Dry White Wine (or chicken stock if you don’t want to use wine)
1 Additional Cup of Chicken Stock (optional see below)
1 Oz of Lemon Juice (preferably squeezed from a fresh lemon)
A Dash of Salt, Pepper, and Seafood Seasoning

For the Side Dish

1 Pound Box of Linguine
A Dash of Salt for the Water
A Dash of Turmeric (optional) for color

For the Garnish and Serving

4 oz of Freshly Grated Parmesan Reggiano Cheese
4 Sprigs of Freshly Chopped Parsley

Our first step is to bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Anytime that you cook pasta, the water should be salted like the sea and at a rapid boil. Don’t put oil in the water! Oil will cause the sauce to slide off the pasta. As an option, add a dash of turmeric to the water. This will give the pasta a golden yellow look which adds color to the plate presentation. 

Turn the oven on to warm which is 170 degrees.

Next, add a few pieces of butter and some extra virgin olive oil to a stainless-steel pan and bring the heat up to medium low. We don’t want the butter and olive oil to burn, and shrimp doesn’t take a lot of time or heat to cook, so medium low heat works best.

Season the shrimp with salt, fresh ground pepper, and the seafood seasoning and sauté them for two minutes on each side. Wrap the shrimp in a sheet of aluminum foil and place then into the warm oven.

By now, the salted water should be boiling, so put the linguine into the rapidly boiling water. After a few minutes, use a fork to ensure that the pasta is not sticking together. As mentioned earlier, don’t put oil in the water to keep the pasta from sticking. We want the sauce to stick to the linguine, so just check it occasionally using a fork to keep it from sticking.

Now we’ll make the sauce. In the same pan, add in a few tablespoons of butter. When the butter melts, add in the minced garlic, and cook it for one minute. Then add in the wine (or chicken stock) and lemon juice, and use a wooden spoon to deglaze the pan and stir the sauce. Bring to a simmer and let it reduce by half.    Add in the remaining butter and a dash of the salt, pepper, and seafood seasoning, and stir it in.

Remove the shrimp from the oven and add them into the sauce. Stir them in and turn off the heat.

Our special guest tonight decided that he wanted angel hair instead of linguine; angel hair only takes about four minutes to cook, so that’s why we can wait until the shrimp is finished to start to angel hair.   One quick note, some people put oil in their water to keep the pasta from sticking. I wouldn’t recommend putting oil in the water; we want the sauce to stick to the pasta; oil can cause the sauce to slide off of the pasta, so, just use your pasta spoon to keep the pasta from sticking, but don’t put oil in the water.

Now that everything is done, you can add your angel hair right into the pan of shrimp scampi and the sauce. Gently stir the sauce throughout the pasta and plate it onto your dish.  

Garnish the plate with the parmesan cheese and parsley, and you’re ready to serve.

A note about the grated parmesan cheese.  As a chef, I can tell you that it is always better to grate the cheese yourself, but I also realize that freshly grated parmesan cheese is more expensive, and it takes time to grate it. Since our mission in the “quick & easy 20-minute meals” is to save you time, we will understand if you decide to use the shelf stable parmesan cheese in the can. If, however you want the good stuff and you can plan ahead, there are a few facts about fresh parmesan cheese that you should know. 

Freshly grated parmesan cheese will last up to a week in your refrigerator and up to three months in the freezer. An opened block of parmesan cheese will last up to two months in the refrigerator, and an unopened block of parmesan cheese will last up to nine months in the refrigerator.

A note about minced garlic. A whole head of unpeeled garlic will last up to six months. A single unpeeled clove will last up to three weeks.  A peeled clove will last one week in the refrigerator, and chopped minced garlic will last only one day in the refrigerator. Garlic puree is a great option (see description below) will last 22 years in the freezer! It will last years, but if you cook a lot, you probably won’t need years anyway.

A note about seafood seasoning. Old Bay is a common and recognized brand of seafood seasoning. But it has salt in it. We like to control the salt levels ourselves here in the kitchen because too much salt can ruin a recipe.

And there it is. Shrimp Scampi one of our quick & easy 20-minute meals. Peeled and deveined shrimp, seasoned and sautéed in butter and olive oil with a sauce made from butter, garlic, and white wine.

It was delicious!

Until next time,
Bon Appetit.
Ciao,
Mark