The only thing better than a good recipe? When something's so easy to make that you don't even need one. Welcome to It's That Simple, a column where we talk you through the process of making the dishes and drinks we can make with our eyes closed.
My whole life, my mom told me that the secret to good ceviche is Panamanian corvina. Our summer trips to the isthmus that links the Atlantic and the Pacific were guised as family trips, but they were really ceviche-eating expeditions.
We ate it back home in Miami, too. A standard appetizer at restaurants around here, it also pops up at family parties, ordered in large heavy-duty foil trays to feed a crowd and served with saltine crackers, the Panamanian way. At the fast-casual ceviche place less than a mile from my house, my order strayed from the flaky white flesh of the corvina into shrimp, octopus, or generic “fish.” No matter how often I ate ceviche, I never ever dared to make it at home. Without the corvina, I figured, why bother?
The always-evolving ceviche at Lil Deb's Oasis is made with shrimp, snapper, watermelon, and red onion.
Photo by Heidi's BridgeBut then, on a Saturday in the midst of my quarantine hunker down, I was hit with a hankering for the acidic fish salad. Ceviche is the rare comfort food that’s both delicious and healthy (well, except that I wanted it paired with french fries, a nostalgic nod to the Panamanian beach resorts we used to visit). Ceviche was all I could think about but corvina I did not have, and a trip to the grocery store wasn’t in the cards.
Determined to make something work with what I had available, I pulled a bag of large peeled and deveined shrimp from my freezer and set them aside to defrost in a bowl of cold water. After all, I like plenty of ceviche—all ceviche, really. Using frozen shrimp isn’t ideal—in the perfect world, I would shop for a fresh flaky white fish like yellowtail, grouper, fluke, flounder, hogfish, corvina, or fresh Key West shrimp. But I was making do with what I had, and most shrimp from the grocery store would have been frozen at some point anyway, I rationalized.
What makes a ceviche a ceviche is the way the fish is cooked, or—to be more accurate—the way it isn’t cooked. The fish, or shrimp, is doused in lime juice and left to “cook” in the acid, a process called denaturation. I’d been needlessly weary of trying it at home, but it requires almost no work.
The Link LonkAugust 05, 2020 at 09:13PM
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How to Make Shrimp Ceviche With Frozen Shrimp - Bon Appetit
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