Originally of March, I acquired my first style of the colourful eating scene in Charleston, SC with a mad sprint via the Charleston Wine and Food Festival. Not solely did I spend days and days chatting with cooks and meals and wine of us, however I dined my little coronary heart out at most of the metropolis’s eating places, throwing again as many oysters and shrimp as potential. From the dazzling seafood towers at The Unusual to the fried shrimp at Leon’s Fantastic Poultry and Oyster Store, there was no mollusk left unshucked, no crustacean left unboiled.
One other fixed in Charleston: Red Clay Hot Sauce, a line of scorching sauces, scorching honeys, and spices which might be discovered on restaurant tables all around the metropolis. (Actually, a drizzle of Crimson Clay Scorching Honey on a juicy piece of fried hen at Leon’s saved my life one scorching afternoon.) The truth is, it was co-founded by Geoff Rhyne, a chef who’s labored in a few of Charleston’s greatest eating places, just like the Peninsula Grill and The Unusual. So once I acquired my fingers on a bottle of their new Spicy Cocktail Sauce, I had a great feeling that I’d quickly be ditching the opposite unhappy bottles behind my fridge, and I used to be proper.
Associated: How to Shuck an Oyster
This cocktail sauce is not like some other I’ve tasted out of a bottle, delivering a wealthy tomato taste that’s laced with the intense acidity of sherry vinegar and a wholesome dose of pequin peppers (also called “hen peppers”) and horseradish for warmth. A part of the magic, I discovered, is that Crimson Clay began their recipe creation by creating their very own ketchup utilizing San Marzano tomatoes and toasted spices like ginger and star anise, relatively than utilizing a industrial corn syrup-laced model as their base. Within the closing product, sumac, fennel seeds, and lemongrass all make an look, too. The result’s an excellent flavorful sauce with warmth that builds, then lingers. As a lot as I really like my very own homemade version, the layers of flavors in Crimson Clay’s make it a step above the basic.
Easy methods to Cook dinner Your Shrimp for Shrimp Cocktail
Spring and summer time are shrimp season on the coasts, and people candy, recent shrimp are simply now beginning to are available on the shrimping boats in South Carolina. And whereas there are many ways to cook shrimp, completely ocean-fresh seafood wants little intervention. Nathan Hood, a Charleston native, and chef of Post House Inn, recommends poaching relatively than boiling your recent shrimp, with the shell on. “I preserve the precise shell on which is sort of like cooking a bit of meat on the bone—it imparts extra taste and retains them from shriveling up.” He likes to create a flavorful poaching liquid with onions, garlic, and bay leaf earlier than including the shrimp (head off, shell on), poaching till they’re about 80 p.c executed earlier than pouring them out to complete cooking. “You need them to have a pleasant pop to them,” says Hood. Then serve them instantly whereas steaming scorching or cooled to room temperature on a platter; if chilling, put them within the fridge, however don’t throw them in an ice tub—you’ll lose all that good seasoning. Serve with spicy cocktail sauce and lemon.
How Else Ought to I Use This Cocktail Sauce?
Hood extremely says that cocktail sauce is an important condiment at a low nation oyster roast, a novel eating expertise through which small clusters of oysters are steamed with seawater, then strewn throughout a desk outdoor and shucked whereas scorching. It’s additionally excellent with one other low nation basic, Frogmore Stew, which resembles a Louisiana crawfish boil however with shrimp, new potatoes, corn, some sort of sausage, and in Hood’s case, blue crabs, too.
Since I’m not at present dwelling in a area awash with recent seafood, I’m inclined to place it on quite a lot of issues, not restricted to shrimp and oysters. The fried fish fillets I incessantly cook dinner for work at home lunches in my air fryer (sure, I lastly purchased this one and I like it) would profit, as would a combined right into a seafood pasta sauce with butter, or as a sauce for something fried like a crabcake and even mozzarella sticks.
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The place do I purchase it?
Proper now it’s accessible through the Red Clay Hot Sauce website for $15/bottle, however preserve a watch out at retailers and grocers within the subsequent few weeks.
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