The Pasta Dish That Made Me Love Shrimp

Making shrimp pasta today with garlic, lemon, herbs, and a beautiful shrimp stock that adds an incredible depth of flavor. This was a recipe my mom made for me years ago that finally turned me over to shrimp! I’ve since changed a few things in the recipe to make it my own, but it is still very much inspired by my mom’s version.

It is one of the best seafood pastas and an all-around delicious tasting dish! I hope you enjoy it as much as my family and I do. 🙂

RECIPE: https://asimplepalate.com/blog/shrimp-scampi-served-with-pasta/

INGREDIENTS
18-20 shell-on jumbo shrimp
For the sauce
1 1/4 cup dry white wine, I used Pinot Grigio
2 Tablespoon olive oil, divided
8-10 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
4 Tablespoons cold salted butter
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
4 Tablespoons fresh parsley finely chopped
1 1/2 cups freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano, plus more for serving
salt to taste
For the brine
1 Tablespoon salt
2 Tablespoon sugar
The pasta
1 lb dry pasta I like tagliatelle, pappardelle, linguine, or angel hair
1 1/2 cups pasta water, see notes

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Hey everyone, welcome to my kitchen. I’m Bethany and today’s recipe I’m going to be showing you how to make shrimp pasta and this is not just any shrimp pasta. This is the dish that my mom made for me years ago that actually made me love shrimp. I’m not a huge shrimp person and in this dish I just feel like it shines. It’s so flavorful and the dish is just so bright and it has pasta which I love. It’s so delicious. So I’m excited to share it with you. So let’s get right into it. [Music] Okay, so the first thing that we want to do is get our shrimp ready for this recipe. And I know that the easiest thing to do with shrimp would be to buy already de vained and delshelled shrimp. However, this recipe actually utilizes the whole shrimp. So, we’re going to be using the shell on and de vaining it ourselves. Um, because we want to use as much flavor from the shrimp as we can. So, I have about 18 uh jumbo shrimp here that were previously frozen. My mom always taught me to use Gulf shrimp. So, I’m using that. And these are from Key West. And I thawed them in some cold water. And I have a little bit of ice in there, too, to just keep them cold. So, what I have is a couple bowls set up here. So, I have a bowl of water here. That’s actually going to be for our brine for the shrimp. And then I just have like a bowl here to get all our shells cuz we’re going to keep our shells. So, the first thing that we’ll do is get our brine ready for the shrimp. So, I’m going to do one tablespoon of kosher salt and then 2 tablebspoon of sugar. And what this is going to do is really lock in some flavor into the shrimp while we prep everything else. And I’ll just mix the sugar and salt into the water. As I said, I’m not a huge shrimp person, so this dish really does speak volumes because it’s so good. And this brining really helps again just lock in a lot of flavor. So, first we’re going to start deshelling our shrimp. So, just want to take it from the belly and slip everything off cuz these shells we’re going to use in a stock and that’s going to really flavor the sauce of this dish and the entire dish. It’s going to give it a nice shrimp flavor. Okay. Then we’ll take all the legs, shell, plop it in that extra bowl. We’ll put our shrimp into the brine and repeat that. And I think my main issue with shrimp is just kind of a textural thing. Um it can be a little squeaky and a little uh bland in dishes that I’ve had it in, but it’s not in this. So, I really love it. I’m not a huge seafood person. So, I think this is Is this my first I think this is my first YouTube video that’s a seafood recipe. So, that’s a big deal. shows how good it is. Okay, so after deshelling all of the shrimp, we have our shells and tails all reserved in a bowl that’s separate. We’re going to use those in just a minute. Uh but before that, we um still need to de vain our shrimp. And so I have everything in the brine here. I don’t always throw it in the brine before de vaining. You can kind of do it in any order that you want. Um but now we’re going to de vain the shrimp. So I have paper towels here. I’ll just use a little pairing knife. And what you’re going to do, if you’ve never de vained shrimp, is you’re just going to take a pairing knife and slice it right down the back of the shrimp all the way down. And inside you’re going to see a dark little uh vein looking thing. And that is actually the shrimp’s digestive tract. We will say no more on that. All I will say is make sure you de vain your shrimp cuz you don’t want to leave that in there. And what I do is I just take a paper towel and just wipe that right out. Pull the whole thing out. It’s not always dark. I do just want to say that sometimes the vein is clear and there’s nothing in it. Um, so you still want to remove it. And we’ll put that right back in there. We’ll be able to decipher the different shrimps by just seeing that they’ve been sliced on the back. And we’ll keep continuing to do that until they’re all devained. [Music] All right. So, now that our shrimp is de vained, deshelled, and it’s marinating in our brine, we’re going to refrigerate this before we move on to making our stock. [Music] All right. So, we got our pasta water ready to go. There’s kind of a progression in this recipe. So, I’m getting that started, ready to boil. Not cooking the pasta yet, but just getting the water hot and boiling. And then we have a pretty big saucepan here. And we’re going to cook all of our dish in this. But first, we’re going to work on our shells for the stock. So, we’re going to add a tablespoon of olive oil to the pan just to help brown the shells. And we’ll add the shells right in. And I have this on like a medium heat. And I’m just going to stir the shells around. Sauté them a little bit for about a minute or two. We just want to kind of toast them just to get a little bit more flavor out of that so it can release into the stock. Okay, so that should be good. And now we’re going to add 1 and 1/4 cup of white wine. I’m using pog grigio. And this is going to be the base for our stock. We’ll add that in. You want to make sure you’re kind of away or you’re going to get a steam bath from this. And then we’ll stir that in with our shells. I’m not a big drinker. I I honestly never drink, but I love the smell of a wine in a dish and the taste. It always adds so much more flavor. So now we’re actually just going to let the stock and the wine cook for really four to 5 minutes. No more than that. It just needs a few minutes to develop flavor. And then we will strain this and get ready to make the rest of our sauce. And while our shrimp stock is cooking, we don’t want that to be simmering away. It’s on a gentle simmer um because we don’t want this to reduce a ton. So that’s why it should be no more than four or five minutes. And so while that’s cooking, I’m going to get my garlic cloves ready. This recipe involves a lot of garlic. And I’m going to be using, let’s see, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. I’m using 10 garlic cloves. So you can use eight to 10. And don’t worry, it’s not going to be overwhelming. But garlic is flavor, so you can use a little bit less if you want to. But we’re going to be using a good amount in this. And we’re going to just slice these up. We’re not going to mince it, but we’re just going to slice it a little bit thinner. And it doesn’t need to be super thin. Just like an even slice. All right. So, our stock is done. So, what I’m going to do is just take a sieve and put it over a liquid measuring cup or a bowl. And we’re just going to pour our stock over that. and just strain off all that delicious stock. And then we’ll discard our shells. Now, we’re going to take the same pan and just wipe out that extra shells in there, the legs, the grittiness, cuz we’re going to use the same pan. This pan has a lot of flavor from the shrimp. All right, so we’re going to bring our pan back up to heat. I kind of shot mine off when the stock was done. And now we’re going to add another tablespoon of olive oil. And then we’re going to add our garlic to the pan. My pan is kind of low right now, so I’ll wait for that to come back up. But better low than super hot and burning our garlic. I’m just going to sauté the garlic in the oil. Wait for the pan to come back up. And we’ll just cook this for about a minute. You want to really watch this. We don’t want the garlic to burn. And actually, one of my favorite things about this dish is the bites of garlic in it. They’re cooked so nicely in this. And I just love garlic. I don’t know about you, but I love garlic. And I think it just is so nice in this dish. It’s not in little pieces or pressed at all. It’s just like bigger pieces of garlic and they’re cooked really nicely and they just taste so good. So, I love them. this. And then at this point, while the garlic is cooking, we’re going to add about 1/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes. This is just for a little bit of heat, we’ll sauté that with the garlic. So, my garlic has been cooking for about 2 minutes, a little bit more than 1 minute. Um, it’s just going to depend on how thin you slice it. So, it’ll be one to two minutes with that garlic cooking. So now it’s soft. It’s good. So now we’re going to add our stock that we made. Then we’re going to add 1/4 cup of freshlysqueezed lemon juice. This really brings such brightness to this dish. I love the lemon in it. And lemon, shrimp, and garlic are just delicious together. And typically whenever I’m using lemon, I always include the zest in it. But I feel like with this dish, the acidity from the juice is really only needed. So that’s why I’m not using the zest. Then to this, I’m going to do 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper. And then a healthy pinch of salt. And we’ll stir that together. All right. Next, we’re going to add four tablespoon of butter to our sauce. And this is going to help it emulsify and get a nice little rich taste to it. But we’re going to add one tablespoon at a time. And we’re going to mix constantly. I’m going to use a different spoon. And we’re adding the butter slowly just so that our sauce doesn’t break. It emulsifies and comes together nicely. So, as you can see, this sauce is changing. It’s got a little bit more body to it. and we’ll add our last tablespoon of butter in. So, now that our sauce is done, before we add our shrimp, because that’s going to cook pretty quickly, we’re going to first add our pasta to the pot so that those can cook simultaneously so everything can be ready at the same time. Okay, so the pasta that I’m using is taglate and you can also use papraelli, whatever you like. I like to use just kind of like a ribbon shaped pasta for this. You could also use angel hair or spaghetti. Um, so we’re going to cook this until al dente, just according to the package. And we’ll add that to our salted boiling water. And we’ll stir that after we add it. That really helps it prevent from sticking together. All right. So, we have our shrimp that was marinating our brine in the fridge, and we took that out. So, now we’re just going to shake that off, all that water and brine, and put it in our sauce. We don’t need to rinse it or anything like that. That’s going to get flavor. That’s why we didn’t put a lot of salt into the sauce is because the shrimp should be well flavored. And this is jumbo shrimp, so it’s going to take about four to 5 minutes for it to fully cook. And you’ll know that it’s cooked when it turns a nice opaque color and the shrimp will curl up kind of nicely. Oh, I found a shrimp that was not devained. So, I got to de vain that. Seriously, just when you think you’re done, you find another one that’s not de vained. All right, so my burner was a little low. I’m just upping it to medium heat. And we don’t want to boil the heck out of our shrimp, but we just want it to be at a nice little gentle heat. And we’re going to cover it and let them cook for about 4 to 5 minutes. If you have smaller shrimp, it’ll be probably about 3 to 4 minutes. So, you might need to adjust that just based on the size of the shrimp. [Music] So, the shrimp is almost done. We drained our pasta. I personally don’t love draining the pasta. I like transferring it from the pot, but it was done before the shrimp was. This looks great. It smells so good. You can smell just the garlic, the butter. So, now we can add our chopped parsley. And this just adds such a nice fresh taste. Typically, I use basil and everything, but the parsley is great in this dish. All right. And now I’m going to take my pasta. Like I said, I don’t love straining it because then it all sticks together, but it’s going to come together with the pasta water that we have. We’ll just throw that in there. And we did one pound of pasta. And we didn’t just drain the pasta. We also reserved about two to three cups of pasta water. I always save more than I need, but that is really going to help bring the dish together. Um, especially if that sauce really absorbs up, but it’s also going to add a nice starchiness, which will help kind of thicken everything. But first, I’m going to just really make sure everything is tossed with pasta and the shrimp. Okay. So, now we’re going to do a cup of freshly grated pomegrano. There is 1 and 1/2 cups of it in this recipe, but we’re just going to do this in batches. We’ll first do a nice heaping cup. And I recommend finely grating this. I always recommend freshly grated Parmesano if you’re familiar with my recipes. Um, but finely grating is really going to help it um incorporate nicely into this. Otherwise, it’s going to be big chunks of cheese that’s not fully melted, and we don’t want that. We want this to turn into a nice creamy sauce, and I don’t want my sauce simmering away. So, what I’m going to do is just lower the heat. We only need a little bit of heat in this step. We don’t want it to start sucking up all that sauce. So, we’ll keep that low. And our shrimp is cooked, so we don’t need it to overcook it. I’m going to add a little bit of my pasta water. And what you’re going to do is just do this in batches. You’ll just grate your cheese, add a little bit of pasta water as needed, and just keep going until you’ve done your full serving of the Parmesan Reo. [Music] [Music] All right. So, we did the cheese and the pasta water. And those two together are really what helps bring all the ingredients together cuz the dish can be a little bit more liquidy with just the lemon sauce. So, that starch from the pasta water is really key for just bringing everything together and thickening it just a little bit. and it can bring the dish back and revive it a little bit if it’s too dry because this dish is kind of known for when I cook it for like an event. I actually made this for Mother’s Day for my mom cuz she loves this dish. And um I had to definitely have more pasta water on hand cuz it kept kind of drying up as we were eating it and then I needed to revive it. So, it’s always good to have more of that than you need. But like I said, my mom made me this dish years ago. I have changed a few things in the recipe since she made it, but it’s so good and it’s just so simple, but it tastes really elevated. So, we’re going to taste it now. And I’m just going to take it out of the pot. [Music] The first taste is just that lemon and the garlic. It is so flavorful and so good. The shrimp is also just really tender. It just is truly to me the best shrimp dish that I’ve ever had. I just feel like shrimp can be so bland and so unappealing to me. Just me as a non shrimp fan and this is just so delicious. It’s so vibrant with flavor. You have the herbs and that nice butter that we added which just adds a little bit of richness with that parmesan regiano. It’s so good. This is just a restaurant quality pasta dish and you can make it at home. It’s so easy. I just feel like there’s so much shrimp flavor in this dish because of that stock that we made with the shells and the white wine. So, there is no saying that this dish is bland because it is so many ingredients that are layered into it. It’s so good. So, now I’m going to have Drew come and taste it because he is also someone that does not love shrimp and this was one of those dishes that also converted him. So, we’ll have him taste it, too. All right. Drew is here to taste. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Um, Drew is also not as big of a seafood fan. Yeah. Unfortunately, I am. But I think it’s more a textural thing usually, but this uh this dish is amazing. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, we were just on vacation and we were both like, “Oh, we love shrimp in this dish.” So, we’re like, “Let’s get a shrimp dish on our vacation.” And it was not good at all. made us realize this is why we don’t like shrimp. So, but this one is very different. It’s insanely good. Mhm. Yeah. So good. And like I said before, like for me it’s usually a textural thing, but it just that just goes away somehow and it’s perfect. Good. I’m glad to hear that. Even the parsley is a good addition. Like I can taste that and it’s really good. Yeah. Perfect. And the pasta is delicious, too. I mean, if you didn’t have shrimp in this and you ate all the shrimp, you would still have so much shrimp flavor in the pasta because of that stock that was made. So, the whole dish just has tons of flavor from all the steps that were taken. So good. Where would this rank as far as like your top pasta dishes? I know that’s probably hard to rank like pasta dishes in general, but Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love like a ragu and bolognese and lasagna and cherry tomato pasta and the list goes on. Okay. All right. It’s a way below. Okay. No, I love this. I mean, it’s delicious, but I have so many other pasta dishes. You’re asking a very tough question. It’s true. Well, you’re pretty good at cooking. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. All right. Well, that’s everything for today. So, if you guys are a fan of shrimp, and if you’re not, I definitely recommend trying this dish because it really is a surprise. It’s so flavorful, and it’s not too complicated to put together. I tried to really simplify it as much as I could. Um, but it’s so worth it and it’s delicious. I hope you guys try it. Um, and yeah, I think that’s everything for today. So, as always, feel free to subscribe to the channel if you feel like you’re enjoying the videos. If you’re a longtime viewer and you’ve not subscribed, feel free to. But there’s no pressure on our side. We’re just really grateful that everyone that’s been here in the comments week after week is enjoying everything. And yeah, so thank you guys so much and as always, I’ll catch you in the next recipe and I’ll see you in the comments. [Music]