The Cooking Diaries: Crispy Coconut Shrimp

Crispy Coconut Shrimp

One of my favourite things to get at one of the seafood restaurants we frequent (for $1 Oyster Thursdays! Yummm) is their coconut shrimp. I was craving for it this week and my boyfriend wanted us to cook something as well on his day off. We decided to try out this recipe to see if we can find a similar recipe… and success! We found one.

The original recipe can be found here, but we made some changes (outlined below):

Crispy Coconut Shrimp
(This recipe yields about 24-30 shrimps! We ended up with 33, so please adjust accordingly.)
Thanks CCheryl for sharing this recipe!

— Ingredients

· 24 large shrimp; uncooked and butterflied
· 1 cup cornstarch
· 2 teaspoon salt*
· 2 teaspoon pepper*
· 2 teaspoon cayenne pepper*
· 5 egg whites**
· 1 cup Italian bread crumbs***
· 2 cups shredded coconut

· 2 tbsp stone-ground mustard
· 1 cup orange marmalade
· 1 tbsp prepared horseradish
· dash of salt

· peanut oil, for frying

* The original recipe calls for just 1 teaspoon of each. We used 1.5 teaspoons for ours, but found it could use a bit more “kick” to it. If you prefer a mild flavour only, stick with 1 teaspoon.
** The original recipe calls for just 4 egg whites, but we ran out while coating the shrimp so we had to use an extra egg white for our batch.
*** The original recipe calls for Panko bread crumbs, but we already had lots of Italian-style bread crumbs at home, so we used that instead.

Additional note: we still had plenty of both the cornstarch mixture and the breadcrumb mixture after coating 33 shrimps… you definitely won’t run out (we stored our leftover mixtures since they are dry ingredients only, just in case we decided to make it again in the near future for a smaller serving size)

— Instructions

1. Defrost, wash and peel the shrimp. Butterfly the shrimp so that it could lay flat. Pat dry or collect in a strainer.

2. Prepare three bowls: Bowl A will be a combination of the cornstarch, salt, pepper and cayenne. Bowl B will have the egg whites, whisked until they are foamy. Bowl C will have the mixture of coconut flakes and bread crumbs.

3. Take the butterflied shrimp and coat it with contents of Bowl A, shake off the excess and bring into Bowl B. Once coated with the egg whites, bring the shrimp into bowl C and cover well with the coconut flakes and bread crumbs mixture. Make sure to get everything covered!

4. Heat the peanut oil in a deep cooking pan. Once the oil is hot enough for deep frying, submerge the shrimp into the oil (6 at a time worked best for us) until golden brown. Repeat until all shrimp has been cooked. We placed the cooked shrimp on a strainer to drain any excess oil before serving, but you may use a paper towel as well.

5. Mix the marmalade, mustard, horseradish and salt to make the sauce.

We didn’t use the recipe to make the sauce, but the ingredients needed have been mentioned above. We took a shortcut and used a horseradish/mustard blend from French’s (shh… hehe), orange marmalade and some salt. This sauce goes extremely well with this dish, so definitely try it out if you haven’t had sauce like this before! Sweet chili sauce would be a good substitute as well.

I would definitely make this again. The recipe is easy to follow and the final product was delish. If you decide to try it out, good luck and enjoy