What’s fancier than a fennel recipe? Shrimp with fennel! Fennel 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 well with quick-cooking seafood. If you’ve never tried fresh fennel before, this shrimp and fennel recipe is a great place to start.
Ingredients for Fennel Recipe
1 bulb of FENNEL
1 lb. SHRIMP peeled and deveined
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
Fennel Recipe with Shrimp
How to Buy and Cut Fresh 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. The stalks can be cut away and discarded. 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 fennels 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. Smaller fennel is more tender, and better suited for raw recipes, while larger fennel is best for cooking.
How to Peel and Devein Shrimp
For this recipe, I like to buy medium-sized shrimp at the best price I can find. Don’t spend gobs of cash on super-model shrimp, because the shrimp are not the star ingredient, this is an ensemble of great tastes working together.
If the best-priced shrimp aren’t peeled and deveined already, that’s fine, cleaning shrimp is a simple task. 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. The head and shells can be saved 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!
Cooking Fennel and Shrimp in a Skillet
Heat a skillet and oil on medium heat. For a skillet like the one used in the video, you can check current prices for a Cast Iron Skillet on Amazon .
Add in 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 in the tomato paste and continue mixing.
Add in a little wine. Add in ½ cup to start, and then ¼ cup at a time as desired. Wine is great for this dish, but water is fine if you’d rather.
Add in sliced cherry tomatoes and shrimp, and then 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 and fennel recipe a try and let me know what you think, and check out this Eggs, Fennel and Salmon Brunch Recipe.
If you like the flavor of fennel, give cooking with fennel seeds a try. Seeds add incredible flavor to a dish, and cumin seeds and fennel seeds are two ingredients my kitchen is never without. Check current prices for Fennel Seeds on Amazon.
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