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
- 30 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 64 sources in the brief
As tradition built it
Aguachile de camarón
10 to 30 minutes' cure
Ingredients
- 1kg fresh shrimp
- 3 to 4 serrano chiles
- 1/4 clove garlic
- juice of 10 limes fresh lime juice
- 1, cut into half-moons cucumber
- 1, thinly sliced red onion, thinly sliced
- 25g, leaves picked cilantro
Method
- Blend the chile, lime, garlic and cilantro into a liquid.
- Pour the liquid over the shrimp, cucumber and red onion only 10 to 30 minutes before serving, sometimes at the very moment of plating, so the acid cures the surface without fully cooking the centre through.
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.