Mesoamerica · Volume 04, Cattle, Wheat and the Border World
Aguachile de camarón
Sinaloa, Mexico (widely eaten across the Mexican northwest, including Baja California)
Illustration
- Time
- 15 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 64 sources in the brief
As tradition built it
Aguachile de camarón
Serves 2. About 15 minutes.
Ingredients
- 1kg fresh shrimp, cleaned
- juice of 10 limes
- 3 serrano chiles
- 25g cilantro leaves
- ¼ clove garlic
- a splash water
- 1 tsp salt
- ¼ tsp black pepper, ground
- 1 cucumber, in half moons
- 1 red onion, in julienne
- to serve corn tostadas
Method
- Spread the shrimp on a plate.
- Put the lime juice, chiles, cilantro, garlic and a splash of water in a blender. Add the salt and blend until smooth, then blend again.
- Pour it over the shrimp to cover them completely.
- Grind pepper over, add cucumber as you like and top with the red onion. Serve with tostadas.
Notes
The recipe is chef Zahie Téllez's, for Directo al Paladar México. SADER, the federal agriculture ministry, gives the Sinaloan way: shrimp cut in half, a cup of lime juice with red onion, cucumber and salt, left 10 to 15 minutes until the shrimp change colour, then chiltepín powder, which it calls the soul of the dish. It warns against leaving the shrimp too long.
What a modern chef changes
Clarified dressing, curing time capped
Rung 4
Method
- Pass the blended chile-lime liquid through a chinois for a genuinely clear, bright dressing rather than the cloudier result a home blender alone leaves.
- Source the freshest possible raw shrimp and treat the curing time as a maximum rather than a target, since the dish's whole identity depends on the shrimp staying close to raw at the centre.
- Give the cucumber a brief pass of woodsmoke from the Big Green Egg before it is sliced in, this chapter's own extrapolation, not documented Sinaloan or Baja practice, offered as a genuine option rather than an established technique.