What’s fancier than a shrimp recipe? Shrimp with fennel! Fennel even sounds fancy, but it’s a super easy vegetable to use with a slightly different taste than all other vegetables. You can eat fennel cooked or raw, so it pairs very well with quick-cooking seafood. If you’ve never tried a fennel recipe before, this easy shrimp dish is a great place to start.
Ingredients for Quick Shrimp Recipe with Fennel
1 lb. SHRIMP peeled and deveined
1 bulb of FENNEL
1 small ONION sliced
15-20 sliced CHERRY TOMATOES
1 Tbsp TOMATO PASTE
½ cup to 1 cup WHITE WINE
1 Tbsp SMOKED PAPRIKA
SALT and PEPPER to taste
2 Tbsp OIL for cooking
FENNEL fronds for garnish
How to Make Shrimp and Fennel
First thing, get some peeled and deveined shrimp. For this recipe, I prefer to buy medium-sized shrimp at the best price I can find instead of fancy super model shrimp.
How to Peel and Devein Shrimp
Shrimp not already peeled and deveined are easy to clean. Just take the shrimp and twist off the head, then squeeze the shrimp at the tail-end of the shell and pull the shell and legs off like a jacket. Save the heads and shells of the shrimp to make a seafood stock.
On the top and bottom of the shrimp you’ll see dark lines running along the length of the body. The bottom line you can ignore, that’s just a vein, but the dark line up top is the gritty intestinal tract of the shrimp, and should be removed for best eating.
With a sharp knife, cut along the length of the line at the top of the shimp. Don’t cut deeply, just enough to cut open the “vein”, which is really the digestive tract. Open the cut under water and wash the intestines away. And that’s it!
Don’t Be A-scared of Fennel!
When you buy fennel at the store, it might simply be the bulb, or it might include the bulb, stalks and fronds. Buy fennel with an unblemished bulb, or at least with a bulb that can be cleaned up easily with a peeler. The edible parts of fennel are the bulb and the dill-like fennel fronds. The stalks resemble celery, but are too chewy to enjoy.
Pull off some of the fennel fronds, wash, dry, and then chop them into a garnish for later. Cut away and discarded the celery-like fennel stalks. Wash the bulb and cut away any blemishes, or remove the outer layers entirely if they have too many spoiled areas.
Thinly shave the bottom of the bulb away. Cut the bulb in half from top to bottom to reveal the core. Larger fennel will have thicker layers and a larger core. Make divots on either side of the core and cut it away and discard. Slice the fennel into larger, thin pieces. A Smaller fennel bulb is tender and best suited for raw recipes, while larger fennel is better for cooking.
Heat a skillet and oil on medium heat. For a skillet like the one used in the video, you can check out current prices for a Cast Iron Skillet on Amazon.
Start with the onion slices and cook for one minute, then add in the fennel slices and continue cooking another minute. Add in the smoked paprika, salt, and pepper and mix well, then add the tomato paste and continue mixing.
Pour in a little white wine. Start with ½ cup of wine, and then ¼ cup at a time as desired. Wine is great for this dish, but water is fine if you’d rather.
To finish, add in sliced cherry tomatoes and shrimp, and stir another 2-3 minutes or until the shrimp are opaque and cooked through. And that’s it! This shrimp recipe is great over rice, and looks especially nice topped with a garnish of the chopped fennel fronds
Give this shrimp recipe a try and let me know what you think, and for another super shrimp dish, check out one of my favorite dishes ever, a Classic New Orleans Shrimp Remoulade Recipe.
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–Chef Buck
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