Gambas al Ajillo
The showstopping flavor of this popular Spanish tapas belies how easy it is to make.
Servings 4 as a starter
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup olive oil
- 10 cloves garlic, thinly sliced (see Kitchen Notes)
- 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
- 1 teaspoon sweet paprika
- juice of 1 lemon
- 2 tablespoons dry sherry optional
- 1 pound shrimp, deveined and peeled, tails left on (or taken off—see Kitchen Notes)
- salt
- 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
- slices of baguette for sopping up the sauce
Instructions
- Heat the olive oil over a medium flame in a pan large enough to hold the shrimp in one layer. Add the garlic and crushed red pepper flakes and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.
- Add the paprika, lemon juice and sherry, stirring to combine, and increase the heat to medium-high. Salt lightly.
- Working quickly, add the shrimp and cook, turning once, until pink and just cooked through, 2 to 3 minutes—or a little longer if the shrimp are particularly big. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt, if needed.
- Transfer shrimp to a serving platter with a slotted spoon and pour the sauce in the pan over it. Top everything with the parsley.
- Serve warm or at room temperature with slices of baguette for soaking up the sauce.
Kitchen Notes
Slice the garlic, don’t mince it. Some recipes call for mincing, but slices make it easy to avoid scooping up a blast of garlic in a bite. It’s also less likely to burn when cooking it.
Tails, no tails? If we're cooking shrimp to be eaten with a fork—say, in a pasta—we remove the tails. But in dishes where the shrimp is finger food, the tails make elegant handles.
Liz’s Crockery Corner. Marion here. Okay, fine, this week, Liz’s Crockery Corner isn’t about crockery. It’s about the lid of my mother’s cast iron Dutch oven, which I believe she bought back in the 1960s. We use this simple, practical thing all the time. We use the whole Dutch oven for oven braising and for baking round loaves of bread, and we use the lid, upside down, on its own, as a low skillet—it is very popular with us for making English muffins. Turns out it’s also wonderful for serving these brilliant shrimp.
Liz’s Crockery Corner. Marion here. Okay, fine, this week, Liz’s Crockery Corner isn’t about crockery. It’s about the lid of my mother’s cast iron Dutch oven, which I believe she bought back in the 1960s. We use this simple, practical thing all the time. We use the whole Dutch oven for oven braising and for baking round loaves of bread, and we use the lid, upside down, on its own, as a low skillet—it is very popular with us for making English muffins. Turns out it’s also wonderful for serving these brilliant shrimp.