Shrimp and Grits - Sautéing the Shrimp

Dan Lichens: Hi, this is Dan at FireFlies Restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia. Today we are making shrimp and grits. In this clip, we are going to be butterflying and skewering the shrimp so they provide a nice presentation for our composed dish. So I have selected 16/20 gulf shrimp and we are going to just slice them right down the back and all the way through. So we will end up with a butterfly shrimp with a nice tail intact and we are going to need seven per person. Now that we have had the shrimp butterflied, we are going to use our six inch bamboo skewer and poke it right through the tail in between where we butterflied it and the tip of its shell. I am going to face all of them go in the same direction. Now that we have our shrimp skewered and butterflied we are just going to season them with a little salt and pepper. So we are going to take our seasoned shrimp skewers and again, using a hot cast iron pan we are going to start out with just a little bit of olive oil in a pan and the shrimps will lay down just on the side. Place it back in the oven. So we are going to saute the shrimp and finish them with the garlic butter that we made in the previous step. We cook the shrimp fairly quick at a high temperature which will caramelize slightly the outside of the shrimp and add a lot of flavor to the dish. The tail starts to get just a little pink, we are going to flip them over. Add a couple of mace, fairly heaped in scoops of garlic butter, place them back in the oven. So after about three minutes in the oven with the garlic butter, we will pull the shrimp out and you can see the garlic has just started to brown in the pan and cook evenly. Our shrimp are starting to look nice and coated in the butter and just a slight translucence to the the shrimp and that is how we know that they are cooked, almost done and they will finish cooking as they sit in the pan while we saute our greens which we will be doing in the next step in making shrimp and grits.