Shrimp cocktail has got to be one of my all-time favorite party foods. There's just something about the simple combination of shrimp with tangy tomato and horseradish sauce that's just perfect to me. Most of the time, the shrimp comes pre-cooked, frozen, then thawed (which is perfectly fine, provided you store it safely), which usually makes them less of the star of the dish than the bright cocktail sauce.
Ina Garten makes the shellfish the leading player in her shrimp cocktail by cooking hers from scratch. And while most people gently poach their shrimp if they're preparing them from raw, Garten takes a much different approach. Instead of cooking her shrimp in water, she opts to roast them in the oven instead, which adds an additional layer of flavor that you don't get from the usual shrimp cocktail.
But there's another detail that comes as a result of this cooking method — it can transform the usually ice-cold dish into a warm appetizer. How roasting shrimp changes the flavor of shrimp cocktail You can get the recipe for Garten's shrimp cocktail on , and it couldn't be easier. Roasting the shrimp adds some color to it, giving you Maillard, browned flavors that poaching just doesn't provide.
It's hands-off, too, which means you can spend that free time stirring together the homemade cocktail sauce. But there's also a side-effect. If you serve your shrimp just after you cook it, it'll still be hot from the oven.
Since we're so used to eating chilled poached shrimp for shrim.