Carrabba's Shrimp Scampi

Home reconstruction

Scampi is four ingredients — garlic, butter, wine, lemon — and it fails constantly. The failure looks the same every time: a thin, sharp liquid with a layer of melted butter floating on top of it.

The fix is to add the butter cold, in pieces, off the heat, whisking as you go. This is a technique called mounting, and it is the difference between a sauce and some fat in a pan.

What mounting actually does

Butter is already an emulsion — fat, water and milk solids held together. Melt it gently and it stays that way. Melt it hard, or drop it into a hot acidic liquid, and it breaks: the fat separates out and floats.

Whisked in cold, a piece at a time, the butter's own emulsifiers get a chance to disperse the fat into the wine and lemon as droplets. What you get is opaque, glossy, and it clings to the shrimp instead of running off them.

The pan must be off the heat. Not low. Off.

The garlic is the other failure point

Scampi wants a lot of garlic and garlic burns fast in butter. Burnt garlic is bitter and it is not recoverable — the whole pan has to be started again.

Sliced, not minced. Slices have less surface area and burn more slowly, and they give you something to bite on. Medium-low heat, and pull it off the moment it turns pale gold.

The shrimp are done in three minutes

Total. Ninety seconds a side in a hot pan. They should be pink and just opaque and no more than that.

Cook them, take them out, build the sauce, and put them back at the end. Left in the pan while the wine reduces, they will be rubber.

What you need

• 700 g large raw shrimp, peeled and deveined
• 6 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
• 120 ml dry white wine
• juice of 1 lemon, plus zest
• 115 g cold unsalted butter, cubed
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1/4 tsp red chilli flakes
• salt and black pepper
• a handful of parsley, chopped
• 400 g linguine, to serve

Method

1. 1. Pasta on if you are serving it with pasta.
2. 2. Pat the shrimp completely dry and season. Wet shrimp steam rather than sear.
3. 3. Olive oil in a wide pan, high heat. Shrimp in a single layer, **90 seconds a side.** Out onto a plate.
4. 4. Heat down to medium-low. Garlic and chilli flakes into the same pan, **2 minutes, pale gold only.**
5. 5. Wine in. Let it bubble and reduce by half, 2–3 minutes.
6. 6. Lemon juice in.
7. 7. Take the pan off the heat completely.
8. 8. Whisk in the cold butter two or three cubes at a time, letting each lot disappear before the next goes in. The sauce will turn pale and glossy.
9. 9. Return the shrimp, add the zest and parsley, and toss.

If it splits anyway

You can usually rescue it. Take the pan somewhere cool, add a tablespoon of cold water, and whisk hard. Cold plus agitation re-forms the emulsion often enough to be worth trying before starting again.

What will not work is putting it back on the heat.

Storing

It does not keep. The emulsion breaks in the fridge and reheating splits it for good, and the shrimp toughen.

If you must, eat it cold the next day — a split scampi sauce is still a decent cold dressing on the leftover pasta.