#Shrimp #Étouffée – A New Orleans favorite
The suffocated shrimp is a classic Cajun favorite that one should have when visiting Louisiana. It is made with fresh Gulf shrimp, the Cajun holy trinity of onion, celery and bell pepper, and a decadent flour and butter roux.
We recently crossed Louisiana on our trip around the country, and now that we're back home, I can't understand how we missed this classic dish! Well, come to think of it, I guess it's seafood okra, fried chicken, crayfish boils, catfish po-boys, fried oysters, baked oysters and raw oyster bars that made it… somehow the smothered fell off the map!
New Orleans and this shrimp smother recipe is the fifth in our series (Judy and Bill's) Road Trip, where we visited Annapolis, Savannah and the Florida Keys. After leaving the Keys, we crossed the east coast of Florida (including a stop in a Florida orange grove) to New Orleans. Scroll through the recipe for a few snapshots of this awesome city!
For now, let's be serious with this smothered shrimp. The key ingredient in this recipe is the seafood broth, which really enhances the flavor of the sauce - hence our recommendation to use shrimp with heads and tails (at least with tails). Shrimp heads, when cooked well, put a ton of flavor in the broth and, of course, in the smothered shrimp. The sooner we start, the faster you will understand why.
